politics power essay

Sample essay on Politics as Power

Finally, we come to the broadest definition of politics. Adrian Leftwich insists that political science should adopt a process definition of politics rather than focus on institutions of government. He says, “Politics is not a separate realm of public life and activity.

On the contrary, politics comprise all the activities of cooperation and conflict, within and between societies, whereby; human species goes about organising the use, production and distribution of human, natural and other resources in the course of production and reproduction of its biological and social life”.

Rather than confining politics to a particular sphere like the state, the government or the public domain this view understands politics as an aspect of all social relations and social activities. Leftwich further says, “……………………….. Politic is at the heart of all collective social activity, formal and informal, public an< private, in all human groups, institutions and societies”. Politics, in this view takes place at every level of social interaction; from the domestic sphere the global stage.

What distinguishes politics from all other forms of social behavior is the existence of power. Power is the ability to achieve a desired result, through whatever means. Politics is in essence power. Harold Lass well’s book “Politics Who Gets What, When, How?” presents such a view of politics. Hence politic is about disagreement and conflicts over scarce resources. Power is the mean through which this struggle is conducted.

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Marxists and feminists also advocate such a view of power. Karl Marx, the founder of the ideology of communism, located the roots of political power in the class structure of society. However, politics is not only about oppression and domination, it is also a means through which exploitation and injustice can be challenged.

Feminists hold a similar view, but on a different basis from the Marxists. They oppose the exclusion of the family and domestic responsibilities from the domain of politics. Modern feminists have attacked the public/private divide and proclaim that “the personal is political”. They believe that what goes on in the domestic and personal life is political simply because there is exercise of power in these spheres of life too.

Kate Millet, hence, defined politics as “power structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another”. Such a notion of politics has helped to bring to light a new dimension of women’s position in family and society.

The four conceptions of politics and political science present a fair view of what a student, stepping into this discipline for the first time, is going to study in future. While it cautions us about serious disagreements among scholars on the definition of the subject, it also exposes us to a broader view of its meaning, nature and scope.

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1.2: Chapter 2- The Nature of Political Power

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• David Hubert
• Salt Lake Community College

“There’s not enough understanding of the realities of power. In a democracy, supposedly we hold power by what we do at the ballot box, so therefore the more we know about political power the better our choices should be and the better, in theory, our democracy should be.” –Journalist Robert Caro (1)

A common element of all definitions of politics is the struggle over resources, rights, or privileges. Lasswell’s shorthand for this struggle is who gets what. This struggle requires us to understand the nature of power, which is a very important concept in political science. At the most basic level,  power  is the ability to prevail in struggles over resources, rights, or privileges. This is an important political concept because power is not evenly distributed in a polity. Some members of a polity are more likely to succeed in their struggle than are others. When some actors have a historical track record of prevailing in political struggles, it can warp the very system itself in ways that allow those actors to continue to prevail. In this text, we’ll focus on three dimensions of power.

The First Dimension of Power: Formal Decision Making

Early twentieth century political and social theorists who analyzed power usually focused on the results of  formal decision-making ,  which we will call  the first dimension of power . Political theorist  Robert Dahl  analyzed power relationships in New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1950s. In his 1961 book  Who Governs , he argued that local elites from a variety of interests compete with each other for decision-making power and that these elites often compromised in their decision-making to reach a result. Dahl’s focus was on outcomes: which decision was eventually reached on each issue? In an earlier journal article, Dahl argued that “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that he would not otherwise do.” (2) Dahl’s statement is a good place to start with respect to understanding the nature of power. This definition would also apply if A could prevent B from doing something that B wanted to do. For example, Congress (A) might get the president (B) to refrain from vetoing a bill that the president (B) disliked if it appeared very likely that Congress (A) would override the president’s (B) veto. The advantage of the first dimension of power as an analytical tool is that it focuses on observable outcomes, making it easier for political scientists to analyze a given situation. But this advantage is also a disadvantage, for it compels us to focus on the obvious at the expense of more subtle manifestations of power.

The Second Dimension of Power: Mobilization of Bias

The second dimension of power is often called the  mobilization of bias . In 1962, political scientists  Peter Bachrach  and  Morton S.  Baratz  made an important contribution to our understanding of the nature of power. In their “Two Faces of Power” essay, they note that power is exercised in ways other than that described by Dahl. They argue that before we can look at the results of formal decision-making, we first need to look at what they call the mobilization of bias existing in the political system being analyzed. In other words, we should look at “the dominant values, the myths, and the established political procedures and rules of the game” as well as look at “which persons or groups . . . gain from the existing bias and which . . . are handicapped by it.” (3) For example, Bachrach and Baratz describe that A can obviously force B to do something, but “power is also exercised when A devotes his energies to creating or reinforcing social and political values and institutional practices that limit the scope of the political process to public consideration of only those issues which are comparatively innocuous to A. To the extent that A succeeds in doing this, B is prevented, for all practical purposes, from bringing to the fore any issues that might in their resolution be seriously detrimental to A’s set of preferences.” (4)

Mobilization of bias can occur in a myriad of different ways. Powerful participants can set the agenda of what is considered an “important” political issue, or they can structure political institutions in ways that preserve their own interests or power, or they can arrange procedural rules to make it difficult for others to challenge the system. Ensuring that a decision is not reached is another powerful manifestation of mobilization of bias because A can prevent B from obtaining what B wants through no apparent act at all. If A can stack the rules of the political game so that B’s issues never get addressed, then A has won without ever having to make a decision openly. Issues that are never or only weakly raised, claims to resources that are never or only weakly made, decisions that are not reached—these are also important scenarios to consider in determining who has political power.

The Third Dimension of Power: Preference Shaping

Formal decision-making as  described by Dahl is the  first dimension of power  and the  mobilization of bias  described by Bachrach and Baratz is the  second dimension of power . Political and social theorist  Steven  Lukes  put forward a  third dimension of power  that we’ll call  preference shaping . In his  Power: A Radical View , which was originally published in 1974, Lukes acknowledges that Bachrach and Baratz contributed immensely to our understanding of power with their mobilization of bias idea, but he argues that power has yet one more dimension to it. Lukes starts with the observation that both of the first two dimensions of power are based on the assumption of conflict, where A and B have different preferences on key issues. In the first dimension of power, A’s preferences win over B’s preferences in a formal decision-making setting—a city council vote, an executive decision, or a court ruling. In the second dimension, the rules of the game are arranged in such a way that A’s preferences either get preferential treatment in the decision-making process or B’s preferences never get heard in the first place.

But what if, Lukes argues, A and B actually have the same preferences and that very fact is evidence of A’s power over B? What if B has real interests and preferences that differ from A’s, but B is not even conscious of their own interests because of A’s power? This may occur because B has internalized A’s values as their own. Perhaps A controls the media to such an extent that B assumes that what is good for A is also good for B. Maybe A has so structured the educational system that B cannot conceive of the world being any different than the  status quo , with A on top and B on the bottom of the class structure. Maybe B has been powerless for so long, that B has internalized the idea that they don’t deserve to get what they want. As Lukes asks,

“[I]s it not the supreme and most insidious exercise of power to prevent people, to whatever degree, from having grievances by shaping their perceptions, cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things, either because they can see or imagine no alternative to it, or because they see it as natural and unchangeable, or because they value it as divinely ordained and beneficial?”  (5)

Analyzing an Issue Using the Three Dimensions of Power

The three dimensions of power can be visible on any number of political issues. For example, let’s say a bill comes before the U.S. Senate to tax very large estates—over, let’s say, $10 million—upon the estate owner’s death. A vote is held, and the bill is defeated with 44 senators supporting it and 56 senators opposing it. The first dimension of power is easy to see since the vote resulted in a clear decision: one side beat the other.

The second dimension of power is visible as well. The Senate has a set of rules and procedures that are stacked against this kind of bill :  because of the filibuster, the bill really needs 60 votes to pass the Senate, so the losers are even further from victory than the vote tally indicates. In addition, because Senators are predominantly white, white interests get privileged. And since whites are more likely to have large estates to pass to their children, a bill taxing those estates has an uphill road in the Senate.

What about the third dimension of power? Have preferences been shaped by elites on this issue? It’s clear that if one compares political debates from the early part of the twentieth century to that of today, you can see that  wealthy interests have been able to get inordinate numbers of middle class and poor people to stand up against the estate tax, because their perception has been shaped to believe it is a  “death tax”  that might affect them. This is an erroneous belief, because most people are light years away from leaving assets anywhere close to $10 million to their heirs. The false notion that the estate tax will affect ordinary people is also intentionally cultivated by elites, and gives senators cover to vote against increasing the estate tax. (6)

A Guide to Spotting the Three Dimensions of Power

When examining any political struggle, use this guide to see if you can spot the three dimensions of power in action:

First Dimension of Power —Look for situations where people who have authority to directly impact the course of an issue have a say in making key decisions. Often, this takes the form of an actual legislative vote, executive command or veto, or court ruling, but other actions might fit into the first dimension as well. Also look for nondecisions—decisions to not decide an issue, which typically benefit one side more than another.

Second Dimension of Power —Look for biases in the rules of the game and for procedures that favor one side over another. Do the rules of politics affect the struggle such that one side has higher hurdles to overcome? Look for people or groups whose stories are told by others, for those stories tend to be self-serving. The novelist Chimamanda Adichie says that “power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.”(7) Look for situations where one actor gets to tell the story of another actor. Look also for societal values and myths, the existence of which stacks the political deck in favor of particular interests

Third Dimension of Power —Look for people who have had the wool pulled over their eyes, who are apparently acting against their own interests, or who take on the viewpoint of others. Look for people who possess resources and access to media or educational tools with which to manipulate attitudes and opinions. Are they able to use those resources or that access to shape the political preferences of other actors in the polity?

As you consider the three dimensions of power, keep in mind that they become progressively more difficult to detect. The first dimension of power is more visible and more common than the second, which is more visible and more common than the third.

1. Quoted in Chris McGreal, “Robert Caro: A Life with LBJ and the Pursuit of Power,”  The Guardian . June 9, 2012.

2. Robert A. Dahl, “The Concept of Power,”  Behavioral Science 2, 1957. 201-15; quoted in Patrick Bernhagen, “Power: Making Sense of an Elusive Concept,” an unpublished manuscript. March 2002.

3. Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Two Faces of Power,”  The American Political Science Review . 56 (4): 1962, pp. 947-952.

4. Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Two Faces of Power,”  The American Political Science Review . 56 (4): 1962, pp. 947-952.

5. Steven Lukes,  Power: A Radical View . 2nd Edition. Ebbw Vale, Wales: Palgrave Macmillan. 2005. Page 28.

6. The “death tax” language is apparently the creation of the National Federation of Independent Business and Republican messaging consultant Frank Luntz. See Mark Abadi, “Republicans Say ‘Death Tax’ While Democrats Say ‘Estate Tax’—and There’s a Fascinating Reason Why,”  BusinessInsider.com . October 9, 2017.

7. Chimamanda Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,”  TED Global . July 2009.

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One Politics, power and community development: an introductory essay

• Published: January 2016
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This chapter offers a critical overview of the book’s unifying theme: the complex and constant interplay between the processes of community development, politics and power. It discusses in turn the contested concepts of ‘community’, ‘community development’, ‘politics’ and ‘power’, before considering some key challenges for the global practice of community development in an increasingly neo-liberalised context. Against the dominance of managerialism and the fracturing of solidarity between citizens, Chapter 1 highlights the importance of a critical vision of community that supports diversity while promoting dialogue across distance and difference. Its latter sections introduce and summarise the varied perspectives presented by contributors to the book, from a range of settings around the world. It concludes with a hope that despite, or even because of, its critical orientation this book will be a politically useful and emboldening resource for its readers.

