Co-written by Chris Rossdale, Koshka Duff, Connor Woodman, Joseph Kisolo-Ssonko, Tom Kemp, and Greg Mason.

Words with their own glossary entries appear in bold when they occur within definitions. Suggested further readings are linked to free PDFs where possible.

Ableism

Can be understood simply as discrimination against people with disabilities. However, this should not be thought of only in terms of individual acts of intentional bad treatment. Ableism can also be manifested in systems which function to oppress, exploit and inflict violence upon people whose abilities deviate from socially enforced norms. This may take many different forms: from physical infrastructures that fail to account for different abilities; policing practices that stigmatise those with enduring mental health issues; to, even, the way in which the category of disability itself is used to mark or label some bodies and ways of being as deficient. 

Ableism intersects with other modes of oppression such as class and racial oppression. This can be seen, for example, in the way poor black people disproportionately have their mental health issues treated as police matters.

Accumulation (of wealth, of capital)

To accumulate means to gather or acquire more and more of something. The accumulation of capital is the process of building up wealth through the exploitation of labour, land, and other resources. In her influential 1913 work, The Accumulation of Capital, theorist and revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg argued that, ‘in its drive to appropriate these productive forces for the purposes of exploitation, capital ransacks the whole planet, procuring means of production from every crevice of the Earth’. She showed how state and paramilitary violence, including colonisation and war, were important modes of capitalist accumulation. In Carceral Capitalism, Jackie Wang analyses how Luxemburg’s analysis applies today.

Agent(s) / agency / agential

To say of people or organisations that they are agents is to attribute purposiveness (i.e. being purposeful) and control to their activity in the world. My non-coerced action of typing these words is an expression of my agency. The state’s enforcement of anti-protest laws is an expression of its agency.

In addition to being agents of our own activity, we can also act through others. So, to speak of someone as an agent of some other person or organisation is to say that their activities don’t express their own purposes  but instead are done on behalf of that other. For example, it might be claimed that the police act primarily as agents of the state rather than as individuals.

We can have our agency limited by others when we are treated in ways that fail to recognise our actual purposes. For example, a police officer might suppress the agency of a black person by interpreting their actions through the lens of ideological notions of black criminality. Conversely, individuals can have their agency enhanced by others. For example, participating in a demonstration may allow an individual to act with others and become part of a greater collective agency.

We can think of agency as related to wider social context and speak of various kinds of agency in relation to possibilities for social change. For example, we could say that anti-repressive political movements have historical, or liberatorary, agency in that they have the potential to allow those involved to purposely overthrow or change oppressive social structures.

Alienated / alienation

These terms found their way into modern political and social discourse from philosophical traditions of the 18th century enlightenment, in which broadly they suggested `the separation of things which naturally belong together…or the establishment of some relation of indifference or hostility between things which are properly in harmony’. (See Karl Marx: Arguments of the Philosophers by Allen Wood, 2004). 

Though these original philosophical meanings remain contested within academic circles, popular usage of the terms indicate states of affairs in which individuals or groups feel/are detached from other individuals, communities or institutions in ways that put the broad interests of the detached parties at odds. So alienated states of affairs typically involve antagonistic relations between individuals and groups whose interests might (at least ideally) be harmonised. 

The term `alienation’ is also often extended to the feelings of the estranged parties, and captures a complex family of affects including: isolation, feelings of powerlessness, lack of empathy or common cause. Uses of the terms `alienated’ and `alienation’ in this book are consistent with ideas described here, but also allow broader inflections according to which individuals and groups may be alienated from social, political and legal processes.

Analysis / to analyse / analytical

The meaning of ‘analysis’ in chemistry is to break a mixture down into its separate elements. The use of the term in philosophy and social theory is broader but still draws on this basic meaning. To analyse, or give an analysis of, a feature of society is to describe it in a way that clarifies or explains what is going on. Often this involves disentangling different elements or factors, although identifying non-obvious or concealed connections between things is an equally important part of analysing society.

The term ‘analytic philosophy’ (or ‘analytical philosophy’) was coined in the early 20th century to describe a form of philosophy that saw itself as producing conceptual clarity by breaking down (‘analysing’) language into its component parts. It distinguished itself sharply from the ‘continental’ tradition dominated at the time by the influence of 19th century German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel. Both ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophy are strands within Western philosophy - although ‘Western philosophy’ has always been influenced, sometimes in unacknowledged ways, by ‘non-Western’ philosophical traditions and ideas, such as those originating in India, China, the African continent and the Middle East.

‘Analytic’ is nowadays used as a broad-brush description of the style of philosophy that has been dominant, at least in Anglo-American universities, over the past century. While the category is controversial and its division from continental philosophy far from clear-cut, some of the features of this tradition have tended to be: enthusiasm for the methods of maths and formal logic (which represents and evaluates forms of argument using symbols rather like maths) as providing models of clarity and rigour; lack of attention to the historical contexts or development of ideas; rejection of literature and literary styles as vehicles for philosophical thinking. 

Autonomy vs heteronomy / autonomous vs. heteronomous

To have autonomy, or to be autonomous, means deciding for yourself, not being under someone else’s control, making up your own rules. It comes from the Greek words ‘auto’ meaning self and ‘nomos’ meaning law. Heteronomy is the opposite of autonomy and means to be controlled by forces outside yourself (the word Greek ‘hetero’ meaning ‘other’ or ‘different’).

The 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously equated autonomy with mastering your own emotions and desires (which he portrayed as wild, heteronomous forces) and following the law of reason, something he believed only white men were capable of. More recent feminist understandings of ‘relational autonomy’ have reframed it as a valuable form of freedom that essentially involves and develops through relations of care and interdependence with others. 

Two or more things may be described as autonomous of each other if they operate independently and do not control each other. The Autonomia (Autonomy) movement in the 1970s in Italy, for instance, emphasised self-organisation by factory workers, school and university students, and the unemployed. They conducted struggles autonomous of the controlling bureaucratic structures of existing political parties, trade unions, and the state. A vivid account of the movement and its eventual crushing by state forces, based on first-hand experience, is presented in the novel The Unseen by Nanni Balestrini.

Affect / affective / affectively

‘Affect’ is another word for emotion or feeling. The affective is a modality of power (i.e. a way that power can exist and be expressed, a set of possibilities for the exercise of power) that operates through an emotive register. The term is used to describe, for example, the way carceral institutions sustain their control or influence of others through creating emotions of subservience to authority, guilt, shame, and feelings of one’s own or others’ blameworthiness.

Binary / non-binary (gender, thinking, logic, people)

To say something is binary is to say it is composed of two mutually exclusive opposites. It can be one thing or the other, never neither and never both. Non-binary perspectives allow for degrees or spectrums of difference, additional axes of difference, and fluidity between positions. A non-binary person is someone who does not identify with either of the binary gender categories ‘man’ or ‘woman’. 

Bourgeois / bourgeoisie

As used in the context of radical social thought, the concept of the bourgeoisie is related to the Marxist idea that society is divided up into competing classes.The bourgeoisie, also known as the capitalist class, is the class that controls the means of production (e.g. factories, machines and the supply of goods), as opposed to the proletariat (workers) and, in some contexts, other classes such as the peasantry and the aristocracy. 

In addition to referring to this class of people, ‘bourgeois’ can be used more widely as a description of ideas and practices. Key to understanding this wider use is the claim that the bourgeoisie control the dominant frameworks of knowledge and understanding (see entries on hegemony and ideology). So references to, for example, the ‘bourgeois notion of democracy’ can be understood as claims that the concept in question (here: ‘democracy’) is being conceived in a way that benefits the ruling class and promotes their continued power.

Carceral (institutions, logic, society, state)

When something is said to be carceral, it means that it is entangled with, or serves to legitimise, systems of imprisonment. Carceral institutions include prisons, border regimes, secret security services, militaries, and the industries that supply and profit from them. The term ‘carceral’ is used to describe these institutions because incarcerating people – restricting their movement and segregating them from the rest of society – is central to their operations. 

The term ‘carceral society’ is closely related with the idea of a disciplinary society. It was popularised by the social theorist Michel Foucault to understand the dominance of carceral institutions in contemporary society and the way carceral logics spread into every aspect of our lives. 

Carceral logics are the ways of thinking and doing things that characterise these sorts of institutions, e.g. constant surveillance, isolating prisoners from each other, treating prisoners as objects to be controlled. Insofar as they operate in a similar manner, institutions such as schools, hospitals, mental asylums and social care systems can also be understood as carceral. As these examples show, it is not always easy to draw a line between the carceral state (i.e. those functions of the state that are carried out through imprisonment) and other purportedly more caring functions of the state. Carceral institutions also need not be state-operated. Factories and other workplaces have notoriously been sites of carceral control.

Cis- (men, women, people)

Cis- can be used as a prefix (as in cis-man or cis-woman), or as an adjective (as in ‘the people in the room were mostly cis’) and was orginally an abriviation for cisgender (or cissexual). It is supposed to indicate that a person is not trans. Precisely how these terms are understood can vary between contexts and is evolving and sometimes contested in the course of ongoing struggles against gender oppression.Often, being cis is explained as identfying as (or with) the gender you were assigned at birth. This definition is helpful in some ways but also limited, as I will explain.

