That's the meaning: You cannot just take tools whose purpose and politics is dominance and violence and "make them liberatory". This goes deeper than "just" embedded politics or lofty talks about ethics, it comes down to what kind of relations you believe do and should and must not define the world.
Mar 18, 2026 at 12:40 PM
LiberationValues
LibertationValues is a political quiz aimed at anti-authoritarian leftists
LiberationValues
LibertationValues is a political quiz aimed at anti-authoritarian leftists
Capitalism, Democracy, and Du Bois’s <em>Two</em> Proletariats
[epq-quote align="align-right"]"What can be more radical or liberating than freedom and justice for all?"[/epq-quote] As an ideal, liberal democracy has great appeal. What can be more radical or liberating than...
We Do This 'Til We Free Us
New York Times Bestseller “Organizing is both science and art. It is thinking through a vision, a strategy, and then figuring out who your targets are, always being concerned about power, always being concerned about how you’re going to actually build power in order to be able to push your issues, in order to be able to get the target to actually move in the way that you want to.” What if social transformation and liberation isn’t about waiting for someone else to come along and save us? What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves? In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle. With a foreword by Naomi Murakawa and chapters on seeking justice beyond the punishment system, transforming how we deal with harm and accountability, and finding hope in collective struggle for abolition, Kaba’s work is deeply rooted in the relentless belief that we can fundamentally change the world. As Kaba writes, “Nothing that we do that is worthwhile is done alone.”
Sparks fly up
Once you’ve seized the tools of political life to build communal power, it’s hard to forget what a hammer feels like in your hand.
The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy
Abstract The Dispersion of Power is an urgent call to rethink centuries of conventional wisdom about what democracy is, why it matters, and how to make it better. Drawing from history, social science, psychology, and critical theory, it explains why elections do not and cannot realize the classic ideal of popular rule, and why prevailing strategies of democratic reform often make things worse. Instead, Bagg argues, we should see democracy as a way of protecting public power from capture—an alternative vision that is at once more realistic and more inspiring. Despite their many shortcomings, real-world elections do prevent the most extreme forms of tyranny, and are therefore indispensable. In dealing with the vast inequalities that remain, however, we cannot rely on standard solutions such as electoral reform, direct democracy, deliberation, and participatory governance. Instead, Bagg shows, protecting and enriching democracy requires addressing underlying inequalities of power directly. In part, this entails substantive policies attacking the advantages of wealthy elites. Even more crucially, deepening democracy requires the organization of oppositional, countervailing power among ordinary people. Neither task is easy, but historical precedents exist in both cases—and if democracy is to survive contemporary crises, leaders and citizens alike must find ways to revive and reinvent these essential democratic practices for the twenty-first century.
Towards a Planetary Theology
Every political innovation requires, first of all, a corresponding transformation in the cosmos. To remake globalization from a gangster racket into a genuine political society, we must recognize theology’s foundational role in shaping political order.
Jonathan Stray (@jonathanstray180913)
Thank you for this. As someone who's been involved in bridge-building for a while (and peace building, which is what this is called internationally) I have some thoughts. The main thing I want to get across is this: it's important to understand what the goals of bridge-building are and aren't. For example, the goal is not to promote progressive politics. That's the job of progressives. The goal is to have a functioning democracy where conflicts are resolved without violence or destruction. There are many ways to support this this, as the Burgesses have documented (see https://www.betterconflictbulletin.org/p/53-roles-that-make-democracy-work) I think you are right that the Trump administration presents a clear danger to our democracy. I also think that this message has been shouted from the rooftops for years, and it did not prevent him from winning a fair election. I don't see why shouting it louder will be successful now. And I do think the left has some responsibility for this situation, which will have to be acknowledged before anyone on the right will be willing to collaborate across political difference. Minimally, I think many of the responses to Trump's polarizing actions were themselves polarizing when they didn't have to be -- an own goal. In my view, this happened because most people are not trained to think about conflict the way that professional peace builders are. The problem, as I see it, is that Trump can get away with dismantling democracy because far too many people are so angry that they support him. If this analysis is correct, the the winning strategy -- winning in the sense of democracy-preserving, not progressive-politics-advancing -- is for "us" to unite with "them" to against authoritarianism and corruption. This strategy is sometimes called "repolarization." The goal is to change the axis of conflict, not to remove or suppress conflict. This view has been explicitly expressed by, among others, political scientist Jennifer McCoy, whom I recently interviewed (https://www.betterconflictbulletin.org/p/repolarize-to-depolarize) For more on this strategy, from the progressive viewpoint, see also: Shikha Dalmia’s keynote at the recent “Liberalism for the 21st Century” conference Liberals Need Moral Clarity, Not Moral Purity, in Their Struggle Against Authoritarianism https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/liberals-need-moral-clarity-not-moral john a. powell's paper discussing how bridging and racial justice activism relate Overcoming Toxic Polarization: Lessons in Effective Bridging https://lawandinequality.org/article/overcoming-toxic-polarization/ Thanks for writing, and thanks for reading.
Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences
POLITICS AFTER THE END OF THE END OF HISTORYWhat happens when politics is everywhere, yet nothing seems to change? From the abandoned dance floors of Thatcher’s London to the mass mobilizations of Black Lives Matter, Anton Jäger traces how public life has become infused with protest, spectacle, and moral urgency — while the old infrastructure of parties, unions, and civic solidarity has been hollowed out.Hyperpolitics revisits the illusions of the “end of history” and dissects the strange energies that replaced them: viral outrage, endless culture wars, and the digital rush of causes that flare and vanish overnight. Jäger shows how the promises of post–Cold War liberalism gave way to a restless, unsteady public sphere where private passions overflow into politics but rarely build enduring power.Ranging from Guy Debord and Wolfgang Tillmans to Houellebecq’s disenchanted fictions, Hyperpolitics makes sense of a world in which collective action remains fragmented and the social fabric thinner than ever. For anyone trying to grasp why our age feels so charged yet so inconsequential, this book offers a vital map through the new contradictions of our hyperpolitical moment.
We Need To Rethink Democracy
On Liberation
Across the world, regular citizens of all ages are bravely and spontaneously standing up to forces of oppression and exploitation. Now, a leader of...
Liberation Toolbox by YK Hong
Liberatory Strategy + Tech Justice for our expansive world
Humanitarian Governance
This review examines humanitarian governance, defined as the increasingly organized and internationalized attempt to save the lives, enhance the welfare, and reduce the suffering of the world's most vulnerable populations. Political scientists and international relations scholars are only now beginning to explain this rapidly growing global governance of humanity, which is particularly evident in the developing literatures on humanitarian intervention, emergency relief, peacebuilding, and refugee protection. As they increasingly engage this relatively unexplored area of global life, political scientists are using the familiar analytics of the global governance literature to explain the origins, design, and effectiveness of this collective activity. This essay, though, interjects an alternative perspective, one that draws from critical theory, to widen the research agenda of the study of humanitarian governance. Specifically, the essay raises six central questions: What kind of world is being imagined and produced? What accounts for the tremendous growth of humanitarian governance over the last century? Who governs? How is humanitarian governance organized and accomplished? What are the principal techniques of control? By what authority do humanitarians govern and what do they do with that authority?
Democracy has Hamlet’s Problem: The Search for Relevance in a Complex World
To cope with the complexity of the world, cognitively limited agents must employ framing to identify what is relevant and stabilise meaning. Yet democracy rests on the Popperian fallibilist imperat...
Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need
An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival. What is the relationship between design, power, and social justice? “Design justice” is an approach to design that is led by marginalized communities and that aims expilcitly to challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities. It has emerged from a growing community of designers in various fields who work closely with social movements and community-based organizations around the world. This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people—specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)—and invites readers to “build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability.” Along the way, the book documents a multitude of real-world community-led design practices, each grounded in a particular social movement. Design Justice goes beyond recent calls for design for good, user-centered design, and employment diversity in the technology and design professions; it connects design to larger struggles for collective liberation and ecological survival. The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Knowledge Unlatched and the MIT Press Frank Urbanowski Memorial Fund.
