From: Yona Maro

For the activist, the academic interested in power and politics, the development practitioner and the engaged citizen, the last couple of years or so have offered a veritable treasure of moments with which to re-imagine the world, and the place of the ‘citizen’ in it, the relationships between rulers and the ruled, and the very meaning of ‘democracy’.

In this context this working paper develops an approach based on thinking at the IDS about ‘Unruly Politics’, a framework that offers new ways to understand and engage politics and political action. ‘Unruly Politics’ is a broad conceptual space rather than a descriptive or nominal category. Broadly, it is an approach that looks at politics beyond what has conventionally been defined as ‘politics’, institutionally and formally. It is simultaneously the insistence on new languages of politics, the redefinition of spaces of politics, ruptures in the aesthetic regimes of power, and the creation of imaginaries of power beyond what is already intelligible.

The paper examines new modalities of political action being generated in these contexts and argues that current approaches to citizen action, (approaches concerned either with the relationship between citizens and state apparatus, or identity related collective action) characterised by the assumptions of that politics relates to ‘interests’, or ‘representation’, fail to appreciate the potential of these emergent modalities.

The paper also asks whether the framework of ‘citizenship’ is adequate for understanding these modalities, whether ‘conscious engagement’ or explicit ideological interpretation of action is necessary to constitute it as political, how we might understand the role of ICTs in these emergences, the role of the ‘bare life’ in generating unruly political action and the usefulness of the notion of ‘Event’ in understanding the changing face of citizen action. The main paper concludes with a discussion on the cynical deployment of discourse in politics, and argues that several of the recent events might be seen as generating the possibilities of a politics that is not cynical.

Link:
http://www.ids.ac.uk/files/dmfile/Wp423.pdf

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