When babies are born, or sometimes before they are born, medical professionals tend to identify them as belonging to one of two categories - male or female - according to their genitals. In a significant number of cases, children's genitals don’t fall neatly into either of these two boxes. These intersex children are often subject to medical interventions including surgery to make them fit into one of these categories, with the category chosen being to some extent dependent on the contingent decisions of doctors and/or parents - practices which have been challenged as harmful by some intersex rights groups. There is a strong social expectation that a child will be brought up and live as a man if they were assigned male at birth and a woman if they were assigned female at birth. This is what it means to be assigned a gender at birth.

Many people's bodies and lives don’t in fact develop in accordance with these social expectations and they might not feel, identify, or live in line with the one of these binary gender categories they were assigned at birth. Being trans, non-binary, gender fluid or gender non-conforming are some terms for ways that people can live differently from or in rebellion against their catagorisation at bith. Being cis is often understood in contrast to this as identifying as/with the catagory you were assigned at birth.

This definition can be helpful insofar as it alerts us to the ways that people who are trans or otherwise non-conforming are subject to significant social sanctions and disadvantages, including but not limited to transphobic violence and discrimination in employment, education and housing. Often they have to struggle to have their gender identity respected. Cis people are advantaged or privileged insofar as being cis does not in itself make you subject to these kinds of experiences and dangers (although a cis woman may be subject to gendered violence as a woman, and a cis man may be subject to other form of oppression, such as racism).

However, just because someone has not ‘come out’ as non-binary, trans or gender non-conforming, or perhaps never wants to identify that way, we cannot assume that they are comfortable with their gender assignment (and all the societal expectations that come with it). Part of the oppressive character of the existing gender system is that it is found constraining by many people, who are forced through social pressure to suppress aspects of themselves that do not fit with gendered norms. The struggles and forms of suffering this involves are not always visible. One limitation of the standard definition of ‘cis’ is that it can obscure them further.

Conspicuous marginalisation

A strategy of gaining support among dominant white and middle-class populations by openly targeting for state punishment and abandonment those that mainstream opinion deems undeserving, such as racially othered migrants.

Colonial boomerang

The process by which methods of social control developed by imperial authorities in their colonies are brought back to their own imperial heartlands/domestic territories. The circulation of personnel and policies carries tools perfected in the colonial laboratory - counter-insurgency, policing and propaganda techniques - back to the empire’s metropolis, where they are deployed against marginalised and outcast populations at home. For more, see Connor Woodman’s Imperial Boomerang series on the Verso Books website.

Coloniality

‘Coloniality’ means, essentially, tied up with and formed through colonial domination. It is associated with the concept of the ‘coloniality of power’, which identifies and describes the living legacy of European colonialism in contemporary social orders and forms of knowledge. This concept was developed within postcolonial and decolonial studies and Latin American subaltern studies, most prominently by Anibal Quijano and subsequently by feminists including Maria Lugones in her account of the Colonial/Modern Gender System.

Counter-subversion / counter-subversion apparatus 

A collection of state institutions and techniques that aim to combat challenges to the prevailing socio-political order. Subversion is usually conceptualised by the state as illegitimate resistance to the dominant political and economic system, resistance that must be monitored, infiltrated and defanged through the methods of counter-subversion. Usually carried out by specialist police units and intelligence agencies against organisers, political groups and unions. For more, see Connor Woodman’s Spycops in Context: Counter-subversion, deep dissent and the logic of political policing.

Counter-normative

See normative / counter-normative.

Critique(s) / to critique

A critique is an analysis of something that reveals its problems or limitations. To critique something means to try to give such an analysis. Its meaning is similar to ‘criticise’ but with some subtle differences. It implies that your criticisms form or arise from a complex and interconnected theoretical understanding of the thing in question, rather than being isolated objections. It is possible to give a critique of something that reveals its limitations without saying that the thing is all bad and should be rejected or opposed in its entirety.

Depoliticise / depoliticisation

These terms are used to criticise presentations of an issue that conceal its political nature and thereby exclude it from public discussion and contestation.

The concept of ‘depoliticisation’ recognises that what counts as ‘political’ is itself a controversial political question and that issues affecting oppressed groups are often excluded from dominant (ideological) understandings of politics, which narrowly focus on what happens in institutions like parliament or during elections. For instance, the feminist slogan ‘The personal is political’ resists the depoliticisation that occurs when key sites of gender oppression (such as access to sexual or reproductive healthcare, or patriarchal norms for intimate and family relationships) are presented as ‘merely personal’ and ‘not political’.

Depoliticising an issue tends to: (a) individualise the problem, presenting it as merely a matter of personal failings or preferences, preventing collective action to change it; (b) naturalise the problem, presenting it as fixed and unchangeable; (c) trivialise the problem, presenting it as insignificant or silly, not worthy of public discussion; and (d) invisibilise the problem, keeping it out of sight and behind closed doors, preventing it from being addressed openly.

Seeing that narrow definitions of the political themselves serve (oppressive) political purposes, many radical critics of the status quo have argued for broader understandings of politics. Koshka Duff brings together some of their insights when she writes: ‘Politics… concerns all forms of social power insofar as they are far-reaching and systemic. It concerns the distribution of benefits and burdens in society, how decisions are made regarding the organization of social life, and who has the power to do what to whom—and it concerns struggle over these things.’ 

Diaspora

A diaspora involves a movement of people away from one original location to become dispersed or scattered around the world. ‘Diaspora’ (or related terms like ‘diasporic populations’) can be used to describe the groups or communities in these ‘new’ geographical locations and their descendents. As an identity, it can express various forms of connection people might have to this (sometimes ancestral) history of movement, which may have been voluntary or forced, sudden or gradual. The concept of diaspora is important, for instance, in Jewish culture. The diaspora relevant in this book is the history of movement away from the continent of Africa. Experiences of colonial enslavement and forced migration to the Americas and the Caribbean are of great significance to, but by no means exhaustive of, the living history of African diasporas.

Direct action

‘Direct action’ is a broad term for political acts that impact ‘directly’ on situations. It can be contrasted with a politics of representation, where people attempt to achieve some goal by appealing to institutionally powerful third parties (e.g. by voting in an election). 

Taking direct action means actively and immediately transforming a given situation. This can involve stopping something from happening - e.g. blockading an arms factory - or implementing chosen solutions to social problems without waiting for authorisation or help ‘from above’ - e.g. setting up a free food programme. It can be violent or nonviolent, legal or illegal. 

Direct action tactics can be used as part of wider campaigns that involve representational elements. For instance, shutting down an arms factory might be part of a campaign that also uses media stunts, marches, and parliamentary lobbying.

The term is sometimes used synonymously with ‘civil disobedience’, but there are actually important differences between the two. Civil disobedience, on standard liberal understandings of the practice, is primarily expressive or communicative in nature; it involves the breaking of laws in order to communicate a grievance and place pressure on powerful actors. While direct action can therefore be part of a campaign of civil disobedience, civil disobedience does not necessarily amount to direct action (if the breaking of laws does not directly transform a situation, but simply registers dissent). 

Direct action is widely used by anarchists, precisely because it refuses the legitimacy of electoral and representative politics.

Disciplinary (power, society, violence)

The idea of disciplinary power - what we might call ‘subjection through surveillance’ - was developed by social theorist Michel Foucault. In his 1975 work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault identified a form of power which he believed was distinctive of contemporary society, namely, power that produces compliant or ‘docile’ subjects through subjecting them to constant surveillance. Knowing that we might be being watched at any time, we learn to police ourselves, to pre-emptively comply to avoid punishment.

Foucault explains this form of power through the image of the ‘Panopticon’: a design for a prison conceived by late 18th/early 19th century liberal philosopher Jeremy Bentham. According to Bentham’s design, prisoners would be kept in cells around the periphery of a circular building, constantly visible from a central guard tower. The prisoners would not be able to see or communicate with each other, nor would they be able to see into the guard tower so they could not know at any given time whether they were being watched. Under these conditions, Foucault notes, obedience would become habitual and perhaps even unconscious. The separation of the prisoners from each other would make solidarity and rebellion extremely difficult. Furthermore, power in this disciplinary institution is ‘impersonal’ in that it does not depend on the guard having any special status. Rather, it is the way the system is set up that works to produce obedience, and the guard’s personality is not important. 

While Bentham was enthusiastic about the possibilities for disciplining the working class represented by his Panopticon, Foucault developed the notion of disciplinary power in order to criticise contemporary society. He argued that we can see this form of power at work in many institutions and areas of life, including workplaces, schools and hospitals as well as prisons. That is what is meant by a ‘disciplinary society’. A striking example of this today might be the conditions in Amazon distribution warehouses where workers are monitored to the point of having their toilet breaks timed by the second, with sanctions for any drop in productivity. 

Discourse(s)

Fundamentally, ‘discourse’ means discussion or conversation. The difference is that when people talk about ‘discourse’ or they are talking about not just one particular conversation but the way conversations in general are conducted in a given time and place, or perhaps within a certain discipline or area of life, e.g. public discourse or various scientific discourses. Books, TV, films, music, social media, news reporting, school textbooks, government documents, and the ways we chat with our friends can all be understood as parts of, or contributing to, discourse. Not everyone gets to participate in mainstream discourses on equal terms because not everyone has the money to buy advertising space/time or the connections to get into journalism. 

The concept of discourse brings out the fact that it is only against a backdrop of common ways of talking about things that any particular piece of language makes sense. Analysing discourses means taking apart the assumptions (e.g. ‘the police are there to keep us safe’), tropes (e.g. the ‘black mugger’, the ‘bad apple’ police officer), and ways of framing and dividing up the world (e.g. ‘criminals’ vs. ‘law-abiding citizens’) that are dominant or widespread in a particular context. 