Introduction

This chapter offers a critical overview of the main theme of the volume: the complex and constant interplay between the processes of community development, politics and power. After discussing in turn the contested concepts of ‘community development’, ‘politics’ and ‘power’, we discuss particular challenges for the global practice of community development in an increasingly neoliberalised context. Against the dominance of managerialism and the fracturing of solidarity between citizens, we highlight the importance of a critical vision of community that supports diversity while promoting dialogue across distance and difference. This chapter also introduces and summarises the varied perspectives offered throughout the volume, which draw on experiences from around the world. We conclude by reasserting our hope that despite, and maybe even because of, its critical orientation this volume can prove to be a politically useful and emboldening resource for its readers.

United and divided by a common language

Given its disparate provenance and contested history, it is hardly surprising that the concept and practice of community development has been subject to much interpretation over time and place. Changing political, economic, cultural and social conditions, which are played out locally and globally, mean that the expectations and aspirations invested in communities change over time. The concept of community itself is nebulous and difficult to trace. ‘Community’ embodies conflicting ideas and emotions: evoking notions of place, identity and interest; and drawing potency from nostalgia, romanticism, solidarity, fear, frustration and hope. It is not always apparent whether community is something that we already have or that we want to build; whether it is a prescription for ourselves or for others. As a political idea ‘community’ chimes with concepts of democracy, mutuality, autonomy, but it is just as likely to manifest as exclusivity, surveillance or control ( Bauman, 2001 ). In this respect, O’Carroll (2002: 15) finds within it ‘an inflexible notion of boundary between similarity and difference’. Ultimately, as Plant (1974) proposes, it may only be possible to figure out what community is by analysing the specific ways in which the term is deployed in different settings, and from that to extrapolate its meanings and its functions within the wider socioeconomic context.

Inherent ambiguities and contradictions notwithstanding, an interest in communities is a continuing focus of public and social policy worldwide: indeed, its very plasticity might be what renders the idea of community so appealing across time, context and space. ‘Community development’ – referring broadly to a democratic process concerned with the demands and aspirations of people in communities – is equally enduring. Its global relevance was first endorsed by the United Nations (UN) in the 1955 publication Social Progress through Community Development , where it was ‘tentatively’ defined as ‘a process designed to create conditions of economic and social progress for the whole community with its active participation and the fullest possible reliance on the community’s initiative’ ( United Nations, 1955 : 6). While primarily framed with reference to rural communities that were not reaping the rewards of ‘economic, social and technological change’ (1955: 5), the UN also affirmed the potential benefits of community development for urban areas, where ‘the most acute problems of disintegration of community and family occur’. Notably, this publication also asserted that ‘the first projects should be initiated in response to the expressed needs of people’ (1955: 8).

Across the intervening decades, and despite various setbacks and revivals, community development has continued to be a ‘world-wide trend’ (1955: 14). Although situated somewhere between rhetoric and reality, actuality and aspiration, generally speaking ‘community development’ can be described as a process through which ‘ordinary’ people collectively attempt to influence their life circumstances. It is premised on the belief that citizens can, or at least should, be active agents of social, economic, political or cultural change. Their collective agency may be expressed via localised forms of organisation or through expressions of solidarity and shared purpose that transcend geography. Beyond this descriptive account, community development is also seen to host evaluative meanings, which reflect particular political investments and which are often expressed as values ( CDX, n.d. ; Community Workers Co-operative, 2008 ; Meade, 2009 ; Banks, 2011 ). Here people self-consciously involve themselves in processes which are (claimed to be) democratic, participatory, empowering and inclusive, and where the changes being sought are oriented towards achieving greater equality, social justice, or other progressive outcomes.

As an edited collection with international reach, the authors in this volume draw on the particularities of their own diverse settings in order to elaborate significant concepts, theories and critical questions for contemporary community development. If the collection seeks to make horizontal connections across place, it also traces vertical connections that run across time and generation. It explores long-standing themes such as the deployment of community development for ideological purposes, and its diverse articulations in state policy; but it also explores some distinctly new tensions and common experiences, particularly those linked to the growing influence of neoliberalism, managerialism and market rationalities.

Despite this shared commitment to transnational exchange and dialogue, very real contextual and conceptual differences are navigated by the authors. For example, in Chapter Thirteen Brigitte Kratzwald observes that the term ‘community development’ is not widely recognised in German-speaking regions. As might be expected, there is no easy equivalence across place and culture. In addition, as many chapters illustrate, within policy, professional and popular discourses internationally, a range of alternative terms evoke or capture particular aspects and forms of the community development process. Terms such as local development, rural extension, participatory development, community work and community organising are frequently used interchangeably with community development while terms such as community practice appear to embrace community development as well as and alongside other kinds of community-based interventions.

Against these looser applications, the term community development has historically been deployed in a more specialised sense to distinguish a very specific kind of social practice or intervention that takes place in communities. In this reading it is one of several alternative approaches to community work, and its values, techniques and processes are seen as discrete, albeit overlapping in certain contexts, from those associated with other community work approaches; for example, community action, community service delivery or community planning ( Thomas, 1983 ; Popple, 1995 ; Banks, 2011 ). While community action may involve working for radical social change, and community service/planning aims to develop community-oriented policies, services and organisations, community development is concerned with promoting community self-help and citizen participation. Community development in this sense is short for ‘community development work’, which may be regarded as a practice, and/or as an occupation, undertaken by community activists and/or paid workers. However, when we use the term ‘community development’ in this introductory essay, we are referring to it as a process – specifically a process through which ordinary people collectively attempt to influence their life chances. We use the term ‘community development practice’ to denote the purposefully applied values, knowledge and skills underpinning the process, and ‘community development work’ when referring to the occupation practised by community development workers.

Clearly this plurality of meanings and usages has the potential to generate considerable confusion and contestation. Consequently, in this volume we have decided to approach the term ‘community development’ in as open and inclusive a way as possible while still retaining some sense of conceptual coherence. With our selection of contributions from different parts of the globe, we want to acknowledge at least some of the variety of processes and practices that are involved when people work together to influence change in their communities, whether those communities are centred on place, shared interest or identity.

In the interests of clarity, within their respective chapters authors have been encouraged to explain how they are framing community development and whether and how the term is understood within that national or regional context. In all cases they describe and analyse practices that are aligned to a broad ideological commitment to community, that are collective rather than individual in focus, and that contain a promise of more genuinely participatory spaces for citizens. Beyond this, the chapters reveal varying roles for the state, national governments, political parties, local government, professionals, activists, local administrators, social movements, international donors, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), international governmental organisations (IGOs), private businesses, corporations and philanthropic foundations. And as different purposes, contexts and actors interact, the political and power relations that are always inherent in community development processes take shape.

Rethinking community development: a dialectical approach

While acknowledging its long-standing association with progressive ideas and values, the series Rethinking Community Development and this, its first book, take a somewhat more circumspect view of community development, contending that both in theory and practice, it is contested and malleable. Indeed we appreciate that the very concept of ‘development’, like community, is elusive and merits some scrutiny in its own right. For example, Escobar (1995: 6) characterises development as a ‘historically produced discourse’, observing a contingent relationship between the ‘modernisation’ of poverty through the creation of an interventionist social sphere in the West during the 19th century, and the invention and implementation of the development paradigm in the so-called ‘Third World’ after the Second World War. Consequent on the rise of development as the ultimate measure of human aspiration, in the wake of US President Truman’s ‘launch’ of the concept in 1949, the lifestyles and production patterns of a majority of the world’s population were defined by default as deficient ( Nandy, 1987 ; Esteva, 1992 ; Escobar, 1995 ). Moreover, to this foundational framing of local populations as the obstacles to or objects of development, has been added a new and more disturbing dimension. Over time, the dominant paradigm of development has come under sustained critique for its singular emphasis on market integration ( Selwyn, 2014 ). According to Bernstein (2005: 119) , what has been lost to development thinking due to the hegemony of neoliberal economics is ‘the wider intellectual, and political, understanding of development as a process of struggle and conflict’.

In the colonialist imaginary, the promise of ‘civilisation’ had long been used to mask or legitimise exploitation, appropriation and control, and the discourse of development would come to serve similar ideological functions in the 20th and 21st centuries. Kothari (2005: 432) reveals ‘the similarities between colonialism and development as projects of modernity and progress’, with their shared ‘reassertion of dichotomies of the “modern” and the “traditional” and the “West” and the “rest”’. Significantly, Mayo (2011: 75) argues that community development was ‘concocted’ by British colonial authorities in the period between the First and Second World Wars in order to serve distinctive political and economic purposes – a dual mission which she characterises as ‘civilising whilst exploiting’. As international liberation struggles began to gain traction during the mid-20th century, older imperialist administrations and an increasingly powerful US became concerned about the form that post-colonial independence might take in Africa, India, Malaysia and later Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos ( Mayo, 2011 ). For the UK and US the fear of communism manifested as an interest in creating new democratic institutions, mass literacy programmes, rural or village development and targeted financial aid: in these, its nascent forms, ‘the political implications of community development’ were revealed with the building or bolstering of ‘local bulwarks (and vested interests) opposed to communism’ ( Mayo, 2011 : 77).

Notwithstanding legitimate scepticism regarding the self-evidence of development as ‘progress’, we would nevertheless argue that community development should be regarded as a dialectical process that hosts both progressive and regressive possibilities. If in their (post-) colonial formations, community development initiatives were deployed to shut down dissent or to foreclose on radical political ideologies, historical and contemporary experience also suggests that they have been positioned at the vanguard of revolutionary politics. For example, The Black Panther Party, established in Oakland California in 1966, developed an extraordinarily varied menu of community programmes, which included a ‘Community Learning Centre’, ‘People’s Free Medical Research Health Clinics’, ‘Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Program’, and ‘Intercommunal Youth Institute’. Explicitly named as ‘survival strategies’ rather than as development objectives in their own right – this was ‘survival pending revolution’ – these programmes were expected to ‘serve as a model for all oppressed people who wish to begin to take concrete actions to deal with their oppression’ ( The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, 2008 : 3–4).

Similarly, in the UK context, community development projects were, in many places, the focus for concerted political action around housing, health, planning and welfare (for example Bryant, 1979 ; Cowley et al, 1977 ; O’Malley, 1977 ). And in Australia, community development provided scope for constructive alliances between the building workers’ union and working class communities around ‘green-bans’ in the defence of jobs and homes ( Mundey and Craig, 1978 ).

These examples, ranging from the integrative to the radical, do not exhaust the possibilities of community development, and this volume explores a variety of manifestations from the Amazon to Australia. Albeit raising critical questions about the politics of contemporary neoliberalised community development in particular, there is nonetheless broad agreement among authors that projects and processes retain valuable scope to speak to people’s real concerns, perhaps even cultivating prefigurative relations where ideals of justice and equality are lived out in the here and now. At the very least, community contexts can still offer increasingly rare and unsequestered spaces of conviviality and solidarity. In challenging and demoralising times, they can inspire resistance, creativity and critical insights into the public and private dimensions of exploitation and oppression. But thinking dialectically about community development means recognising that it is always a historically situated, ideologically contested and contextually specific set of practices. It is simultaneously formal and informal; of the state and beyond the state; concerned with the individual and with the collective; an expression of popular politics and a policy intervention or governmental strategy. Therefore, it occurs at the interface of divergent, and even competing, actors, rationalities, disciplinary interests, professional identities and epistemological fields.

Subsequent texts in the book series will continue to make such intersections explicit and Politics, Power and Community Development introduces key themes that will be picked up and expanded on in later volumes. Contributors to this, Volume One, include authors who may already be familiar as part of the international community development ‘fold’; others come from backgrounds in social policy, commons activism and scholarship, international development, environmental justice or social movement theorising, geography and disability studies. The shared starting point is an acknowledgement that, while community development is a global practice, it is done, talked and thought about in different ways in different settings ( Abah, 2007 ). Taken together, the chapters of this volume also propose that this ambivalence and plurality is what makes it distinctive and promising, creating space for reflexivity, strategic dialogue and critical inquiry.