As these examples show, social power and oppression are often reflected and played out in discourses. Discourses can be ideological in the sense of reinforcing or legitimising oppression, and therefore often have very material consequences, such as people being incarcerated on the basis of racist tropes. On the other hand, the fact that we are always participating in discourses (and in a sense cannot escape them) means that reshaping and changing them can be a political project.

Expropriate / expropriated / expropriation

To expropriate means to take something away from someone, to stop it from being theirs. The expropriation of land and resources from indigenous people, often by violent means, is definitive of colonialism. The term can also be used to describe forms of resistance that collectively take back wealth that has been unjustly extracted from an oppressed community or class. For instance, during an uprising, taking things without paying for them from big corporations like Walmart or Target is sometimes called ‘expropriating the expropriators’.

Exceptional powers

See state of exception / exceptional powers.

Extraordinary rendition

A euphemism for state kidnapping. Developed during the ‘War on Terror’ in the 2000s, Western countries worked with dictatorships in the Global South to kidnap ‘terrorist suspects’ and take them to so-called ‘black sites’ around the world -  torture camps usually run by the CIA. For more, see Jeremy Scahill’s documentary, Dirty Wars.

Formal vs. substantive / material (power, equality, conditions) 

‘Formal’ means ‘official’ and can refer to laws or rules that are codified by institutions like the state, companies, universities, etc. ‘Substantive’ refers to how things actually are on the ground, how social relations really operate in practice and the material conditions that enable (or disable) activity. The contrast between de jure (in law) and de facto (in fact) is sometimes used to mean something similar.

So for example, we might say that people have the formal right or freedom to protest as enshrined in various laws. However, if those people do not have the money to afford to pay to travel to the location police have agreed that protest can happen then these substantive material conditions will not allow for their participation.

The distinction can also be applied to questions of equality. We might say that in the marketplace of labour there is formal equality between the worker selling their labour power and the employer seeking to employ them, codified in a legal system that presents them as equals. However, because of actual differences in their material resources and bargaining positions, the boss will tend to have substantive power over the worker. 

Function creep

See mission creep / function creep.

Globalisation

Refers to processes of intensified interaction and integration between people, communities and organisations at a global level. Such connections have advanced concurrently with modern developments in transportation and communication technology. 

While the concept is a relatively new one, and easily applied to technologies developed during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, global interconnections have a much longer history, and were integral to the formation of the capitalist and colonial world order. For instance, the Atlantic Slave Trade, through which manufactured goods, plantation crops such as sugar and cotton, and enslaved people were transported between three continents, can be understood as a process of globalisation.

The term ‘globalisation’ is often used as a noun to describe the shifts in global connections that took place in the second half of the 20th century, in which rapid expansions of capitalist markets occurred alongside the spread of communications technologies including the internet. It is often used in this manner by liberals, many of whom support these developments as promoting the spread of liberal ideas, economics and systems of government. However such uses are often criticised for being too abstract or depoliticised, presenting what are frequently violent and disharmonious transformations as part of a global process of unification, and thereby framing opposition to these changes as impediments to human progress. Concepts such as imperialism, neoliberalism and intercommunalism are perhaps better placed to account for the forms of domination woven into contemporary processes of global interconnection.

Global South vs. Global North

A broad distinction between the rich nations of (primarily) Europe and North America, on the one hand (the Global North), and their former colonies, the poor nations in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Oceania, on the other (the Global South). 

The terms do not correspond to a precise North/South geographical distinction - Australia and New Zealand, for example, are part of the Global North although they are in the Southern Hemisphere. Rather, they are designed to indicate that the Global North is rich because of its imperial exploitation of the Global South, which is poor as a result of its having been colonised. ‘Global South’ is now used in place of the older ‘Third World’. 

Unlike the terms ‘developed’ and ‘developing countries’ common in liberal discourse, the Global North/Global South distinction does not position the Global North as more advanced along a path of human progress.  

Hard picket / picket line

A picket line is a group of striking workers (employees refusing to work until some demand of theirs is met) who congregate at the entrance to their workplace during a strike. A hard picket will attempt to physically prevent anyone from entering the workplace, disrupting its normal functioning and magnifying the workers’ power to win their demands against their employers.

Hegemony / hegemonic

To be hegemonic, or to achieve hegemony, means to be dominant in an overarching way, defining the atmosphere of a particular time and place. The term ‘hegemony’ is often used to describe dominant ideological frameworks of knowledge and understanding that work to conceal power while upholding existing power structures and hierarchies. 

When a way of thinking is hegemonic it can often be difficult to notice it precisely because it is everywhere, just as we don’t tend to notice the air we are breathing. Best known in its articulation by Antonio Gramsci, hegemony is continually reinforced through class dominance in media, education and political institutions as well as through the coercive force targeted at those who challenge it (e.g. by the police).

One can also speak of counter-hegemony as a revolutionary project that aims to transform society by linking up and building up the power of different constituencies of the exploited and oppressed, and engaging in multiple struggles for transformation within existing institutions and against them.

Heterogeneous

A word for various or diverse, coming from Greek ‘heteros‘ (other, different) and ‘genos’ (kind). 

Heteronomy / heteronomous

See autonomy vs heteronomy / autonomous vs. heteronomous.

Heteronormative / heterosexist / hetero-patriarchy

‘Heteronormativity’ describes the social attitudes, practices and institutions that set up hetersexuality as the norm and mark other forms of sexual experience and desire as deviant, immoral or in some way lesser, or simply erase them from view. An example of a heteronormative assumption would be asking a teenage girl ‘do you have a boyfriend yet?’.  

The terms ‘heterosexist’ and ‘hetero-patriarchy’ capture the close connections between heteronormativity and gender oppression. Dominant ideals of masculinity and femininity are closely tied to the performance of heterosexuality. The severity of social (and in some times and places, legal) penalties for non-conformity to heteronormative standards have led some, such as feminist writer Adrienne Rich, to coin the term ‘compulsory heterosexuality’.

Hierarchy / hierarchies / hierarchical

A hierarchy is any form of social organisation in which people/groups are ordered or ranked with some having superior status and wielding power over others. It contains the word-forming element ‘-archy’ which means ‘rule’, deriving from the Greek ‘arkhos’ meaning ‘leader, chief, ruler’.

Ideology / ideologies / ideological

In several critical traditions, including Marxism, feminism and critical race theory, the term ‘ideology’ refers to (a) false, misleading and distorted beliefs and ways of thinking that (b) function to prop up an oppressive status quo by (c) making it appear natural, just, legitimate, or unchangeable. 

While the word ‘ideology’ is often used in ordinary language simply to refer to any set of political beliefs, or sometimes as an insult for views the speaker finds dogmatic or unappealing, it is the more specific technical meaning given here that is relevant to its use in this book. A helpful explanation of this concept and its origins is given in Chapter 3, ‘Outposts in your head: ideology, patriarchy, and critique’, of Lorna Feminism’s Introduction to Feminism. To work out whether a belief is ideological in this sense we have to ask: what effects does it have for people to believe it? Who benefits from people believing it? To give an example, in late medieval Europe the belief that the monarch was appointed by God served to uphold the hierarchical social order of the time. It encouraged people to accept the decrees of those at the top as divinely ordained and therefore legitimate.

We can observe that ideological views are often widespread or mainstream (hegemonic) in any given time or place. This is in part because those with more wealth and power are able to control what is printed or broadcast in the media, what is put onto school curricula, what research gets funding, who gets selected for high-profile roles, and so on.

Intercommunalism

Intercommunalism is a concept developed by Black Panther Party leader Huey P. Newton in the 1970s to describe the ways global power relations had changed in the middle of the twentieth century. As advancing technology drew societies around the world closer together (e.g. by enabling travel and communications) and capitalist markets became ever more global with the rise of multinational corporations, financial institutions and forces like NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), the importance of individual nation states in governing their respective territories and populations receded. The world was increasingly structured by capitalist imperialism with the US empire at its core. At the same time, within a given state, different communities could experience wholly different conditions.

Rather than an inter-national world of separate nation states, then, Newton saw a series of communities linked by relations of production and force, even as they were divided against one another: an intercommunal world.

This analysis had consequences for resistance and revolution. It meant, according to Newton, that nation states were no longer meaningful ground for politics, and national liberation was no longer a useful revolutionary aspiration. Instead, revolutionary forces should build solidarity between the communities of the world, recognising that empire divides these communities in order to better dominate them. We should, he argued, respond to the reactionary intercommunalism of capitalist imperialism by developing revolutionary intercommunalism.

Intersectional (injustices, oppression, analysis, failures) / intersectionality

Intersectionality is a concept developed by critical race theory scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to make sense of the specific forms of racism and sexism faced by Black women. Crenshaw argued that Black women face a double exclusion, suffering from both racism and sexism, and are often marginalised by anti-racist movements privileging the experience of Black men, and feminist movements prioritising white women. Black women are thus rendered invisible even in anti-discrimination and liberation politics.

Although Crenshaw is credited with popularising the term ‘intersectionality’, she has been very clear that she was building on existing strands of Black feminist thought, citing influences including Angela Davis (see Women, Race and Class) and the Combahee River Collective. 

These thinkers argue that we cannot make sense of the experiences of Black women by considering Blackness and womanhood separately; they must be understood as always interrelated, or intersectional, social identities. For example, ‘beauty’ standards that cast white womanhood as normative, or medical practices of forced sterilisation that have often been directed at black and indigenous women, are gendered and racialised at the same time.

While Crenshaw’s formulation focuses on Black women, the concept has subsequently been broadened to recognise other groups who exist at the intersections of several forms (often called ‘axes’) of oppression - e.g. working class queer people, or indigenous disabled people - whose experiences and struggles can be invisibilised by dominant framings of identity and oppression. 

An intersectional analysis is therefore one that pays attention to multiple forms of oppression simultaneously, not just by listing them but looking at the complex ways they are intertwined in people’s experiences.

Intersubjective / intersubjectivity

See subject / subjectivity / subjectivisation / intersubjective / intersubjectivity.

Imperial / imperialist / imperialism

The construction of an empire, i.e. the political, economic and social domination of one country or people by a foreign state. Most famously associated with the European empires that ruled vast swathes of the planet from the late 15th to the 20th century through slavery, resource plunder and genocide. Following decolonisation in the mid 20th century, many former empires turned to ‘neo-imperialism’ or ‘neo-colonialism’, dominating their former colonies culturally and economically without formal colonial status.

Kettles / kettling

A police tactic used to control demonstrations. Protesters are surrounded by police, forced into a small space, and prevented from leaving the encirclement without giving their details to the authorities. Used prominently during the 2010 student demonstrations against tuition fee rises in London, the idea is that the space becomes hot and unpleasant, like water in a kettle. For more, see Netpol’s guide to kettles.

Legitimate / legitimacy / legitimise

Having legitimacy, or being legitimate, means having appropriate justification for a political action, institution, state of affairs, or form of power. For example, it might be asked, ‘Is this type of protest legitimate?’ 

The term comes from Latin legitimus meaning ‘lawful’. However, it now has a broader moral and political meaning which allows us to ask, for instance, ‘Are existing states legitimate?’ or ‘Are these laws legitimate?’ This does not have to mean simply ‘Are they lawful?’ but ‘Are they just, right, or appropriately justified?’ in some deeper sense that goes beyond positive law. It is an open question whether the concept of legitimacy brings with it some notion of an ideal of lawfulness, even if it does not endorse any actually existing laws.

A ‘legitimate’ child is the product of the kind of normative sexual relationships that are sanctioned and enforced by law (e.g. marriage or similar). Establishing legitimacy for the purposes of inheritance has been very important for the transmission of private property between generations and the preservation of the capitalist class system. Children deemed illegitimate and women deemed guilty of having illegitimate children or relationships have been subject to harsh penalties, from social stigma to incarceration.

To legitimise or legitimate a system, institution, or state of affairs means to make it appear legitimate, just, and right (even if it is not).

Liberal / liberalism

Liberalism is a political philosophy and a set of political institutions and norms that arose historically around the end of the seventeenth century. It subsequently became dominant, in the West initially and then globally after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its watchwords include: liberty, individual rights, equality of opportunity, tolerance, the rule of law, and checks and balances in government. While liberalism was so hegemonic in the 1990s and early 2000s that many believed there was no (desirable) alternative, the global financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath have led many to talk of a ‘crisis of liberalism’. 

Historian Domenico Losurdo has described liberalism as a ‘tangle of emancipation and dis-emancipation’, pointing to the ways that liberalism has always pulled in (at least apparently) contradictory directions: ideals of individual liberty and privacy alongside the rise of mass incarceration and the modern surveillance state; inalienable rights proclaimed at the same time as plantation economies based on chattel slave labour. It can therefore be helpful to distinguish between the (sometimes quite abstract) values and theories espoused by liberal political philosophers, on the one hand, and the actual practices and conditions of what we might call ‘real existing liberalism’, on the other. Critics have noted a liberal ‘tactic of preserving noble principles by excluding certain ‘problematic’ people from the relevant category’, as philosopher Lorna Finlayson puts it: ‘All men are created equal - but women are not men. All humans must be treated with dignity - but those natives are not fully human. Prisoners of war have certain rights - but these people are terrorists.’ (See her book The Political Is Political: Conformity and the Illusion of Dissent in Contemporary Political Philosophy.)

However, these contradictions are not always best understood simply as cases of not practising what you preach. Often they reflect the ways that values like freedom and equality are formulated within a liberal worldview. While the name ‘liberalism’ implies a philosophy and mode of government that is distinguished by the high value it places on freedom, there are other political philosophies that pay just as much, if not greater, attention to the value of liberty. Anarchism is an obvious example. Karl Marx, too, is often read as a theorist of freedom and critic of the unfreedom produced by capitalism. So, rather than simply stating that liberals care about liberty, we need to investigate further what is specific about liberal conceptions of it. 

One central pillar of liberal understandings of liberty is the tendency to understand freedom as fundamentally connected with the enforcement of a regime of private property. Policing that upholds the existing distribution of resources (for instance, by preventing someone from riding a train when they can’t afford a ticket) is not seen as interfering with freedom but as protecting it. This is because, in contrast with anarchism and Marxism, liberalism tends to take for granted if not actively embrace capitalism as the best mode of organising production and distribution in society. This helps explain why capitalist economic crises (such as post-2008) can be so destabilising of liberal assumptions and institutions. 

Historically, liberalism developed concurrently with capitalism; indeed, it is sometimes described (by its critics) as a bourgeois or capitalist ideology, so closely have the two been intertwined. The seventeenth century philosopher John Locke, widely regarded as a ‘father of liberalism’, argued that private ownership and the exploitation of land for profit were natural and Godly pursuits, and insisted on the need for a state to enforce this order of property.

This points to another defining feature of liberalism: in contrast with anarchist, left-libertarian and abolitionist approaches, liberalism supports or takes for granted the existence of state power. Many liberal political philosophers have developed ‘social contract’ theories spelling out the conditions under which they believe obedience to the state is morally obligatory. Liberals generally support a right to protest as long as that protest takes law-abiding forms or fits a narrow model of civil disobedience, and will tend to reject more radical forms of direct action. 

Liberals promote an image of politics as a sphere of reasonable debate and discussion, within which a plurality of opinions are tolerated. However, this ‘marketplace of ideas’, like markets generally, tends to be skewed in favour of those with greater resources (the money to pay for advertising or donate to a political party, the family connections to get into journalism, etc.). As systematically oppressed groups tend to lack these resources, they often have to resort to more disruptive and less ‘respectable’ ways of getting their voices heard (damaging property, using public space in unsanctioned ways, confronting police, shutting down business as usual) - which liberals tend to regard as ‘unreasonable’ or beyond the ‘limits of toleration’, and which states tend to criminalise. Consequently, it is hard to challenge in any fundamental way the existing apportionment of wealth and power in society from within a liberal framework.

In theory, liberalism does support revolutionary action against tyrannical governments. In practice this has been largely restricted to revolutionary movements led by and promoting the interests of a white property-owning class, such as the American Revolution and the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. Critics have also noted a liberal tendency to celebrate (sanitised versions of) militant actions and movements - such as the suffragettes or the Stonewall riots - only once they are safely in the past, while condemning the ‘criminality’, ‘disorder’ and ‘violence’ of contemporary struggles. 

While almost all liberals share the belief that a core function of the state is to enforce private property through policing, there are many shades of liberal opinion regarding what the state should do beyond this. Liberals support varying levels of redistribution and provision of public services through taxation, on a spectrum ranging from ‘social democratic’ positions on the left to neo-liberal positions on the right.

The traditional liberal distinction between a ‘public’ sphere of politics and a ‘private’ sphere of intimate relationships, religious observance, and diverse cultural norms and practices, has been criticised by feminists (including liberal feminists) for depoliticising many significant forms of gender oppression, such as unequal divisions of household labour. There are long-running debates within liberalism about whether state action to address these forms of oppression constitutes a problematic paternalism. Advocates of change point out that liberal states have in fact always played a role in shaping the so-called ‘private’ sphere, for instance by enforcing certain norms of family life through the legal institution of marriage; they have pointed out a liberal tendency only to notice ‘state intervention’ when it is challenging rather than maintaining the status quo. 

Liberalism is often thought of as closely connected with some ideal of democratic rule, with states such as the UK describing themselves as ‘liberal democracies’. Historically, however, liberalism both in theory and practice has had an uneasy relationship with democratic ideals. This is because giving significant decision-making power to the majority threatens to destabilise a capitalist system under which the majority are significantly worse off than an economic elite. Early liberal and US Founding Father James Madison famously argued that government ought to ‘protect the minority of the opulent against the majority’. Liberals have therefore tended to favour institutions such as parliaments that can represent people without involving them directly, while rejecting more radical, direct, or substantive forms of democracy.

This support for a parliamentary system of government is one way liberalism can be distinguished from more right-wing positions, such as fascism, that favour giving absolute power to a head of state as in a dictatorship or absolutist monarchy. Many liberals at least nowadays will also talk about the equality of persons regardless of sex, race, etc., and the rights of ‘the individual’ against ‘the collective’.

In practice, things have again been more complex. ‘Liberal’ states such as Britain have often displayed openly authoritarian tendencies in ruling their colonies, with nineteenth century liberal philosopher and colonial administrator John Stuart Mill arguing that ‘despotism is a legitimate mode of government’ for ‘races in their nonage [childlike condition]’ (see his famous essay On Liberty). Locke was also involved in the development and administration of slavery in the colony of South Carolina. Throughout its history, liberalism has had close connections with empire and imperialism, often justifying colonial projects on the grounds of ‘civilizing’ native peoples by bringing them liberal values.