Power in community development

As its title suggests, this volume highlights and critically examines some key political themes and issues, and the associated power relationships that are shaping contemporary community development. Not least because of its semantic connection with the concept of ‘empowerment’, community development generally comes with an explicit commitment to the reshaping of power relationships. However, when empowerment is promised, it is not always obvious what form power is presumed to take, what might be the optimal ways of unleashing it, or whether its pursuit involves a direct confrontation with the sources of conflict and inequality in our social world ( Reed Jr., 2000 ). As with many of the shibboleths of community development, there are abiding questions about whether claims of empowerment should be abandoned, reclaimed or challenged to live up to their promise.

To make empowerment meaningful, we need to actively theorise and analyse the politics of power. As the chapters in this volume illustrate, empowerment in community development can variously translate as: successful demands for identity recognition or limited material redistribution; demonstrations of self-help and mutual aid; confrontations with oppressive or constraining state and market forces; the building of skills, education and ‘marketability’ of community members; mobilising communities as some kind of untapped economic resource; or people creatively reimagining their place in the wider economy, culture and society. It can manifest in policy and political change or emerge through resistance and struggle. Consequently the authors necessarily conceive of power in divergent ways, and thereby reflect and contribute to the unfinished and ongoing sociological debate that surrounds this concept.

In sociology, power is often regarded as a ‘capacity’, which allows actors to limit the actions or interests of other actors, and arguably it is this idea of power as ‘power over’ that figures most prominently in the discourse and practice of community development internationally ( Takhar, 2011 : 345–6). When conceptualised in this way, power may be seen to have different ‘dimensions’, which reflect varying degrees of accountability and transparency in its deployment ( Powercube, n.d. ; Bacharach and Baratz, 1962 ; Lukes, 2005 ). On the first dimension is visible power that operates in public contexts, and which requires communities to organise or mobilise strategically in order to effect their will. On its second dimension, power operates in hidden ways, to circumscribe agendas, silence actors and keep issues off the table in public and private contexts. And finally there is a third dimension where power is invisible and operates insidiously, obscuring our real interests while locking us into the dominant value consensus ( Powercube, n.d. ; Bacharach and Baratz, 1962 ; Lukes, 2005 ). This multi-dimensional conception implies that one of the central purposes of community development is to lay claim to some of the kinds of power that shape personal and social lives, and it is around such a project of claims-making that communities converge and collective action is organised.

In contrast, writers like Michel Foucault (1978: 93–4) argue that power is mobile and omnipresent, that it is ‘not something that is acquired, seized or shared; something that one holds on to or allows to slip away’ but instead it is ‘exercised from innumerable points’ in all kinds of social relationships. This alerts us to the prospect that power is present not only in public domains, but also in our private lives and most intimate encounters. It is a feature of all manner of family, community, institutional, governmental and professional interactions. Nor does it merely constrain the actions and interests of ourselves and others; in fact it constitutes our identities and brings behaviours into being ( Foucault, 1978 ). For example, and as Barbara Cruikshank (1999) argues, the very naming of communities as disempowered or as requiring the intercession of a facilitating actor – qua the community development worker – is itself an expression of power. The identities and subjectivities of the powerless, poor, socially excluded or disadvantaged on whom community development is so typically focused are thus constructed, mobilised and recruited to participate in its processes. Such a focus on the constitutive potential of community development supports an interrogation of the rationalities, judgements and assumptions that precede and legitimise its associated actions. It also raises questions about democratic accountability, about the comparative status of citizen knowledge and professional judgement, and about empowerment as a ‘power relationship’ that can be ‘used well or badly’ ( Cruikshank, 1999 : 86). In this volume, related themes are explored in chapters by Janet Newman and John Clarke (Chapter Two ), Manish Jha (Chapter Four ), and Niamh McCrea (Chapter Six ).

Politics and community development in the age of neoliberalism

Politics is a key organising concept in this volume. In its broadest sense, politics is about the affairs of state and the actions and interventions that are linked to government; it relates to how citizens are constituted by society. But the term is also used to refer to a discipline, a topic of study, and an arena for action and critical thinking. It is this idea of politics as an arena for action and critical thinking that interests us and it ‘entails that we … ask why and how particular social formations have a specific shape and come into being, and what it might mean to rethink such formations in terms of opening up new sites of struggles and movements’ ( Giroux, 2004 : 133).

This volume emerges partly from our acute unease about the global hegemony of neoliberalism, and the authors collectively trace whether and how its influence is felt in community development internationally. Brenner, Peck and Theodore (2010: 230) explain that neoliberalisation, a process rather than an actor, ‘produces geo-institutional differentiation across places, territories, and scales; but it does this systemically, as a pervasive, endemic feature of its basic operational logic’. In other words, even as its intensity and extensity diverges according to context, there is still an underlying coherence behind this global ideological and political project. Consequently, tendencies towards the privatisation of public services, commodification of natural resources, deployment of managerialist rationalities, pursuit of competitiveness, promotion of financialisation and the redrafting of the boundaries of the social are replicated across nations.

Furthermore the enactment of these ‘reforms’ or adjustments, within state institutions and civil society, has been actively enforced through the funding regimes of global actors such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) ( Kothari, 2005 ; Gaynor, Chapter Ten ). Nonetheless, there remain significant local and regional variations in how citizens and publics respond to such transformations. Different traditions of democracy, leadership, welfare delivery, collectivisation, politicisation, public service, statecraft, industrialisation and ‘modernisation’ inflect really existing neoliberalisms. And, as the chapters in this volume show, for community development workers and activists too, there are varying degrees of critique, resistance and acquiescence (Chen, Chapter Five ; Gaynor, Chapter Ten ; Kenny, Chapter Three ; Kratzwald, Chapter Thirteen ; Martínez Domínguez and Scandrett, Chapter Nine ; McCrea, Chapter Six ; Newman and Clarke, Chapter Two ).

Inevitably then, the volume explores the tensions and possibilities for community development practice that are emerging in the face of diminishing resources, new power alignments, and changing relationships between state and market. Significantly, neoliberalisation has not heralded the complete negation of the state or its relevance, even though its efficiency and its capacity to provide public welfare services have come under sustained attack from the cheerleaders of the so-called ‘free’ market ( Crouch, 2011 ; Mirowski, 2013 ). In some contexts, it may in fact have succeeded in exposing the pressing necessity to ‘conserve’ those democratic impulses and values which have also found expression in state formations, by making demands on the state to resist the market ( Judt, 2010 ). Peck (2010: 106) describes complex state transitions ‘from dogmatic deregulation to market-friendly reregulation, from structural adjustment to good governance, from budget cuts to regulation-by-audit, from welfare retrenchment to active social policy’, all of which point to neoliberalism’s ‘shape-shifting’ propensities, where new roles and responsibilities for states emerge in different contexts, and in turn states formulate new expectations and demands of citizens.

Unsurprisingly, because of the ‘dominance of the state as the provider that sets the overall framework for community development practice’ ( Chile, 2006 : 423) in many jurisdictions, the texture and tone of relationships between the state and community-based projects have been long-standing preoccupations for commentators globally ( Arnstein, 1969 ; London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group, 1979 ; Kenny, 2002 ; Chile, 2006 ; Cornwall, 2008 ; Shaw, 2011 ). As sponsors, enablers and initiators of community development programmes, policy makers and governments have often struggled to move beyond a control or disciplinary style of engagement to a more democratic one. For example, in 1979 (n.p.) the London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group highlighted how ‘the state also seems to represent our problems to us in a way that muddles us as to what is problematic for us and what is problematic for the state’. More recently, in the shadow of neoliberalism, nation states have become fixated on modernisation and managerialist agendas, so that public sector employees and funded projects are relentlessly pushed to demonstrate efficiency, performativity and compliance with centrally determined indicators of competency and achievement ( Shaw, 2011 ; Rosol, 2012 ).

Nor is the imposition of bureaucracy and surveillance the function of nation states alone, it is also a by-product of the sponsor/donor relationships being promulgated by IGOs, private foundations and ‘Big’ NGOs. Consequently, following research with South African NGOs, Mueller-Hirth (2012: 656) contends that ‘accountability is one of the key concerns of neoliberal development’, where the onus is less on democratic oversight by communities and populations, and more on the creation of ‘calculable spaces that can be made governable through experts and expertise’ (also McCrea, Chapter Six ). In this volume, contributors broadly agree that the role and identity of the (funded) community development worker is being fundamentally refashioned in this climate. But if surveillance cultures are becoming normalised, there is also evidence that some community development workers recalibrate, creatively comply with, and even resist managerial ordinances in order to minimise their impact ( Mayo, Hoggett and Miller, 2007 ; Mueller-Hirth, 2012 ; Newman and Clarke, Chapter Two ).

Outside the internal structures of community organisations, the impacts of neoliberalised social policies are felt in communities, by people ‘on the ground’, as policy makers promote the virtues of ‘voluntarism’ and meld rationalities of ‘self-responsibilisation’ with those of ‘neo-communitarian … active citizenship’ ( Rosol, 2012 : 251). Albeit to varying degrees, people are exhorted, induced or coerced to fill gaps in welfare delivery and to contend with the consequences of austerity, deindustrialisation and the flexibilisation of work (Botes, Chapter Twelve ; Kenny, Chapter Three ; Meekosha, Wannan and Shuttleworth, Chapter Eight ). And still they are asked to demonstrate innovation and entrepreneurship, to gentrify or exploit their living environments as ‘places’ that can compete in the global market ( Rosol, 2012 ; Chen, Chapter Five ; Martínez Domínguez and Scandrett, Chapter Nine ).

As authors reflect on whether and how state policies are being transformed in line with market imperatives, other chapters assess the growing influence of private corporations over community development internationally (Martínez Domínguez and Scandrett, Chapter Nine ; McCrea, Chapter Six ). Arguably, through foundation funding and experiments in venture philanthropy, the corporate sector is at last displaying a willingness to become ‘citizenship oriented’ or ‘socially responsible’ ( Marsden and Andriof, 1998 ); but again, such claims merit closer inspection and analysis. ‘Philanthrocapitalism’ (see Edwards, 2008 ) potentially offers alternative resource streams to hard-pressed communities that are otherwise denied public subsidy, and may even support a measure of independent activism where states actively repress or demonise dissent. Evidence so far suggests that community development organisations have had varying success in their efforts to encourage corporations to become publicly accountable or to abandon deleterious and invidious business practices ( Ottinger, 2013 ; Martínez Domínguez and Scandrett, Chapter Nine ; McCrea, Chapter Six ). At the same time, the movement to philanthropy could be seen to further legitimise state disinvestment from welfare and service delivery, and to perpetuate the hegemony of quantitative conceptions of project efficiency and accountability. Through their application of business metrics to social justice contexts, corporations and foundations may in their own fashion discipline community development projects. As Edwards (2008: 45) explains: ‘It is easy to identify quick fixes in terms of business and market criteria, only to find out that what seemed inefficient turns out to be essential for civil society’s social and political impact’.

Drawing together these diverse themes and trends, neoliberalism emerges as a common denominator that is moulding and mobilising contemporary community development work internationally. Paradoxically perhaps, there may never have been another time in its global history when there has been such a degree of homogeneity across context; where people are experiencing some of the same kinds of conditions throughout the world. But rather than reduce us to defeatism or political quietude, we wonder if that insight might nourish some optimism too. Hardt and Negri (2000) characterise global neoliberalism as a de-centred ‘Empire’ which, precisely because it is everywhere at once, can be confronted from innumerable vantage points. The remaking of the status and coherence of the state, along with virtually unstoppable patterns of movement and migration across national frontiers, may create new possibilities for a progressive, cosmopolitan politics to emerge ( Morell, 2012 ; Kenny, Chapter Three ). Hardt and Negri (2000) , for example, have denoted the ‘Multitude’ as the politically conscious and transformative actor of the moment, in which the promise of an inclusive and variegated resistance to the current political configuration resides. Their privileging of ‘Multitude’ over other subject categories such as ‘class’ is itself a reaction to the perceived limitations of Marxist orthodoxy, implying a more heterogeneous and poly-vocal movement that incorporates but is not restricted to peasants, indigenous communities, the non-working poor, women, migrants and sans papiers .

Notwithstanding some scepticism as to the efficacy or viability of the Multitude and its capacity to function strategically or to sustain itself politically, it is apparent that the globalisation of media, oppression, resistance and knowledge engenders new prospects for transnational solidarity and dialogue. This volume, and those that follow in the series, frame that dialogue through the lens of community development and its possible meanings. At the very least, we hope that common, or at least comparable, encounters with neoliberalised globalisation might inspire a measure of consensus regarding the necessary reassertion of a democratic, politically robust and inclusive version of community development; one which is critically engaged and posits alternatives to the current hegemony by drawing on its distinctive connections to and relevance for people’s everyday lives in communities. But despite our hope, we cannot pretend that such a project is either inevitable or easy.

Solidarity across distance and difference

Of course we are aware that neoliberalism is not the only political or ideological game in town. Accentuating and intersecting it are other axes of oppression or exclusion, some contextually specific, some more generalisable (for example, imperialism, racism, sexism, homophobia), against which community development practitioners could feel impotent. Nonetheless, a willingness to oppose, transcend or transform those inequalities and misrecognitions animates multiple forms of collective action today. Even though there has been an abject failure to fundamentally destabilise capitalism as a system, throughout the 20th century (especially since the 1960s) progressive movements have sought to redefine both the substance and practice of progressive politics. Such movements speak of ‘anti-racism, anti-imperialism, anti-war, the New Left, second-wave feminism, LGBT liberation, multiculturalism, and so on’ ( Fraser, 2013 : 131). Chapters in this volume identify and explore some localised forms of cultural and social struggle, mainly centred on issues of access, autonomy, identity and self-expression, where fruitful alliances are already being made with community development practitioners. Others, however, show that such creative dialogue and mutual support remain largely absent but ongoing necessities (Botes, Chapter Twelve ; Cameron, Chapter Eleven ; Farrell and Tandon, Chapter Seven ; Jha; Chapter Four ; Kratzwald, Chapter Thirteen ; Meekosha, Wannan and Shuttleworth, Chapter Eight ).

Clearly politics are plural; inequalities are discrete and overlapping. The urgency of a critical politics of diversity that is founded on a commitment to empathy and solidarity has, if anything, intensified since the beginning of the 21st century. Paul Gilroy (2004: 1–6) analyses the conflicted character of the contemporary backlash against multiculturalism and cosmopolitan sensibilities: the ‘resurgent imperial power of the United States … Xenophobia and nationalism are thriving … any open stance toward otherness appears old-fashioned, new-agey and quaintly ethnocentric’ and there is ‘a habitual resort to culture as unbridgeable division’. In many of the countries of the Global North, anti-immigrant and racist posturing is becoming normalised in politics. LGBT rights and freedoms are on the advance but there are significant setbacks too as political leaders cultivate homophobia and rationalise legal restrictions on sexual diversity ( United Nations Development Programme, 2011 ). In this volume Helen Meekosha, Alison Wannan and Russell Shuttleworth (Chapter Eight ) describe how in Australia, the hard-won rights and entitlements of women, disabled people and Aboriginal communities are being unpicked by reactionary forces. They acknowledge that over the course of their respective histories both social work and community development work have too often met racism, discrimination and exclusion with paternalism and charity. And, as Colin Cameron (Chapter Eleven ) compellingly argues with reference to the cultural and social status of disabled people, such tendencies have not gone away. Similarly, in their respective chapters Manish Jha (Chapter Four ) and Martha Farrell and Rajesh Tandon (Chapter Seven ) consider how ‘mainstream’ or official models of community development in India have disregarded the rigidity of caste and gender hierarchy within communities of place, with profoundly negative consequences for poorer women and Dalits in particular.

Chapters across the volume highlight the continuing legacies of patriarchy, environmental destruction, racism, individualised constructions of disability, and caste- and class-based inequality, as forces with which community development practitioners must reckon. Clearly poverty, oppression, misrecognition and alienation take their toll so that building community responses from the ground up, especially in compromised times, is never straightforward. However, our contributors describe original efforts to vitalise democratic principles and recreate community development practice. Through, for example, protest (Botes, Chapter Twelve ), commoning (Kratzwald, Chapter Thirteen ), culture and the arts (Cameron, Chapter Eleven ), people co-produce countervailing forms of power and new ways of being or belonging. If communities are, however unwittingly or unwillingly, adopting and adapting to market values and processes, they are also germinating alternatives with varying degrees of confidence and success.

Finally, it would of course be possible to add to the litany of political concerns and crises that are explored in the chapters of this volume. Politics must be regarded ‘not as a stable field but as a field whose form and content are continually re-defined’ ( Amin and Thrift, 2013 : 6) and this inevitably makes it impossible to produce a representative inventory of issues that holds across place and time. We could equally and legitimately assess the way community development practice engages with and responds to: war and violence; ethnic and religious conflict; migration and displacement of populations; imperialism; homophobia and repressions of sexual freedoms; urbanisation or rural depopulation. While we appreciate the partiality and necessarily limited scope of this volume, as the series develops we want to create an intellectual space within which these and other issues and concerns can be paid the critical attention they deserve.

This volume’s purpose and structure

This volume sets the tone for the Rethinking Community Development series as a whole by probing some fundamental challenges and dilemmas for community development today. At the same time, it is sufficiently open and generative to encourage different or even divergent responses. As contributors address the volume title, Politics, Power and Community Development , they raise issues of international relevance but which are, nonetheless, specific in their consequences. Across the 12 chapters that follow, we find critical reflections on policy and practice in Taiwan, Australia, India, South Africa, Burundi, Germany, the US, Ireland, Malawi, Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazonia and the UK. No more than they can be expected to capture the ‘essential’ character of community development within a particular nation state, these cases do not claim to be representative of some kind of universal ‘glocal’ reality. While all authors direct their chapters explicitly towards community development, in some cases their contributions are informed by a particular policy interest or political question. For example, individual chapters focus on global governance and the (post-)Washington Consensus; disability arts and the affirmation model; reversals to diversity and egalitarian policies; environmental justice in the context of oil exploration; gender equality and the successes and limitations of India’s Panchayat system; service delivery protests and democratic deficits; and the remaking of place in the name of cultural specificity and economic competitiveness.

Thinking politically

The volume is divided into three main parts, although there are thematic overlaps across their individual chapters. Part 1, ‘Thinking politically’, raises fundamental theoretical questions regarding the form and substance of community development practice in the contemporary policy field. Janet Newman and John Clarke (Chapter Two ) address the complicated ‘politics of deploying community’ when this attractive but elusive concept is burdened with contradictory expectations. Rather than present an account of community as unilaterally imposed from above – by the state or by other powerful actors – they are mindful that in the micro-contexts of practice the worker has agency and scope for negotiation or refusal. Official policies and discourses are never simply ‘delivered’ in pure unmediated form to communities by neutral or passive practitioners. Instead, they are subject to a ‘politics of translation’, through which actors exercise ‘interpretation, creativity and judgement’. As community development practice migrates between organisational or institutional settings, and as it crosses national and local borders, it is repeatedly redefined and renegotiated.

This point is further underlined in Newman and Clarke’s unpacking of ‘the politics of articulation’, which refers to the ways in which ‘community’ is inflected by its association with other concepts and ideas. They argue that the soldering of ‘community’ to words and policies that signify antagonistic or incompatible political aspirations means there can be no guarantee of predetermined outcomes. With so many diverse actors and agendas interacting in practice, there are borrowings and reclamations, inversions and reimaginings, all of which ensure that community development practice remains both unpredictable and an ongoing site of struggle.

Sue Kenny (Chapter Three ) explores alternative constructions of the community development worker’s role, which are themselves framed by the rationalities and assumptions that inform the establishment of community development processes. Highlighting and questioning the presumed divergence between ‘facilitative’ and ‘leadership’ approaches to the work, she suggests that in both theory and practice such distinctions become blurred. She further argues that practitioners and activists need to interrogate the models of leadership/facilitation being practised and promoted as community development, not least because of their implications for how visions of empowerment are enacted on the ground. In any event, new and problematic forms of professionalism and managerialism are inflecting the roles being asked of workers, potentially inhibiting more critical praxis. Kenny therefore considers innovative ways of thinking about practice that may relieve the stifling spirit of conformity that managerialism cultivates. Notably, and in the spirit of dialectial analysis that informs the volume, her chapter points to the transcendent possibilities of cosmopolitanism for a creative (re) engagement with the political and social realities of globalisation.

Manish Jha (Chapter Four ) looks at policy and practice as it has evolved in post-independence India, to tease out how ‘community development’ and ‘community organisation’ have emerged as distinct governmental strategies that have experienced varying fortunes over time. Here government is understood in the Foucauldian (2009) sense as entailing a concern with the creation of particular kinds of subjects, an enterprise not exclusively linked to the programmes, actions or ‘mentalities’ of the government and the state. NGOs, professionals, political parties, micro-movements and grassroots activist groups also seek to mobilise and call particular kinds of ‘subject’ into being. In India the forms of community subjectivity that have been sanctioned and supported by the state are those most closely reconciled with the nation’s wider modernisation project: in the past its successive five-year plans and, more recently, its status as a centre of competitive neoliberalised capitalism. However, against these dominant models of community development, Jha also traces the emergence of a more activist-led model of community organising, that challenges established political truths and, in particular, caste norms. He thus emphasises the hold of diversity and division within community; that there is no universal Indian community development subject. Instead inequalities linked to class, caste, religious affiliation, migration, gender or esteem intersect with governmental strategies; and people demonstrate their capacity for agency through distinct models of collective self-organisation.

Practising politics

The second part of the volume is more explicitly concerned with how the politics of community development and power relations unfold in specific contexts. Chapters include case studies with a geographical focus, in that they are based in particular countries, but they are also thematic, highlighting issues and concerns that have a more generalisable international significance. Yi-Ling Chen (Chapter Five ) reflects on the peculiar salience of locality in this era of globalisation, whereby cities must become entrepreneurial as they seek competitive advantage in the international market place. Within post-industrialising nation states, competition is enacted across regions, as national development policies responsibilise cities to find unique selling points. In Taiwan’s evolving democracy, a particular emphasis is placed on ‘culture’, both as a signifier of national identity and as a marketable resource. Meanwhile, processes of community development and community participation are being invited by policy makers in order to popularise and embed this project of cultural and spatial renewal. For example, communities have mobilised to regenerate historic buildings and decommissioned industrial plants in Hualien City, on the east coast of Taiwan. The depth of community participation varies within and between these ‘places’ but Chen alerts us to the pivotal role that communities play in the government’s reconstruction of the nation.

Niamh McCrea’s analysis of philanthropy and its expanding role in the resourcing of community development (Chapter Six ) brings some other consequences of neoliberalism into sharp relief. In the Republic of Ireland, where community development has been funded almost exclusively by the state, private foundations have begun to establish a significant presence. The history and scale of philanthropic funding to social justice causes varies considerably between nation states. However, as national governments increasingly divest themselves of responsibilities for welfare delivery, community organisations’ dependence on private sector resources is likely to deepen. Like Jha, McCrea adopts a Foucauldian approach as she analyses the political nuances of this transition. Foundations can seek to impose distinctive kinds of organisational rationalities, especially those linked with performance management, on grantees. Yet, while allowing for critiques of the associated de-radicalisation and depoliticisation of community development, McCrea’s account of the experiences of the Migrants Rights Centre Ireland cautions against a deterministic appraisal of those trends. Evoking indirectly the politics of articulation and translation as defined by Newman and Clarke (Chapter Two ), she finds that community organisations may in their turn destabilise the rationalities of funder organisations, prompting new understandings of social issues and of organisational cultures.