These are some of the reasons why feminist, decolonial and left-wing critics of liberalism have argued that the category of ‘the individual’ to whom liberal rights and freedoms are granted is not genuinely universal (i.e. applying to everyone) but assumes a white, able-bodied, property-owning man. In response to these critiques, some contemporary liberals such as philosopher Martha Nussbaum have made serious efforts to formulate a more inclusive liberalism. However, while they continue to support capitalism - a system which seems to produce and require vast material inequalities, expanding carceral institutions, and the unfreedom that comes with poverty for a global proletarian majority (see racial capitalism / gendered capitalism) - it is difficult to see how the freedom and equality that liberalism offers can be more than merely formal.

Lumpenproletarian / Lumpenproletariat

These are terms used primarily by Marxists to describe the group or stratum (layer) of people within a capitalist system who tend to be criminalised, houseless or itinerant, engaged in sex work or other informal economies. These people are proletarian (i.e. workers) in the sense that they don’t own land or means of production, so are not capitalists or rentiers, but are not regular waged workers as they are excluded from the formal, ‘legitimate’ economy. The term comes from the German word ‘Lumpen’ meaning rags or ragged.

‘Lumpenproletariat’ is the collective word for this whole class of people. ‘Lumpenproletarian(s)’ can be used as a noun to describe members of this class, or as an adjective, when it is often shortened to ‘lumpen’ (e.g. ‘lumpen culture’).

These have all traditionally been derogatory terms, with Marxists tending to assume that the so-called ‘Lumpenproletariat’ is a politically unreliable or even reactionary force - a kind of ‘rent-a-mob’, or mindless, anti-social underclass. However, this disparaging assumption has been strongly challenged by anti-racist and anti-colonial Marxists such as Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis. Attending to the roles of criminalisation, racialised exclusion, and bourgeois norms of ‘respectability’ in maintaining the capitalist system, these thinkers draw attention to the revolutionary potential of groups beyond and on the margins of the industrial proletariat. Rather than colluding with capitalism’s dehumanisation of the most marginalised, they argue, we must recognise and support the existing political consciousness and resistance of those at the sharp end of policing and the global order of property that policing enforces.

Sex workers unionising and campaigning for decriminalisation, slum-dwellers’ movements in the Global South, benefits claimants’ organising, anti-police riots and prison uprisings, as well as more day-to-day forms of resistance and mutual aid, such as pooling resources to visit loved-ones in prison, are examples of (so-called) ‘lumpen’ political agency. 

Mad

In Western societies over the past few hundred years, the term ‘mad’ has often been applied to people who don’t fit ‘normal’ standards of appearance and behaviour. In some other historical and cultural contexts, ‘madness’ has been evaluated positively as a sacred, artistic or religious phenomenon. 

On the basis of psychiatric diagnoses, many people have been subject to incarceration and forcible medication, Electro-Convulsive Therapy or, historically, lobotomy. The flip side of these coercive interventions has often been state abandonment when people suffering mental health crises are not listened to and denied support and healthcare. The current integration of policing and mental health services, which is escalating under neo-liberal austerity, often involves both these forms of harm. Campaigns such as stopSIM are resisting the criminalisation of mental illness.

Like ‘queer’ and ‘slut’, the term ‘mad’ has historically been derogatory and used as a slur but a ‘mad’ identity has also been reclaimed as a common experience of oppression to organise around. Mad Pride, for instance, is a movement led by users of mental health services which challenges the assumption that being ‘sane’ and ‘well-adjusted’ is better than being ‘mad’ and advocates for stigma-free mental health care.

An insight of this movement is that ‘madness’ and ‘sanity’ are political categories. Being recognised as ‘sane’ and ‘reasonable’ is often a product of social power and privilege. For instance, non-conformity to dominant norms of gender and sexuality has often been pathologised (i.e. treated as an individual medical problem) as ‘madness’. Women have been diagnosed as ‘hysterical’ for wanting to write books or not displaying the expected ‘maternal instincts’. Psychiatric labels can also be racialised, with schizophrenia being a label that has been disproportionately applied to black people, often for resisting white supremacist norms and institutions, as Jonathan Metzl shows in The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease.

At the same time, many serious mental health problems are products of a violent and oppressive social order in which trauma, anxiety, depression and alienation are systemic issues.

Material (power, equality, conditions)

See formal vs. substantive / material (power, equality, conditions) 

Militarism / militarise / militarised / militarisation

‘Militarism’ refers to the processes through which societies prepare for and carry out organised political violence. While often used to refer specifically to ideologies that celebrate a strong military force, it can be more broadly understood as the constellation of values, practices and institutions through which war, military and police action, and violent security regimes are reproduced, legitimised, and normalised.

Sometimes militarism is a distinctly visible phenomenon. For example, public rituals of war commemoration are designed to reinforce public support for ‘the troops’. Often, though, it is more banal. Militarism can be reproduced on a day-to-day basis through the persistence and political power of the arms trade, through social attitudes that venerate aggressive masculinities, and through racist or Orientalist ideas about dangerous others. 

The term ‘militarisation’ is often used to talk about how institutions are becoming more similar to and entangled with the military - for example, when police departments acquire military-grade weaponry such as grenades and armoured vehicles, or when universities pour funding into ‘counter-terrorism’ research and invest in arms companies. 

However, this concept is contested. Critics point out that it can be misleading insofar as it implies that there was ever a simple separation between policing (or other state functions) and military power, a view refuted by phenomena like the colonial boomerang effect. Alison Howell, for example, argues that the notion of militarisation ‘falsely presumes a peaceful liberal order that is encroached on by military values or institutions’ instead of recognising that ‘institutions [like the police and universities] have always already been implicated in martial politics – that is, [in] producing White social and economic order through war-like relations with Indigenous, racialized, disabled, poor and other communities’.

Mission creep / function creep

The process by which powers and technologies used by the state for one purpose slowly begin to be used for an ever-expanding range of reasons. Once institutionalised (i.e. ingrained in the operations of an institution such as the police or military), methods originally justified for use in one type of ‘extreme’ scenario tend to become normalised and used as standard. For example, powers of electronic surveillance granted to intelligence agencies for limited ‘counter-terrorism’ purposes eventually came to be used against entire Muslim populations, progressive movements, and other citizens.

Monopoly on (legitimate) violence

To monopolise something means to keep it all for yourself, like in the game Monopoly where you aim to buy up all the property. 

The early 20th century German social theorist Max Weber famously defined the state as an entity with a monopoly on legitimate violence within a given territory. This means that the state’s agents – including police officers, soldiers, and border guards – are legally authorised to use violence to achieve their aims while it is illegal for ordinary citizens (or non-citizens) to do likewise.

To maintain control, Weber argued, the state must prevent any significant levels of violence being committed by non-state agents. However, as many pieces in this volume show, the actual situation is more complex. Many forms of ‘unofficial’ violence against oppressed groups - such as domestic violence, sexual violence, and racist attacks and lynchings - while often technically illegal (although not always: marital rape was not defined as a crime in Britain until the 1990s) have been systematically tolerated in practice, socially legitimised, and even relied upon by the state to keep people ‘in their place’ within the existing hierarchical social order.

Neo-colonial

Denotes the continuation of imperial domination of Global South by Global North after the end of formal colonialism. In the mid-20th century, the European empires formally lowered their flags in the countries of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Pacific. Cultural, economic and military domination, however, have continued until the present day, in the form of military bases, punitive debt regimes, secret state operations and more. The term was popularised by the first president of independent Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, in his book, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism.

Neoliberalism

Names the global economic and political paradigm that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s and persists to this day. Neoliberalism emphasises reductions in government spending on social welfare, the privatization of public services, and the deregulation of labour standards, environmental standards and financial markets. Originally associated with the policies of Augusto Pinochet, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and economists like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, it developed as a response to the perceived shortcomings of post-WW2 Keynesian economics, and has been marked by the aggressive promotion of capitalist markets into many aspects of life, such as education and healthcare.

At the international level, neoliberalism has been promoted by global financial organisations (GFOs) including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. These institutions have pushed the Global South to privatize their economies, impose economic austerity, lower labour and environmental standards, and open markets to foreign corporations. 

By making essential loans or aid money conditional on adherence to neoliberal ‘structural adjustment’, the GFOs (backed by the US and Western European states) have been able to force governments to push through deeply unpopular reforms, frequently with disastrous results. Proponents claim that neoliberal policies lead to higher economic growth and market efficiencies. However, the neoliberal era has been characterised by stagnating wages, increased labour precarity, ecological crisis, widening inequality, and both local and global cycles of economic collapse. 

Proponents claim that neoliberalism promotes freedom by placing limits on the power of the state and allowing for free movement around the globe. In reality, the neoliberal era has been marked by an intensification of repressive state power, used to pacify communities and sectors who resist neoliberal reforms, and by borders that provide easy movement for business and the wealthy while severely limiting the movement of labour.

Naturalise / naturalised

To naturalise something is to make it appear natural. There is a widespread assumption that things which are natural are (or tend to be) good, or at least that they are inevitable and unchangeable. Therefore, to present a particular social arrangement, practice or institution as natural is a way of supporting or reinforcing it. It encourages people to take the way things currently are as simply given, rather than investigating how they developed historically, or trying to change them.