Some problems inherent to top-down, government-mandated forms of community development are profiled by Martha Farrell and Rajesh Tandon (Chapter Seven ). They chart the historical evolution of participatory approaches in India, where community development-type activities and programmes have been incorporated within successive five-year plans since the late 1940s. The promotion of rural modernisation, agricultural extension and, from the 1950s, new community-based democratic institutions (the Panchayat system), spawned an extensive community-based development infrastructure. However, the disregarding of and lack of engagement with the politics of class, caste and religious hierarchy ultimately reinforced established social relations and ways of doing things. Specifically, Farrell and Tandon testify to the resilience of patriarchy as a regime of oppression that inhibits development and continues to undermine women’s participation in the public sphere. The chapter concludes with some learning from the campaigning and capacity-building work of Participatory Research in Asia, which mobilises and supports Indian women to confront everyday patriarchy in its various guises.

In Chapter Eight , on the ‘politics of diversity in Australia’, Helen Meekosha, Alison Wannan and Russell Shuttleworth focus their attention on community practice – incorporating community development and other (professionalised) interventions. Their chapter strongly evokes the dialectical character of community practice as they cite the historical complicity of community and social workers in the systemic oppression of Aboriginal and disabled communities. Underpinning their analysis is a concurrent recognition that social movements, community activists and, in some exemplary cases, professional workers, have secured important welfare, social and political advances for minority groups in Australia. However, empowerment and social rights can be built on fragile foundations, particularly where the advocates of neoliberalism, reactionary political agendas and new kinds of nationalist insularity seek to roll back progress, discredit multiculturalism and legitimise inequality. Thus these writers describe a conflicted public sphere, where community practitioners work within increasingly straitened financial circumstances and where state-sponsored community programmes champion bland ‘capacity-building’ approaches at the expense of more democratic forms of engagement.

Against these trends, the chapter presents two more promising case studies that suggest positive expressions of solidarity are being created within and between diverse social groups: one focused on disability politics and new alliances between activists and professionals; the other analysing efforts to vitalise cultural diversity, democratic engagement and cross-community alliances within public housing estates. Their chapter ultimately calls for a politics of diversity that is necessarily inclusive of difference and that is expansive enough to forge solidarity between oppressed communities that may be fractured or suspicious of each other.

Analysing the contemporary politics of environmental justice, Teresa Martínez Domínguez and Eurig Scandrett (Chapter Nine ) circle some issues also highlighted by Niamh McCrea. Their chapter explores another dimension of corporate or private sector sponsorship of community development: the enactment of Corporate Social Responsibility programmes in the Ecuadorean and Peruvian Amazon. Here the oil industry seeks to legitimise its appropriation of natural resources, and the consequent social and environmental damage, via community development initiatives. This incorporation of community development is not entirely new: historically, and as noted already, its practices have been implicated in, for example, the politics of colonialism, anti-communism and social control. In Latin America, where national and transnational oil companies extract resources with virtual impunity in the absence of state regulation and oversight, community development programmes are deployed to mitigate the associated environmental contingencies and to override conflict with ‘good neighbour agreements’. When not posing as neighbours, however, the oil companies can also engage in manipulation and coercion to establish economic control. In their most conventional forms, community development processes and practices are deployed in service of corporate interests, yet the authors do acknowledge more hopeful variants. They propose that the concept of ‘ecological debt’ may provide an alternative framework for understanding the real costs and legacies of oil exploration, a framework that also supports mobilisations by indigenous communities against the exploitation of their lands and cultures.

As we reflect on the politics of community development it is tempting to centre our gaze on the familiar or the proximate: on what is happening in local government, regional agencies or national government departments. Niamh Gaynor (Chapter Ten ) alerts us to the wider or distal politics of globalisation and the ever-encroaching influence of IGOs. She is attentive to the threat of manipulation and top-down agendas as institutions such as the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization cultivate an interest in communities. Pledges to empower and engage civil society feature prominently in the rhetoric and funding strategies of the World Bank as it tries to obviate the public relations crisis precipitated by its allegiance to neoliberal orthodoxies – often referred to as the Washington Consensus because of its and the IMF’s operational base in Washington DC. These sister organisations’ combined championing of structural adjustment policies and rigid fiscal indicators during the 1980s and 1990s has generated widespread economic, social and economic devastation. In order to re-establish credibility and appease critics, the World Bank has been party to an ideological shift – towards a post-Washington Consensus – that Gaynor compares to the supposedly middle-ground politics of the ‘Third Way’. While attuned to the risks and realities of co-option present for civil society in the associated development infrastructure and consultative forums, Gaynor nonetheless identifies opportunities for resistance. Drawing on examples from Malawi and Burundi, she observes how participating communities have challenged their own representatives to better articulate their interests and how they have subverted structures and processes by demanding real institutional accountability and enhanced democratic oversight.

Politicising the future

The final section of the volume turns towards contexts and issues which may seem relevant and promising for community development theory and practice, but where there is at best limited engagement and at worst outright estrangement. These three chapters detail innovations and forms of activism which progress outside and in parallel to mainstream community development programmes, even though they have much to contribute to the formulation of a more pluralistic, critically engaged and creative model of practice.

Like Yi-Ling Chen, Colin Cameron (Chapter Eleven ), emphasises the central role that culture plays in the building and mobilisation of community. In his detailing of the symbiotic relationship between the disability movement and disability arts, Cameron describes a cultural project that proudly and defiantly rejects mainstream constructions of disabled people and their identities. The disability arts movement is an activist-artist-led force for social change that raises profound questions for individuals, communities, institutions and legislators about how we view capacity or agency. Reflecting on the work of the poet Sue Napolitano, Cameron illustrates how poetry – in content, form and expression – gives voice to alternative values that may effect transformations in the political consciousness of disabled people. He thus raises a red flag for much community development practice, where the rhetoric of community participation and ownership may disguise a deeply rooted paternalism (see also Jha, Chapter Four ). Mainstream conceptions of development often pivot on what Nikolas Rose (2000: 331) denotes as constructions of ‘excluded populations’ as people who ‘have either refused the bonds of civility and self-responsibility, or they are unable to assume them for constitutional reasons, or they aspire to them but have not been given the skills, capacities and means’ (emphasis added). Cameron sets out a progressive agenda for practitioners of community development who may wish to engage with the vital insights of disability activism. In his reckoning the adoption of an ‘affirmation model’ of disability by community practitioners, might support a praxis that consciously resists and replaces the disabling structures, institutions and processes that manifest in everyday contexts in communities.

Lucius Botes (Chapter Twelve ) analyses forms of community action, organisation or mobilisation that consciously identify as political. He details the emergence of service delivery protests on the South African landscape since 2004. These protests are inspired by and reflect people’s everyday lives in community contexts, highlighting gaps in basic services such as electricity, water and sanitation, and the poor quality of infrastructure such as housing and roads. Post-apartheid governments have stewarded the country’s transition to democracy and provided much-needed investment in civic and public amenities. However, this has not been sufficient to override historical legacies of racism and inequality or indeed more localised patterns of brokerage and exclusion in the determination of access to services. Botes details the various tactics adopted by participants in such protests, which have become violent in some instances. Given that the protests are enacted in distinct geographical places and speak to such everyday concerns, there is a notable absence of community development practitioners in mobilising citizens or in brokering agreements. Botes thus alerts us to a defining problematic for community development in South Africa, but one that has a wider relevance too. Community development practice may exhibit its own democratic deficits when it is primarily responsive to external donors or statutory agencies, but lacks a popular mandate.

The global hegemony of neoliberalism privileges an economic model that cultivates individualism, competitiveness and a disconnection between production and consumption. Brigitte Kratzwald (Chapter Thirteen ) explores whether and how the participatory ethos of community development might be linked to alternative economic rationalities. In so doing, she acknowledges that alternative economics is itself a contested field, with some versions attempting to complement or mitigate market ideology but with others expressly anti-capitalist in orientation. Furthermore, in German-speaking contexts, community development has been widely regarded as a social work methodology and has often been viewed sceptically as an abdication of state responsibility for service provision.

Extending her discussion to explore innovative ideas in action, Kratzwald reflects on the potential for correspondence and mutual learning between commons activism – often called commoning – and community development. There has been a recent renewal of interest in commoning ( McDermott, O’Connell and O’Donovan, 2014 ), which had previously been widely dismissed as a moribund relic of pre-industrial society, and Kratzwald highlights precisely what commons processes have to offer in the face of our current global predicament. Drawing on examples from Germany, Detroit and the UK, Kratzwald highlights how people have united against marginalisation and urban decay to create commons that are respectful of local environments, that validate human sociability and that sustain principles of mutuality and cooperation. She also exposes some dilemmas that exercise commons activists but which resonate with the world of community development practice too: for example, ambivalences regarding the role and place of the state, whether it can become a partner in such processes or whether it should be regarded with suspicion and maybe even rejection. Nonetheless if community development and commons processes are to contribute to a progressive politics, they need to embrace and work with differences in social strata or world view. And Kratzwald concludes that there are already some exciting examples of such praxis from which we can learn and take inspiration.

Clearly, despite the very significant differences in focus and tone across its chapters, some unifying themes and concerns are being interrogated by the contributors to the volume. As a totality, Politics, Power and Community Development raises fundamental questions regarding the current form, status and future viability of the processes and practices of community development. We see that community development continues to occupy a contradictory position within the changing politics of various state formations. In many contexts agendas are imposed from the top and accountability is constructed as a system of control rather than as an expression of popular democracy. Yet in these disparate international examples there is also evidence that creative alliances are being forged between government agencies, professionals, activists and communities, as they seek to protect or to reassert more progressive visions of statehood and citizenship. There is much commonality in these chapters as they report on the commodification and marketisation of community development, and the parallel responsibilisation of communities to prove their competitive edge or to compensate for the residualisation of public services. Authors also alert us to some of the homogenising tendencies of neoliberalised globalisation. Against the market’s promise of boundless choice, we see the stranglehold of managerialism internationally as funders, be they government, IGO or philanthropic, demand quantifiable outcomes and guarantees of performativity from civil society groups.

In drawing attention to such trends and issues, we hope to support a nuanced understanding of the inevitable tensions and challenges that characterise community development roles and relationships. Our purpose is not to castigate workers, activists or professionals for their ‘failure’ to deliver on community development’s putative radicalism; we recognise that contexts are deeply compromised and obstacles are manifold. Instead, we want to encourage all those concerned with the democratic potential of community development, particularly practitioners, to use this volume as a resource for thinking critically and creatively about their work. Out of the contradictions, concepts, illustrations and questions that are presented by the authors, we hope that readers can trace new options and possibilities. And out of the apparent strangeness of different contexts and places, we hope that readers will be able to recognise the prospect of solidarity and new alliances.

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What is political power? (Essay Sample)

What is political power.

Power is usually defined as the ability to influence people’s behavior by getting people to do what the person wants. Politically, having the ability to influence people is a huge responsibility. Being a leader means having the abilities to not only convince people, but also to inspire them and influence their decision by making them see the sense that the person with power is acting in their best interest. Therefore, political power is about not only persuasion, but also manipulation. Politics is the act of persuasion, acquisition, and exercise of political power.

Political power shapes and control people’s attitude towards the leader and the governing system. The leader guides the behavior of his followers in a direction he desires to achieve the common political objectives. Occupying a political position means having the power and the ability to effect the desired change of behavior of other people involved through persuasion or manipulation. For example, if an individual has the political power over the other person, the degree in which a leader can motivate, incite, inspire, stimulate, and makes other people modify their political behavior. This process is termed as having the political power.

Some of the political behavior or political activities that can be influenced by those having political powers include contributing money to political parties, attending meetings, voting in an election for specific candidates, engaging in protests, change of policies and demonstrations to demand certain changes. People who possess political powers may occur government positions, or some may be private citizens. In most cases, individuals with political powers who are not in government are very influential. They play important roles on mobilizing political resources, exerts pressure on the government to modify decision-making processes more so in public policies. An influential individual who do not occupy government positions, usually come from influential political families, or some are a network of members of specific interest groups or even a leader of a political party who is popular among citizens. Political power exercised can be illegitimate or legitimate, legitimate political power is a widely accepted rule by the citizens. Legitimate political power is derived from widespread acceptance by its citizens whereby the government is given the mandate to make rules and issues commands.