As well as pointing out that many naturalised features of current society (such as police and prisons) are products of historically specific circumstances and processes, the understanding of nature as (automatically) good and/or fixed and unchangeable has been criticised as ideological by many feminists and de-colonial thinkers. See, for example, Linda Birke’s Feminism and the Biological Body.

Normative / counter-normative

Normativity relates to evaluative standards such as good/ bad, proper/improper, wise/idiotic etc. It can be helpful to contrast it with an apparently neutral description. For example, noting that a clothing shop is 100 years old might be thought to be merely descriptive; in contrast, claiming that the shop sells classy attire looks like a normative claim. It is normative because it involves evaluation: we are saying the shop is a better shop than others. 

However, the distinction is not clear-cut and sometimes things may appear to be merely descriptive but in fact be (implicitly) normative. Saying that someone is a criminal, for example, might be thought to just describe the fact that they have broken the law. However, because the label ‘criminal’ carries normative assumptions in dominant discourse, it can be used to imply accusations of bad moral character or association with marginalised and maligned social identities.

Normative theory studies the reasoning behind normative evaluations. It looks at concepts that are used to justify these evaluations such as rights, freedoms, welfare, order etc. Normative theory seeks not to just give a (descriptive) account of the evaluations people do make but instead show how things should rightly be understood. However, it is questionable to what extent we can formulate and agree on normative theories and concepts in abstraction from thinking about actual systems, institutions and struggles. For more on this debate, check out this Philosophy Bites interview with Raymond Geuss.

‘Normative’ can also be used in a different sense - as a stand-alone word or a word part - to describe social practices or arrangements that have a high status. For example, ‘the normative family’ refers to the kind of family that is set up as the ideal to which all people should aspire, although it may not be statistically the most common; heteronormative attitudes and institutions give higher status to heterosexual people, relationships, and desires while devaluing others; mononormative culture, sometimes known as ‘compulsory monogamy’, privileges and values monogamy over non-monogamous relationship styles such as open relationships, polyamory, or relationship anarchy.

Counter-normative practices resist or subvert dominant ideals and ways of doing things.

Operationalisation

The process of putting something into operation, or into practice on the ground. The term has military overtones, implying a strategic deployment of forces.

Orientalism / orientalisation / orientalise / orientalised

In its classical form, ‘orientalism’ (sometimes capitalised as ‘Orientalism’) referred to the study of cultural artifacts - art, architecture, literature - depicting ‘oriental’ or Eastern cultures (understood in contrast with the ‘occidental’ West). Contemporary uses emerge from Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism. This work drew together and developed existing Arabic-language critiques of the imperial context and implications of Western cultural representations of the Orient. Said argued that Western depictions of ‘the East’ have tended to represent a complex and shifting set of cultures as homogenous, static, and - crucially - as undeveloped, uncivilized, and irrational. While ‘the East’ might be shown as enticing and even an object of desire, it is also framed in a manner that represents it as both inferior and dangerous.

Through such representations, ‘the West’ is implied to be the opposite of ‘the East’: advanced, civilized, and rational. Said shows how the self-image of the West is therefore contingent on ‘orientalised’ images of the Other. For Said, orientalism is integral to the ideological framework that upholds Western imperialism; it is a way of knowing the Other that demonstrates the natural inferiority of the East, and therefore the necessity of Western dominance. It reassures the West of the rightfulness of its project.

Contemporary usages have extended this analysis into many other spheres, recognising that sweeping orientalist depictions have been integral to contemporary forms of imperialism. Notably, cultural representations of Islam as homogenous, irrational, uncivilized, anti-modern and dangerous, across a wide variety of media including film, television and video games, have been significant factors in making possible the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and in legitimating the repression of Muslims across much of the Western world as part of the ‘War on Terror’.

Othering / othered / other / otherness

A social process of demarcation and exclusion that works to differentiate ‘othered’ groups by presenting them as intrinsically different and alien. Othering often involves presenting the target group as dangerous, or as fascinatingly ‘exotic’ but ultimately incomprehensible. A common strategy of white supremacist society is to prevent empathy with the targets of racist violence through racial othering. 

The word ‘Other’ is sometimes capitalised to indicate this theoretical use, but not always.

Outsourced / outsourcing

Outsourcing is when an institution such as a university or hospital hires a private company (sometimes known as a ‘contractor’) to provide a service such as cleaning, catering, or - as is increasingly the case in UK universities - hourly-paid teaching. 

Outsourced workers are not employed directly by the institution, but by the contractor. This tends to significantly worsen employment conditions because the contractor is not legally bound to respect the same level of workers’ rights as public institutions are. Outsourcing therefore creates a ‘two tier’ workforce where directly employed (or ‘in house’) workers are generally treated significantly better than their outsourced co-workers. Precarious zero-hour and temporary contracts, and lack of basic employment benefits such as sick pay, are widespread features of outsourced labour. The practice also allows institutions to evade accountability for how its cleaners, caterers, or teaching staff are treated, since they are not officially the employer. 

In the UK context, outsourcing is often identified as part of a neoliberal drive to privatise public institutions, sometimes by less visible and therefore less easily contested means. However, many outsourced workers have fought back and organised successful campaigns to improve their wages and conditions. An example is the cleaners’ struggle at the London School of Economics (LSE), where workers won their demand of being brought in house.

Understood more globally, outsourcing can involve sending jobs overseas, particularly to countries in the Global South where workers’ rights and labour standards may be lower. For example, academic publishers based in the UK often outsource work such as copy-editing and typesetting to companies based in India, who can employ workers on lower wages.

Pacify / pacification

The Oxford English Dictionary states that to pacify is ‘to reduce to peaceful submission’. The term ‘pacification’ is nowadays often rejected by political actors in favour of more neutral-sounding phrases including ‘peacekeeping’ and ‘peacemaking’. Nevertheless, pacification is a powerful concept for making sense of the ways in which colonial and capitalist forms of rule have not only progressed through making war, but also by imposing particular kinds of peace. 

The pacification of communities aims not only at crushing hostile forces but also at producing a new kind of social order. Pacification is not only carried out by military forces; it involves winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of target populations, dispersing new ideologies through civil society, and reshaping cultural, economic and political landscapes. Via rhetorical and political frameworks of peace and security, pacified communities are (re)incorporated into global markets, usually in a subordinated role and always in a manner that restricts the scope for challenges to the prevailing order. The result is often a version of ‘peace’ and ‘security’ that serves the interests of some while inflicting violence and insecurity on many others.

Paternalist / paternalistic

The roots of this word are in ‘paternal’ meaning ‘fatherly’ and so relating to the way in which a father may have responsibility for and control over his children. In political discourse, it is used largely as a negative term to highlight the ways in which the agency of adults can be denied or undermined by institutions like the state, or other powerful agents, claiming to act in their best interests or know what’s best for them, in doing so treating them like children. 

Uses of ‘paternalist’ need not suppose that the authority in question actually has (what they consider to be) the best interests of its subjects at heart. In thinking about actual parental relationships, for example, we might consider that a father beating his child is actually interested in the child’s submission, or releasing his own frustrations, rather than in what is best for them. Similarly, whilst the authorities might claim that incarceration in a mental hospital is in a person’s best interests, we might think this presentation masks more sinister intentions of social control through the isolation and punishment of non-conformists (see entry for Mad). 

Just as it is a contested matter how children should be treated so as to respect and help develop their capacities for self-directed action, in the wider political sphere there are debates around what kinds of care, nurture and protection count as problematically paternalistic. For example, we could argue about whether providing ‘safe spaces’ or banning cigarette advertising is problematically paternalistic or in fact supportive and autonomy-enabling. 

Patriarchal / patriarchy / hetero-patriarchy

‘Patriarchy’ (sometimes: ‘the patriarchy’) is the name feminists have given to the system in which men as a group wield power over and oppress women as a group. In this system, people are forced to fit into the binary categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, with life chances and experiences varying massively depending on which category you are assigned to, and those who do not conform to these categories often being subject to severe social sanctions (stigma, abuse, violence, incarceration, discrimination, etc.).

‘Patriarchal’ is an adjective that can be applied to anything that manifests or supports this system, e.g. patriarchal ideology, patriarchal attitudes, patriarchal norms and expectations, patriarchal institutions.

The term ‘hetero-patriarchy’ illuminates how the policing of sexuality into a restrictive set of heterosexual norms, against which other forms and expressions of sexual desire are marked as ‘deviant’ and often punished, is part and parcel of patriarchal oppression. See entry for  heteronormativity.

Because patriarchal oppression intersects in complex ways with other hierarchies such as race, class and disability, it is not the case that all men are better off than all women. Still, being a man is a factor that tends to help rather than hinder you in acquiring social status, power, and advantages. However, while men on the whole have more power and social status within this system than women and gender non-conforming people, and therefore benefit from it relative to these groups, feminists have often pointed out that men are also harmed by patriarchy. For instance, the requirement that boys and men should not show emotional vulnerability - on pain of being labelled ‘sissy’ (and often subjected to verbal and physical abuse as a result) - can prevent them developing relationships of genuine intimacy. Therefore, there are many ways in which men too would ultimately be better off without patriarchy.

Picket line

See hard picket / picket line.

Positive law vs. natural law

‘Positive law’ means law that actually exists in the real world. It does not mean the laws are positive in the sense of being good or desirable, but in the sense that they have been posited (to ‘posit’ meaning to set down, establish, or create).

Positive law is sometimes contrasted with the idea of a ‘natural law’ that gives ‘higher’ standards of right and wrong: namely, ideals which actual laws should live up to and can be criticised if they deviate from, and which people should follow regardless of what laws are actually in place. 

Philosophers have sometimes explained their ideas of natural law with reference to a divine law-maker or to supposedly definitive features of human beings, such as our reasoning abilities, endowing us with certain ‘rights’ by nature. 

Precarious / precarity / precariat

If something is precarious it is insecure and uncertain, on the brink of collapsing or falling apart. ‘Precarity’ is a term that is often used with respect to work and working conditions. It means that workers lack job security and must live in constant fear of losing their income because they are on short-term contracts, zero-hour contracts, or no formal contracts at all. 

Precarity is often discussed in relation to new technologies and platforms such as Deliveroo and (until very recently) Uber, where workers may be excluded from employee protections such as sick pay or guaranteed hours because they are technically self-employed, while lacking any meaningful control over their day-to-day working lives. An increase in precarious labour conditions, often as part and parcel of outsourcing, is widely recognised as a feature of neo-liberalism. However, precarious working conditions have always been a part of capitalism; for example, agricultural workers in England in the 18th century were often employed casually, on a seasonal or even on a day by day basis. 

There is some debate about whether precarious workers form a distinct grouping or class of workers with its own interests and experiences - a so-called ‘precariat’.

Prefigurative politics

A form of political practice that involves intentional experimentation with ways of living and relating to others that would be a part of the group’s desired future society. 

Prefigurative politics is most often associated with anti-hierarchical and consensus-based organising and counter-normative experiments in communal living that try to build and enact today the kinds of mutual, non-exploitative relationships to fellow-humans and non-human nature - including practices of democratic decision-making, mutual accountability, and reimagined forms of property - that might exist in a utopian society. It involves a rejection of using the ‘master’s tools’ to bring about social and political goals and instead tries to ‘build a new world in the shell of the old’. 

It is sometimes contrasted with a strategic or instrumental approach to politics, which thinks of organising as simply a means (‘instrument’) to an end, to be assessed only in terms of how effective it is at bringing about that end. This contrast is not as clear-cut as might first appear, however, as supporters of pre-figurative projects often give strategic arguments in favour of their approach. For example, they might argue that a non-hierarchical and democratically-run group will be more effective because all participants can develop their skills and confidence through taking part in collective decision-making, and will be more motivated to stick to decisions they have had a say in.

Prevent strategy / Prevent programme

A UK government ‘counter-terrorism’ programme that purpotedly aims to prevent the ‘radicalisation’ of individuals towards ‘extremism’ (including a recently invented category of  ‘non-violent extremism’). It imposes duties on staff at public institutions including schools, universities, and social care services to report on the political attitudes of pupils, students and clients if they show signs of deviance from ‘British Values’. Alleged indicators of vulnerability to radicalisation highlighted in Prevent trainings include ‘relevant mental health issues’, ‘a desire for political or moral change’, suddenly growing a beard (if Muslim), and expressing grievances relating to British foreign policy.  

Launched in 2006 under the Labour government’s ‘War on Terror’, the programme has been criticised for turning teachers, medical professionals and social workers into state spies, closely surveilling British Muslims in every aspect of their lives and contributing to the Islamophobia of British society. For more on this, see the Arun Kundnani’s Spooked! How not to prevent violent extremism. As subsequent Conservative-led governments have expanded the programme, environmentalist, anti-austerity, and other left-wing activist groups and opinions have been subject to intensified police attention under the Prevent strategy. Critics describe a chilling effect on dissent in general.

The programme also claims to tackle far-right extremism. However, as the National Union of Students point out in their opposition to the policy, ‘One of the most harmful outcomes of this policy has been the fuelling of anti-Muslim sentiment, specifically in far right groups like the EDL [English Defence League]. If all Muslims are considered to be vulnerable to radicalisation, then all Muslims are treated as possible criminals, aligning perfectly with the far-right agenda’. 

Prison industrial complex / Prison-Industrial-Complex

A term used to denote the symbiotic (i.e. close and mutually beneficial) relationship between the state and corporate institutions that make up the carceral system. The state and corporate interests in social control and profit-maximisation combine in an ever-expanding network of police, courts, migrant detention camps and prisons, often run by private companies and regulated by law. For more, see Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete?

Proletarian / proletariat

Sometimes also referred to as the working class, the proletariat is the set of people whose position within a capitalist economic system is defined predominantly by their labour power (i.e. their capacity to work), owning nothing significant beyond that, such as land or capital. This means they are subordinate or vulnerable within the economic system and their labour is exploited for the profit of others. The term ‘proletarian’ is usually used as an adjective, e.g. ‘a proletarian revolution’. 

Members of the proletariat often have to work for a wage in order to survive. However, the condition of being proletarian is not equivalent to engaging in waged labour. At any given time, there will usually be a significant section of the proletariat who are unemployed, forming what Marxists refer to as a ‘reserve army of labour’. Women have also been required to perform a great deal of unwaged labour such as housework and caring for children and the elderly (whether instead of waged work or on top of it as a ‘second shift’). Marxist feminists emphasise that this work is just as essential to a capitalist economy as waged labour and have organised ‘women’s strikes’ where women temporarily refuse to do it in order to make its value more visible and demand change.

Strikes, unions and the refusal of work are means by which the proletariat can build and exercise collectively the power they lack as isolated individuals. Some radical political projects (such as Marxism) focus on the proletariat as the potential radical agent for change and call for a proletarian revolution to overthrow the rule of the bourgeois (capitalist) class who own the means of production. 

There is some debate about how best to understand the intersection of people’s economic class (i.e. proletarian/bourgeois) with other facets of their social identity such as race and gender (see intersectionality). It is also debated how many classes we should identify, for example whether the precariat, the peasantry, or the professional classes should be understood as separate classes or simply as part of the proletariat.

Punitive

‘Punitive’ means relating to punishment, i.e. the infliction of suffering in response to some (perceived) transgression, harm, or wrongdoing. 

As a descriptor of a practice, logic or society, it highlights how that thing fundamentally involves or relies upon punishment, sometimes in ways that are not immediately obvious. For instance, abolitionists point out that imprisonment is only one aspect of the punitive state. Welfare policies that use sanctions to enforce compliance and immigration policies that approve or deny status on the basis of ‘good character’ tests can be just as punitive. 

Punitiveness can also be present in thinking and practices beyond the state. For instance, responding to accusations of harm or ‘problematic behaviour’ by a member of a political group or online community with tactics like shunning, public shaming, and attempting to destroy their livelihood and support networks, can replicate binary understandings of the world as divided neatly into good and bad, and punitive logics that treat those labelled ‘bad’ as disposable. For more on this, see Natalie Wynn (ContraPoints) on ‘Canceling’.

Racial capitalism / racial gendered capitalism

The concept of racial capitalism was popularised by Cedric Robinson in his book Black Marxism (1983) and used to think about the ways that capitalism and racism are not independent forms of oppression, but instead are intimately shaped by and reliant on one another. 

Robinson shows how early capitalist formations drew from and reinforced emerging ideas about racial categorisation, using these to organise and naturalise particular labour roles - most notably culminating in the development of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Today, the idea of racial capitalism points our attention to the ways that capitalism relies on a racial division and hierarchy of labour to undercut wages and pitch workers against each other. And it sets out how the material inequalities that result from capitalism (and on which capitalism relies) structurally disadvantage racialised communities. 

The concept demonstrates the need for an understanding of liberation that is both anti-racist and anti-capitalist, while helping to diagnose the shortcomings of projects which believe that anti-capitalism can overlook racism, or that anti-racism can be compatible with capitalism. Race and class are not separate and competing issues; class is always racialised, and the particular social relations of race and racism are always shaped by class. Abolitionists like Ruth Wilson Gilmore are at the forefront of theorising racial capitalism. See, for example, Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore - Antipode Online. 

These analyses have been built on and complexified by theorists of racial gendered capitalism such as Gargi Bhattacharyya, Lola Olufemi and Vanessa E. Thompson, who show how gendered oppression must also be understood intersectionally as shaped by and dependent on racial capitalism, and vice versa. For example, the construction of the normative ‘White Family’ (think 1950s American suburbia) with its gendered roles of dominant ‘breadwinner’ husband and sequestered ‘homemaker’ wife has always depended on the exploited and often stigmatised labour of women of colour as domestic ‘helps’ and sex workers.

Racialise / racialised / racialisation

Racialisation is a process that invents and ascribes racial characteristics, creates racial categories and places people within them. While it is possible to speak of individuals as racialising others through their actions and attitudes, racialisation is best thought of as a structural rather than individual process. It isn’t just individual acts of taking people or things (e.g. criminality, intelligence) to have a racial character but instead involves a systematic collective process. So, for example, my mixed heritage kids being thought to be white by one isolated person doesn’t make them automatically white. However, their having characteristics, such as darker skin and curlier hair than their classmates and being prone to being judged to be non-white and treated differently can be seen as part of a process of racialisation that makes it true that they are not white. Racialisation can be seen as the primary function of White Supremacy.