Illegitimate political power implies exercising powers that violate the existing rules; these may include sabotage, protests, and whistle blowing. Extreme illegitimate forms of political power pose a risk of loss of membership. Since most political organization is made up of individuals with different values and interest, this presents the potential for conflict over resources.  A leader in power uses his position to attain group goals. However, power is applied in different forms. Coercive power is based on fear. Coercive power includes sanctions, restrictions, and control by force.

Power plays an important role in politics because its consequences can yield positive or negative results.  Power in politics is a two-way relationship depending on how people interact based on the resources or values they hold or are in control of.  Conflict arises due to pressure to achieve specific goals that might not be realistic.  That is why leaders manipulate his followers to serve their needs at the expense of others.  In a democratic system, use of power should not involve force; instead of obtaining power should be more of influence that is known as soft power.

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A Brief History of the Political Essay

From swift to woolf, david bromwich considers an evolving genre.

The political essay has never been a clearly defined genre. David Hume may have legitimated it in 1758 when he classified under a collective rubric his own Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. “Political,” however, should have come last in order, since Hume took a speculative and detached view of politics, and seems to have been incapable of feeling passion for a political cause. We commonly associate political thought with full-scale treatises by philosophers of a different sort, whose understanding of politics was central to their account of human nature. Hobbes’s Leviathan , Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws , Rousseau’s Social Contract , Mill’s Representative Government , and, closer to our time, Rawls’s Theory of Justice , all satisfy that expectation. What, then, is a political essay? By the late 18th century, the periodical writings of Steele, Swift, Goldsmith, and Johnson had broadened the scope of the English essay for serious purposes. The field of politics, as much as culture, appeared to their successors well suited to arguments on society and government.

A public act of praise, dissent, or original description may take on permanent value when it implicates concerns beyond the present moment. Where the issue is momentous, the commitment stirred by passion, and the writing strong enough, an essay may sink deep roots in the language of politics. An essay is an attempt , as the word implies—a trial of sense and persuasion, which any citizen may hazard in a society where people are free to speak their minds. A more restrictive idea of political argument—one that would confer special legitimacy on an elite caste of managers, consultants, and symbolic analysts—presumes an environment in which state papers justify decisions arrived at from a region above politics. By contrast, the absence of formal constraints or a settled audience for the essay means that the daily experience of the writer counts as evidence. A season of crisis tempts people to think politically; in the process, they sometimes discover reasons to back their convictions.

The experience of civic freedom and its discontents may lead the essayist to think beyond politics. In 1940, Virginia Woolf recalled the sound of German bombers circling overhead the night before; the insect-like irritant, with its promise of aggression, frightened her into thought: “It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet which may at any moment sting you to death.” The ugly noise, for Woolf, signaled the prerogative of the fighting half of the species: Englishwomen “must lie weaponless tonight.” Yet Englishmen would be called upon to destroy the menace; and she was not sorry for their help. The mood of the writer is poised between gratitude and a bewildered frustration. Woolf ’s essay, “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” declines to exhibit the patriotic sentiment by which most reporters in her position would have felt drawn. At the same time, its personal emphasis keeps the author honest through the awareness of her own dependency.

Begin with an incident— I could have been killed last night —and you may end with speculations on human nature. Start with a national policy that you deplore, and it may take you back to the question, “Who are my neighbors?” In 1846, Henry David Thoreau was arrested for having refused to pay a poll tax; he made a lesson of his resistance two years later, when he saw the greed and dishonesty of the Mexican War: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” But to Thoreau’s surprise, the window of the prison had opened onto the life of the town he lived in, with its everyday errands and duties, its compromises and arrangements, and for him that glimpse was a revelation:

They were the voices of old burghers that I heard in the streets. I was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village inn,—a wholly new and rare experience to me. It was a closer view of my native town. I was fairly inside of it. I had never seen its institutions before. This is one of its peculiar institutions; for it is a shire town. I began to comprehend what its inhabitants were about.

Slavery, at that time, was nicknamed “the peculiar institution,” and by calling the prison itself a peculiar institution, and maybe having in mind the adjacent inn as well, Thoreau prods his reader to think about the constraints that are a tacit condition of social life.

The risk of political writing may lure the citizen to write—a fact Hazlitt seems to acknowledge in his essay “On the Regal Character,” where his second sentence wonders if the essay will expose him to prosecution: “In writing a criticism, we hope we shall not be accused of intending a libel.” (His friend Leigh Hunt had recently served two years in prison for “seditious libel” of the Prince Regent—having characterized him as a dandy notorious for his ostentation and obesity.) The writer’s consciousness of provocative intent may indeed be inseparable from the wish to persuade; though the tone of commitment will vary with the zeal and composition of the audience, whether that means a political party, a movement, a vanguard of the enlightened, or “the people” at large.

Edmund Burke, for example, writes to the sheriffs of Bristol (and through them to the city’s electors) in order to warn against the suspension of habeas corpus by the British war ministry in 1777. The sudden introduction of the repressive act, he tells the electors, has imperiled their liberty even if they are for the moment individually exempt. In response to the charge that the Americans fighting for independence are an unrepresentative minority, he warns: “ General rebellions and revolts of an whole people never were encouraged , now or at any time. They are always provoked. ” So too, Mahatma Gandhi addresses his movement of resistance against British rule, as well as others who can be attracted to the cause, when he explains why nonviolent protest requires courage of a higher degree than the warrior’s: “Non-violence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment.” In both cases, the writer treats the immediate injustice as an occasion for broader strictures on the nature of justice. There are certain duties that governors owe to the governed, and duties hardly less compulsory that the people owe to themselves.

Apparently diverse topics connect the essays in Writing Politics ; but, taken loosely to illustrate a historical continuity, they show the changing face of oppression and violence, and the invention of new paths for improving justice. Arbitrary power is the enemy throughout—power that, by the nature of its asserted scope and authority, makes itself the judge of its own cause. King George III, whose reign spanned sixty years beginning in 1760, from the first was thought to have overextended monarchical power and prerogative, and by doing so to have reversed an understanding of parliamentary sovereignty that was tacitly recognized by his predecessors. Writing against the king, “Junius” (the pen name of Philip Francis) traced the monarch’s errors to a poor education; and he gave an edge of deliberate effrontery to the attack on arbitrary power by addressing the king as you. “It is the misfortune of your life, and originally the cause of every reproach and distress, which has attended your government, that you should never have been acquainted with the language of truth, until you heard it in the complaints of your people.”

A similar frankness, without the ad hominem spur, can be felt in Burke’s attack on the monarchical distrust of liberty at home as well as abroad: “If any ask me what a free Government is, I answer, that, for any practical purpose, it is what the people think so; and that they, and not I, are the natural, lawful, and competent judges of this matter.” Writing in the same key from America, Thomas Paine, in his seventh number of The Crisis , gave a new description to the British attempt to preserve the unity of the empire by force of arms. He called it a war of conquest; and by addressing his warning directly “to the people of England,” he reminded the king’s subjects that war is always a social evil, for it sponsors a violence that does not terminate in itself. War enlarges every opportunity of vainglory—a malady familiar to monarchies.

The coming of democracy marks a turning point in modern discussions of sovereignty and the necessary protections of liberty. Confronted by the American annexation of parts of Mexico, in 1846–48, Thoreau saw to his disgust that a war of conquest could also be a popular war, the will of the people directed to the oppression of persons. It follows that the state apparatus built by democracy is at best an equivocal ally of individual rights. Yet as Emerson would recognize in his lecture “The Fugitive Slave Law,” and Frederick Douglass would confirm in “The Mission of the War,” the massed power of the state is likewise the only vehicle powerful enough to destroy a system of oppression as inveterate as American slavery had become by the 1850s.

Acceptance of political evil—a moral inertia that can corrupt the ablest of lawmakers—goes easily with the comforts of a society at peace where many are satisfied. “Here was the question,” writes Emerson: “Are you for man and for the good of man; or are you for the hurt and harm of man? It was question whether man shall be treated as leather? whether the Negroes shall be as the Indians were in Spanish America, a piece of money?” Emerson wondered at the apostasy of Daniel Webster, How came he there? The answer was that Webster had deluded himself by projecting a possible right from serial compromise with wrong.

Two ways lie open to correct the popular will without a relapse into docile assent and the rule of oligarchy. You may widen the terms of discourse and action by enlarging the community of participants. Alternatively, you may strengthen the opportunities of dissent through acts of exemplary protest—protest in speech, in action, or both. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. remain the commanding instances in this regard. Both led movements that demanded of every adherent that the protest serve as an express image of the society it means to bring about. Nonviolent resistance accordingly involves a public disclosure of the work of conscience—a demonstrated willingness to make oneself an exemplary warrior without war. Because they were practical reformers, Gandhi and King, within the societies they sought to reform, were engaged in what Michael Oakeshott calls “the pursuit of intimations.” They did not start from a model of the good society generated from outside. They built on existing practices of toleration, friendship, neighborly care, and respect for the dignity of strangers.

Nonviolent resistance, as a tactic of persuasion, aims to arouse an audience of the uncommitted by its show of discipline and civic responsibility. Well, but why not simply resist? Why show respect for the laws of a government you mean to change radically? Nonviolence, for Gandhi and King, was never merely a tactic, and there were moral as well as rhetorical reasons for their ethic of communal self-respect and self-command. Gandhi looked on the British empire as a commonwealth that had proved its ability to reform. King spoke with the authority of a native American, claiming the rights due to all Americans, and he evoked the ideals his countrymen often said they wished to live by. The stories the nation loved to tell of itself took pride in emancipation much more than pride in conquest and domination. “So,” wrote King from the Birmingham City Jail, “I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court because it is morally right, and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.”

A subtler enemy of liberty than outright prejudice and violent oppression is the psychological push toward conformity. This internalized docility inhabits and may be said to dictate the costume of manners in a democracy. Because the rule of mass opinion serves as a practical substitute for the absolute authority that is no longer available, it exerts an enormous and hidden pressure. This dangerous “omnipotence of the majority,” as Tocqueville called it, knows no power greater than itself; it resembles an absolute monarch in possessing neither the equipment nor the motive to render a judgment against itself. Toleration thus becomes a political value that requires as vigilant a defense as liberty. Minorities are marked not only by race, religion, and habits of association, but also by opinion.

“It is easy to see,” writes Walter Bagehot in “The Metaphysical Basis of Toleration,” “that very many believers would persecute sceptics” if they were given the means, “and that very many sceptics would persecute believers.” Bagehot has in mind religious belief, in particular, but the same intolerance operates when it is a question of penalizing a word, a gesture, a wrongly sympathetic or unsympathetic show of feeling by which a fellow citizen might claim to be offended. The more divided the society, the more it will crave implicit assurances of unity; the more unified it is, the more it wants an even greater show of unity—an unmistakable signal of membership and belonging that can be read as proof of collective solidarity. The “guilty fear of criticism,” Mary McCarthy remarked of the domestic fear of Communism in the 1950s, “the sense of being surrounded by an unappreciative world,” brought to American life a regimen of tests, codes, and loyalty oaths that were calculated to confirm rather than subdue the anxiety.

Proscribed and persecuted groups naturally seek a fortified community of their own, which should be proof against insult; and by 1870 or so, the sure method of creating such a community was to found a new nation. George Eliot took this remedy to be prudent and inevitable, in her sympathetic early account of the Zionist quest for a Jewish state, yet her unsparing portrait of English anti-Semitism seems to recognize the nation-remedy as a carrier of the same exclusion it hopes to abolish. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to a widened sense of community is the apparently intuitive—but in fact regularly inculcated—intellectual habit by which we divide people into racial, religious, and ethnic identities. The idea of an international confederation for peace was tried twice, without success, in the 20th century, with the League of Nations and the United Nations; but some such goal, first formulated in the political writings of Kant, has found memorable popular expression again and again.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s essay “Of the Ruling of Men” affords a prospect of international liberty that seems to the author simply the next necessary advance of common sense in the cause of humanity. Du Bois noticed in 1920 how late the expansion of rights had arrived at the rights of women. Always, the last hiding places of arbitrary power are the trusted arenas of privilege a society has come to accept as customary, and to which it has accorded the spurious honor of supposing it part of the natural order: men over women; the strong nations over the weak; corporate heads over employees. The pattern had come under scrutiny already in Harriet Taylor Mill’s “Enfranchisement of Women,” and its application to the hierarchies of ownership and labor would be affirmed in William Morris’s lecture “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil.” The commercial and manufacturing class, wrote Morris, “ force the genuine workers to provide for them”; no better (only more recondite in their procedures) are “the parasites” whose function is to defend the cause of property, “sometimes, as in the case of lawyers, undisguisedly so.” The socialists Morris and Du Bois regard the ultimate aim of a democratic world as the replacement of useless by useful work. With that change must also come the invention of a shared experience of leisure that is neither wasteful nor thoughtless.

A necessary bulwark of personal freedom is property, and in the commercial democracies for the past three centuries a usual means of agreement for the defense of property has been the contract. In challenging the sacredness of contract, in certain cases of conflict with a common good, T. H. Green moved the idea of “freedom of contract” from the domain of nature to that of social arrangements that are settled by convention and therefore subject to revision. The freedom of contract must be susceptible of modification when it fails to meet a standard of public well-being. The right of a factory owner, for example, to employ child labor if the child agrees, should not be protected. “No contract,” Green argues, “is valid in which human persons, willingly or unwillingly, are dealt with as commodities”; for when we speak of freedom, “we mean a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying.” And again:

When we measure the progress of a society by its growth in freedom, we measure it by the increasing development and exercise on the whole of those powers of contributing to social good with which we believe the members of the society to be endowed; in short, by the greater power on the part of the citizens as a body to make the most and best of themselves.

Legislation in the public interest may still be consistent with the principles of free society when it parts from a leading maxim of contractual individualism.

The very idea of a social contract has usually been taken to imply an obligation to die for the state. Though Hobbes and Locke offered reservations on this point, the classical theorists agree that the state yields the prospect of “commodious living” without which human life would be unsocial and greatly impoverished; and there are times when the state can survive only through the sacrifice of citizens. May there also be a duty of self-sacrifice against a state whose whole direction and momentum has bent it toward injustice? Hannah Arendt, in “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” asked that question regarding the conduct of state officials as well as ordinary people under the encroaching tyranny of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Citizens then, Arendt observes, had live options of political conduct besides passive obedience and open revolt. Conscientious opposition could show itself in public indications of nonsupport . This is a fact that the pervasiveness of conformism and careerism in mass societies makes harder to see than it should be.

Jonathan Swift, a writer as temperamentally diverse from Arendt as possible, shows in “A Modest Proposal” how the human creature goes about rationalizing any act or any policy, however atrocious. Our propensity to make-normal, to approve whatever renders life more orderly, can lead by the lightest of expedient steps to a plan for marketing the babies of the Irish poor as flesh suitable for eating. It is, after all—so Swift’s fictional narrator argues—a plausible design to alleviate poverty and distress among a large sector of the population, and to eliminate the filth and crowding that disgusts persons of a more elevated sort. The justification is purely utilitarian, and the proposer cites the most disinterested of motives: he has no financial or personal stake in the design. Civility has often been praised as a necessity of political argument, but Swift’s proposal is at once civil and, in itself, atrocious.

An absorbing concern of Arendt’s, as of several of the other essay writers gathered here, was the difficulty of thinking. We measure, we compute, we calculate, we weigh advantages and disadvantages—that much is only sensible, only logical—but we give reasons that are often blind to our motives, we rationalize and we normalize in order to justify ourselves. It is supremely difficult to use the equipment we learn from parents and teachers, which instructs us how to deal fairly with persons, and apply it to the relationship between persons and society, and between the manners of society and the laws of a nation. The 21st century has saddled persons of all nations with a catastrophic possibility, the destruction of a planetary environment for organized human life; and in facing the predicament directly, and formulating answers to the question it poses, the political thinkers of the past may help us chiefly by intimations. The idea of a good or tolerable society now encompasses relations between people at the widest imaginable distance apart. It must also cover a new relation of stewardship between humankind and nature.

Having made the present selection with the abovementioned topics in view—the republican defense against arbitrary power; the progress of liberty; the coming of mass-suffrage democracy and its peculiar dangers; justifications for political dissent and disobedience; war, as chosen for the purpose of domination or as necessary to destroy a greater evil; the responsibilities of the citizen; the political meaning of work and the conditions of work—an anthology of writings all in English seemed warranted by the subject matter. For in the past three centuries, these issues have been discussed most searchingly by political critics and theorists in Britain and the United States.

The span covers the Glorious Revolution and its achievement of parliamentary sovereignty; the American Revolution, and the civil war that has rightly been called the second American revolution; the expansion of the franchise under the two great reform bills in England and the 15th amendment to the US constitution; the two world wars and the Holocaust; and the mass movements of nonviolent resistance that brought national independence to India and broadened the terms of citizenship of black Americans. The sequence gives adequate evidence of thinkers engaged in a single conversation. Many of these authors were reading the essayists who came before them; and in many cases (Burke and Paine, Lincoln and Douglass, Churchill and Orwell), they were reading each other.

Writing Politics contains no example of the half-political, half-commercial genre of “leadership” writing. Certain other principles that guided the editor will be obvious at a glance, but may as well be stated. Only complete essays are included, no extracts. This has meant excluding great writers—Hobbes, Locke, Wollstonecraft, and John Stuart Mill, among others—whose definitive political writing came in the shape of full-length books. There are likewise no chapters of books; no party manifestos or statements of creed; nothing that was first published posthumously. All of these essays were written at the time noted, were meant for an audience of the time, and were published with an eye to their immediate effect. This is so even in cases (as with Morris and Du Bois) where the author had in view the reformation of a whole way of thinking. Some lectures have been included—the printed lecture was an indispensable medium for political ideas in the 19th century—but there are no party speeches delivered by an official to advance a cause of the moment.

Two exceptions to the principles may prove the rule. Abraham Lincoln’s letter to James C. Conkling was a public letter, written to defend the Emancipation Proclamation, in which, a few months earlier, President Lincoln had declared the freedom of all slaves in the rebelling states; he now extended the order to cover black soldiers who fought for the Union: “If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.” Lincoln was risking his presidency when he published this extraordinary appeal and admonition, and his view was shared by Frederick Douglass in “The Mission of the War”: “No war but an Abolition war, no peace but an Abolition peace.” The other exception is “The Roots of Honour,” John Ruskin’s attack on the mercenary morality of 19th-century capitalism . He called the chapter “Essay I” in Unto This Last , and his nomenclature seemed a fair excuse for reprinting an ineradicable prophecy.

__________________________________

From Writing Politics , edited by David Bromwich. Copyright © 2020 by David Bromwich; courtesy of NYRB Classics.

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Essay on Politics for Students and Children

500+ words essay on politics.

When we hear the term politics, we usually think of the government, politicians and political parties. For a country to have an organized government and work as per specific guidelines, we require a certain organization. This is where politics comes in, as it essentially forms the government. Every country, group and organization use politics to instrument various ways to organize their events, prospects and more.

Politics does not limit to those in power in the government. It is also about the ones who are in the run to achieve the same power. The candidates of the opposition party question the party on power during political debates . They intend to inform people and make them aware of their agenda and what the present government is doing. All this is done with the help of politics only.

Dirty Politics

Dirty politics refers to the kind of politics in which moves are made for the personal interest of a person or party. It ignores the overall development of a nation and hurts the essence of the country. If we look at it closely, there are various constituents of dirty politics.

The ministers of various political parties, in order to defame the opposition, spread fake news and give provocative speeches against them. This hampers with the harmony of the country and also degrades the essence of politics . They pass sexist remarks and instill hate in the hearts of people to watch their party win with a majority of seats.

Read 500 Words Essay on Corruption Here

Furthermore, the majority of politicians are corrupt. They abuse their power to advance their personal interests rather than that of the country. We see the news flooded with articles like ministers and their families involving in scams and illegal practices. The power they have makes them feel invincible which is why they get away with any crime.

Before coming into power, the government makes numerous promises to the public. They influence and manipulate them into thinking all their promises will be fulfilled. However, as soon as they gain power, they turn their back on the public. They work for their selfish motives and keep fooling people in every election. Out of all this, only the common suffers at the hands of lying and corrupt politicians.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Lack of Educated Ministers

If we look at the scenario of Indian elections, any random person with enough power and money can contest the elections. They just need to be a citizen of the country and be at least 25 years old. There are a few clauses too which are very easy.

The strangest thing is that contesting for elections does not require any minimum education qualification. Thus, we see how so many uneducated and non-deserving candidates get into power and then misuse it endlessly. A country with uneducated ministers cannot develop or even be on the right path.

We need educated ministers badly in the government. They are the ones who can make the country progress as they will handle things better than the illiterate ones. The candidates must be well-qualified in order to take on a big responsibility as running an entire nation. In short, we need to save our country from corrupt and uneducated politicians who are no less than parasites eating away the development growth of the country and its resources. All of us must unite to break the wheel and work for the prosperous future of our country.

FAQs on Politics

Q.1 Why is the political system corrupt?

A.1 Political system is corrupt because the ministers in power exercise their authority to get away with all their crimes. They bribe everyone into working for their selfish motives making the whole system corrupt.

Q.2 Why does India need educated ministers?

A.2 India does not have a minimum educational qualification requirement for ministers. This is why the uneducated lot is corrupting the system and pushing the country to doom. We need educated ministers so they can help the country develop with their progressive thinking.

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Good Power And Politics Essay Example

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Power , Politics , Religion , People , Government , Authority , Good Samaritan , Management

Published: 02/20/2023

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Introduction Politics and power are useful in daily lives. However, power is whereby one can influence individuals without coercing them to do something notable. Politics involve all the activities related to governance in a particular area or a country. Often, religion does not mix with politics because religious leaders tend to uphold their values. Based on the parable of Good Samaritan, one would see the manifestation of authority on how the Samaritan, seen as a man of lower social class, saved a man who was dying while the priest and Levite did not find an urge to help. Power strongly relates to religion while politics involve earthly leadership. According to Bergoglio, one should be concerned only with God-given powers. However, many people mistake power with coercion of people. Pope does not entertain participation of religious leaders such as priests and fathers in political activities. However, other scholars argue that democracy should take shape in any country hence religious leaders would contribute to such developments. Bergoglio acknowledges humility in exercising power because one may not be sure when he or she will be coming down. According to the Pope, Religious leaders have the mandate to preach values rather than exercising political acts that may not be of use to them and their followers. They should uphold the dignity of Godly powers other than human ones (Bergoglio & Skorka, 2013, p. 139). Furthermore, based on the story of Good Samaritan, the priest did not help the man who had been beaten up by robbers. The priest was a man of higher authority, but surprisingly, he did not help the wounded man. Also, the Levite who passed without helping was the one likely to have offered his helping hand. The Good Samaritan exercised authority that has set an example for people who read the story. However, he was ‘unlikely helper’ based on his lower social class as compared to the Levite and the priest. Examples of people seen as unlikely helpers in the community include people with disabilities. Individuals should take up responsibility and help the unfortunate ones in the society. The three had been walking in separate instances when they saw a man in the ditch. Only one went to help that person to safety while others walked away. The Good Samaritan’s story is impressive and urges human beings to exercise their authority in making the society a better place. One may be seen as a feeble creature who may not help those in need, but after giving his best, he would outshine those perceived to be rich (Piliavin & Piliavin, 1973, p.120). Moreover, the fact that many people show-off their powers expresses high levels of pride that goes against God’s teachings. The fact that the story of the man in the ditch was set in the dark; without the knowledge of the participants shows the right manner of exercising powers. I find it quite compelling to exercise power or authority in secret other than showing off. One who does it in secret without caring about public opinion shows that his or hers urge to help emanates from the heart. In today’s world, people dismiss others because of their situation and class. For instance, someone with a disability may be rejected because of his or her situation but at the end makes a good leader based on particular values. In conclusion, the Pope differentiates between power and politics. He cites power to originate from God while politics is related to earthly values. However, religious personnel may contribute to the leadership of a country without being partisan. Religion should not mix with politics, except in particular circumstances. The Good Samaritan shows that a person perceived to be of lower tier can exercise power by helping others. Humility should also be on the forefront when exercising powers and authority.  

Bergoglio, J. M., & Skorka, A. (2013). On Heaven and Earth: Pope Francis on Faith, Family, and the Church in the Twenty-first Century (pp. 139-140). Image. Piliavin, J. A., & Piliavin, I. M. (1973). The good Samaritan: Why does he help. (pp. 120-122) Unpublished manuscript, University of Wisconsin.

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NPR defends its journalism after senior editor says it has lost the public's trust

David Folkenflik

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust.

NPR's top news executive defended its journalism and its commitment to reflecting a diverse array of views on Tuesday after a senior NPR editor wrote a broad critique of how the network has covered some of the most important stories of the age.

"An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America," writes Uri Berliner.

A strategic emphasis on diversity and inclusion on the basis of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, promoted by NPR's former CEO, John Lansing, has fed "the absence of viewpoint diversity," Berliner writes.

NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner's assessment.

"We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," she wrote. "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world."

NPR names tech executive Katherine Maher to lead in turbulent era

She added, "None of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole."

A spokesperson for NPR said Chapin, who also serves as the network's chief content officer, would have no further comment.

Praised by NPR's critics

Berliner is a senior editor on NPR's Business Desk. (Disclosure: I, too, am part of the Business Desk, and Berliner has edited many of my past stories. He did not see any version of this article or participate in its preparation before it was posted publicly.)

Berliner's essay , titled "I've Been at NPR for 25 years. Here's How We Lost America's Trust," was published by The Free Press, a website that has welcomed journalists who have concluded that mainstream news outlets have become reflexively liberal.

Berliner writes that as a Subaru-driving, Sarah Lawrence College graduate who "was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother ," he fits the mold of a loyal NPR fan.

Yet Berliner says NPR's news coverage has fallen short on some of the most controversial stories of recent years, from the question of whether former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, to the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19, to the significance and provenance of emails leaked from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden weeks before the 2020 election. In addition, he blasted NPR's coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

On each of these stories, Berliner asserts, NPR has suffered from groupthink due to too little diversity of viewpoints in the newsroom.

The essay ricocheted Tuesday around conservative media , with some labeling Berliner a whistleblower . Others picked it up on social media, including Elon Musk, who has lambasted NPR for leaving his social media site, X. (Musk emailed another NPR reporter a link to Berliner's article with a gibe that the reporter was a "quisling" — a World War II reference to someone who collaborates with the enemy.)

When asked for further comment late Tuesday, Berliner declined, saying the essay spoke for itself.

The arguments he raises — and counters — have percolated across U.S. newsrooms in recent years. The #MeToo sexual harassment scandals of 2016 and 2017 forced newsrooms to listen to and heed more junior colleagues. The social justice movement prompted by the killing of George Floyd in 2020 inspired a reckoning in many places. Newsroom leaders often appeared to stand on shaky ground.

Leaders at many newsrooms, including top editors at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times , lost their jobs. Legendary Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron wrote in his memoir that he feared his bonds with the staff were "frayed beyond repair," especially over the degree of self-expression his journalists expected to exert on social media, before he decided to step down in early 2021.

Since then, Baron and others — including leaders of some of these newsrooms — have suggested that the pendulum has swung too far.

Author Interviews

Legendary editor marty baron describes his 'collision of power' with trump and bezos.

New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger warned last year against journalists embracing a stance of what he calls "one-side-ism": "where journalists are demonstrating that they're on the side of the righteous."

"I really think that that can create blind spots and echo chambers," he said.

Internal arguments at The Times over the strength of its reporting on accusations that Hamas engaged in sexual assaults as part of a strategy for its Oct. 7 attack on Israel erupted publicly . The paper conducted an investigation to determine the source of a leak over a planned episode of the paper's podcast The Daily on the subject, which months later has not been released. The newsroom guild accused the paper of "targeted interrogation" of journalists of Middle Eastern descent.

Heated pushback in NPR's newsroom

Given Berliner's account of private conversations, several NPR journalists question whether they can now trust him with unguarded assessments about stories in real time. Others express frustration that he had not sought out comment in advance of publication. Berliner acknowledged to me that for this story, he did not seek NPR's approval to publish the piece, nor did he give the network advance notice.

Some of Berliner's NPR colleagues are responding heatedly. Fernando Alfonso, a senior supervising editor for digital news, wrote that he wholeheartedly rejected Berliner's critique of the coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, for which NPR's journalists, like their peers, periodically put themselves at risk.

Alfonso also took issue with Berliner's concern over the focus on diversity at NPR.

"As a person of color who has often worked in newsrooms with little to no people who look like me, the efforts NPR has made to diversify its workforce and its sources are unique and appropriate given the news industry's long-standing lack of diversity," Alfonso says. "These efforts should be celebrated and not denigrated as Uri has done."

After this story was first published, Berliner contested Alfonso's characterization, saying his criticism of NPR is about the lack of diversity of viewpoints, not its diversity itself.

"I never criticized NPR's priority of achieving a more diverse workforce in terms of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. I have not 'denigrated' NPR's newsroom diversity goals," Berliner said. "That's wrong."

Questions of diversity

Under former CEO John Lansing, NPR made increasing diversity, both of its staff and its audience, its "North Star" mission. Berliner says in the essay that NPR failed to consider broader diversity of viewpoint, noting, "In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans."

Berliner cited audience estimates that suggested a concurrent falloff in listening by Republicans. (The number of people listening to NPR broadcasts and terrestrial radio broadly has declined since the start of the pandemic.)

Former NPR vice president for news and ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin tweeted , "I know Uri. He's not wrong."

Others questioned Berliner's logic. "This probably gets causality somewhat backward," tweeted Semafor Washington editor Jordan Weissmann . "I'd guess that a lot of NPR listeners who voted for [Mitt] Romney have changed how they identify politically."

Similarly, Nieman Lab founder Joshua Benton suggested the rise of Trump alienated many NPR-appreciating Republicans from the GOP.

In recent years, NPR has greatly enhanced the percentage of people of color in its workforce and its executive ranks. Four out of 10 staffers are people of color; nearly half of NPR's leadership team identifies as Black, Asian or Latino.

"The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not?" Lansing, who stepped down last month, says in response to Berliner's piece. "I'd welcome the argument against that."

"On radio, we were really lagging in our representation of an audience that makes us look like what America looks like today," Lansing says. The U.S. looks and sounds a lot different than it did in 1971, when NPR's first show was broadcast, Lansing says.

A network spokesperson says new NPR CEO Katherine Maher supports Chapin and her response to Berliner's critique.

The spokesperson says that Maher "believes that it's a healthy thing for a public service newsroom to engage in rigorous consideration of the needs of our audiences, including where we serve our mission well and where we can serve it better."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

Power and Politics in a Modern Organization Essay

Power and politics are two important parts of organizational behavior and effective management. Management and leadership skills are complex issues that demand the unique professional knowledge and expertise of a person. The problem of power and politics in a modern organization receives great attention in recent years influenced by changing cultural traditions and new management techniques (Pfeffer, 1992). The distinction between power and politics provides a framework for developing leadership strategy given one’s place in a situation, with or without power. The point of the difference between leadership and management challenges, and the different modes of operating that each requires are based on differences between power and politics within one organization.

Power is a bargain; employees entrust leaders in exchange for service. Indeed, it is possible to define this notion as a process “entrusted to perform a service” (Mintzberg, 1985). When individuals meet expectations, their credibility and chances for promotion increase; when they do not, they risk their image and position. Politics means a certain direction and approach to exercise power and make decisions. In both cases, good leadership skills are needed to provide effective governance if a person is to ensure political leadership and decision-making. To the extent that leaders and managers tried in the past to distinguish between leadership and power, they merely make a distinction between two kinds of power: formal and informal authority. In organizations, politics has usually been associated with informal authority, denoting the ability to gain and deploy power—that is, the power to influence and inspire a subordinate (Pfeffer, 1992). Power and politics are saddled with expectations that constrain the exercise of leadership. Consequently, equating leadership with informal power does little to help employees develop strategies of leadership, whether with or without power, to tackle the most important challenges. The dependency on power generated by distress has the special advantage of holding a social system together when other management tools fail to function properly (Daft, 2003).

An example of organizational politics is the promotion and training of all employees working with the company for 3 years. Politics allow the company to ensure an adequate supply of professional and competent staff and reduced redundancy rates. In this case, power relations will be a relationship between a manager/trainer and the employee/trainee assigned to further promotion. Power relationships become a critical feature of a holding environment. Leadership, however, such dependency discourages more adaptive social constructs and behavior. The pattern of dependency itself evolved not to enable a given troop to achieve new adaptations (for example, to venture into new technological innovations or address new kinds of work structure), but to enable the crowd to function routinely within the ecological zone to which its particular set of social behaviors had adapted already. Power and politics are interlinked as the main similarity between them are a strong impact on staff and employee relationships and a possibility to change the course of actions. That is, the management is not designed to invent new norms or role structures, but to direct, defend, and maintain order within the established processes. If a new kind of power appears, the staff will enact its procedure for routine predators and the alpha will valiantly attempt to fulfill his role, though unsuccessfully (Pfeffer, 1992).

In contrast to politics, power is connected with visibility. In this case, under visibility researchers imply innovation, critical skills, and making external relationships. So, power relations are achieved when behavior is made distinctive in certain kinds of ways. in its turn, leaders deal with the development and maintenance of the order. It makes sense to equate management with formal and informal authority in a world of technical problems in which expertise and well-designed procedures and norms suffice to meet the challenges we face. Politics and power can be expected to offer strategic direction, defense, course of action, conflict management, and normal maintenance. Many companies have thrived for long periods in quite stable environments due in large part to wise and expert politics and power. But when the company requires changes in employees’ values, attitudes, or behavior patterns, when responsibility, pain, and initiative must be distributed widely, our unrealistic expectations of authority serve as constraints on the exercise of leadership (Mintzberg, 1985).

In sum, power and politics are connected by their strong impact on the organization and the employees. Power usually refers to the personal characteristics of a leader/manager while politics refers to the general approach of the origination or an organizational unit. In the context of work, management often makes demands that frustrate people’s expectations for easy answers. Politics under pressure to deliver “leadership” all too often make the classic error of treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems. Using politics and power as the main tools of influence, managers take responsibility for other employees’ problems and give them back ready-made solutions. Leaders gain power in the first place because they take duty and solve problems with such aplomb. Managers rarely receive power and have a possibility to develop organizational politics, as these are the main characteristics of organizational leadership.

Daft, R. L. (2003). Orga nizational Theory and Design . 9th Edition. South-Western College Pub; 8 edition.

Mintzberg, H. (1985). The organization as political arena’, Journal of Management Studies , 22 (2), 133-154.

Pfeffer, J. (1992). ‘Understanding power in organizations’, California Management Review , 34 (2), 29-50.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, December 3). Power and Politics in a Modern Organization. https://ivypanda.com/essays/power-and-politics-in-a-modern-organization/

"Power and Politics in a Modern Organization." IvyPanda , 3 Dec. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/power-and-politics-in-a-modern-organization/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Power and Politics in a Modern Organization'. 3 December.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Power and Politics in a Modern Organization." December 3, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/power-and-politics-in-a-modern-organization/.

1. IvyPanda . "Power and Politics in a Modern Organization." December 3, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/power-and-politics-in-a-modern-organization/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Power and Politics in a Modern Organization." December 3, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/power-and-politics-in-a-modern-organization/.

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