In addition to the question of how individuals are characterised, we can speak of the racialisation of objects, ways of being and systems. For example, certain styles of music can come to be seen as having racial characteristics (e.g classical music as white, Hip Hop as black). We can talk about the criminal justice system operating in a racialised manner, e.g. when blackness comes to be seen as entangled with being criminal in a way that presupposes and reinforces racial categories.

Generally, though not necessarily, talk of racialisation goes along with the idea that race itself is a social construct rather than any kind of biological reality. Such views - sometimes called ‘social constructionist’ or ‘social constructivist’ - do not deny that people have different kinds of bodily characteristics, such as different shades of skin, different textures of hair etc. Instead, they deny that these characteristics themselves imply the drawing of racial boundaries - just as the fact that people objectively have different eyelash lengths does not imply that the social world should be divided into ‘shorties’ and ‘longies’. They note, for instance, that the same person in different places and times could count as having a different race depending on the localised practices of racialisation. Someone who counts as black or African-American in the US context today might count as mulatto in some South American countries or as dual heritage in the UK; someone who counts as white in the US today might have counted as black under the ‘one drop rule’ a hundred years ago. We might say that there is no reality to race beyond the current and historical processes of racialisation which have been enacted on people with particular bodies. 

Reified

To reify something means to fix or solidify it into an object. It comes from the Latin res meaning ‘thing’. To describe something as ‘reified’ draws attention to the social processes that produce it as a thing and suggests that it would not exist in anything like its current form were it not for those processes. When something is reified, we often imagine – wrongly - that it is natural and unchangeable.

Retribution / retributive / retributivism

Retribution means getting your own back on a supposed wrongdoer. Retributivist theories seek to justify criminal punishment with the idea that criminals deserve to be punished. According to these views, inflicting suffering on ‘wrongdoers’ is morally good, or even necessary, in and of itself. ‘An eye for an eye’ is a classic retributivist statement (although many forms of retributivism have more sophisticated accounts of what makes a punishment ‘proportionate’ or ‘fit the crime’).

Retributivist theories are sometimes described as ‘backward-looking’ because they see the act of breaking the law as incurring a debt that must be paid through suffering. These are contrasted with: (a) ‘consequentialist’ theories that try to justify punishment with reference to desired effects in the future, such as its (supposed) ‘deterrent’ or ‘rehabilitative’ effect; and (b) ‘expressivist’ theories that emphasise the role of punishment in expressing a community’s (supposed) moral condemnation of the criminalised.

Sovereign (power, individual)

To be sovereign means to have ultimate control over something, the power to decide what happens within a given area. Sovereignty is a term for the status or power that a sovereign has. Theories of sovereignty are generally accounts that seek to justify this power and/or specify conditions it must meet to be legitimate.

The concept of sovereignty was important in the development of modern Europe states from the late Middle Ages onwards. In that context, a sovereign was a monarch who had very significant if not total (or ‘absolute’) power over their kingdom or territory. With the rise of democratic ideas, ‘sovereign’ has come to be understood more broadly as whoever rules over an area, which could be ‘the people’ as a whole rather than a particular individual. Hence the phrase ‘popular sovereignty’, which means the people deciding for, or ruling, themselves - although who is included in ‘the people’ and who speaks in their name are often contested issues. Colonised people, for instance, have frequently been excluded.

The ‘sovereign individual’ is an ideal of personhood that emphasises self-control or self-mastery. Dominant for many centuries within Western philosophical and political traditions, it imagines the self as a monarch ruling over the kingdom of his (or, less often, her) own desires, beliefs, and emotions. This view of human beings emphasises total independence from outside (‘heteronomous’) forces and praises the suppression of ‘unruly’ desires and feelings. Correspondingly, it denigrates human beings who (are perceived to) fail or refuse to exist in this way, with women and other oppressed groups often being placed in this category. It is closely connected with the ideal of autonomy as self-rule and has been similarly criticised by many feminists, anti-colonial thinkers, and other theorists of social power for ignoring the ways in which individuals are shaped by their social contexts, and for devaluing relationships of interdependence, solidarity, and care. 

‘Sovereign power’ is the kind of power exercised by a sovereign, namely, deliberate, conscious power exercised by an individual who knows and intends what they are doing. The social theorist Michel Foucault is just one of many who has argued that this is too narrow a view of power to capture a great deal of what goes on in our social world, with other less individual and less intentional forms of power - such as disciplinary power - being at least as important.

State of exception / exceptional powers

A situation in which fundamental legal rights are suspended in the name of protecting the existing order from some extreme danger, such as a revolution, foreign invasion, pandemic, ‘terrorist’ threat, or other emergency. Other terms for this include: ‘martial law’, ‘emergency powers’, ‘state of emergency’, and ‘state of siege’.

Declaring a state of exception often allows the ‘executive’ – the government or the President – to issue decrees without going through the ordinary law-making processes such as consulting parliament. Police are often granted wide-ranging powers to arrest and imprison suspects without trial, disperse crowds, impose curfews, raid buildings without warrant, and use lethal force. 

All modern legal orders include provisions for declaring a state of exception, which they make use of so regularly that the very idea of these powers and conditions as ‘exceptional’ is arguably misleading. An influential theorist on this subject is Giorgio Agamben, who traces how ‘a permanent state of emergency […] has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones.’ (See his book, The State of Exception.) One reason is that those in positions of state power themselves get to decide what counts as an ‘emergency’ and what measures are ‘necessary’ to secure public safety – and who counts as a part of the ‘public’ whose safety matters. 

Occupied territories and colonised populations in particular have often been subject to ‘exceptional powers’ as the norm.

Status quo

The existing state of affairs, especially regarding matters of social and political organisation.

Structural (violence, racism, injustice, inequalities, conditions)

To describe something as structural is to say that it involves social or organisational forces that are, in some way, broader than individual people. The term is often used when a writer is trying to move the focus away from attempts at explanation that focus purely on the beliefs, intentions, actions and responsibility of individuals (attributing blame etc.), to explanations that look at wider systemic causes. This may mean focusing on the overall functioning of the system that creates these individuals and circumstances. 

For example, if there were a situation where all of the serving staff working in a shop were white, whilst all of the cleaners who worked there were black, we might look first for individual prejudices held by the managers who hired the staff. However, a fuller explanation might look at more systemic causes, e.g. the way in which the hiring practices operate, the differing hours and flexibility of the different roles etc., and assess these for structural racism. More widely, we might look at structural conditions such as the underlying distributions of education, incomes and housing across groups as a whole. In some cases, structures can be external to people altogether, for example if the built environment contains lots of stairs and few ramps for prams or wheelchairs.

Structural forces can cause such extreme harms that these processes are sometimes referred to as ‘structural violence’. The bad outcomes of structural violence can be just as detrimental as those of individual interpersonal violence; for example, being denied the cancer treatment you need because of structural inequalities in distribution of access to healthcare can kill you just as being stabbed by an individual in the street can. In fact, even many apparently individual acts of violence can be seen to result from wider social forces. Economic and healthcare inequalities are often the key driving factors in how individuals act. Thus, structural violence should not be seen as incompatible with individual or interpersonal violence; structural conditions can make interpersonal violence more likely or make certain groups more vulnerable to it. For instance, many feminists have pointed to the role of patriarchal structures in producing forms of gendered violence including sexual assault and domestic abuse.

Subject / subjectivity / subjectivisation / intersubjective / intersubjectivity

‘Subject’ is a philosophical word for a person. To say something is ‘subjective’ is to say that it depends on how things seem from a person’s particular point of view. The term ‘subjectivity’ refers generally to having a mind and a perspective on the world. 

Talking about people as ‘subjects’ brings out their status as beings with a point of view on the world which is socially formed. Our ways of thinking and perceiving the world depend in many complex ways on our social experiences, which may differ depending on our ‘subject position’, i.e. where we are positioned in society with respect to various intersecting lines (or ‘axes’) of oppression, such as gender, sexuality, race, class, and disability, as well as geographical and historical location. 

The term ‘intersubjective’ refers to what is built up and shared between people (with ‘inter’ meaning between, as in ‘inter-rail’). Something is ‘intersubjective’ if it depends on the ideas and practices of a whole group of people interacting in complex ways. ‘Intersubjectivity’ describes whatever is created and sustained by what humans think, feel, and do, not as isolated individuals but in conflict and conversation as social beings.

Terms like ‘subjectification’ or ‘subjectivisation’ are used to capture the social processes that make us into the subjects that we are, forming our habits, ways of thinking, and points of view. For example, a child who is repeatedly told by parents, teachers, and other authority figures that she must sit in a ‘ladylike’ manner, and punished when she does not, may learn to restrict her bodily movements and posture to the point where it becomes automatic and ‘second nature’ to conform to social expectations of femininity. These processes of gendered subjectification are analysed by the philosopher Sandra Bartky in her paper ‘Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power’.

Substantive (power, equality, conditions)

See formal vs. substantive / material (power, equality, conditions) 

Sui generis

A Latin term that means unique, belonging to a class of its own. To present a phenomenon, such as a particular instance of police surveillance or the targeting of racial minorities, as sui generis means to present it as distinctive and particular, as if it came out of nowhere rather than as part of a general pattern or historical trajectory. Resisting this ahistorical approach can help us understand the functions these phenomena serve in the social order.

Totalising

Totalising accounts of society claim that all (relevant) social phenomena can be derived from and explained in terms of a single theory or analysis. The term ‘totalising’ is most often used critically, to object to the way such claims erase complexity and diversity. 

Totalising accounts usually permit little possibility of resistance to the dominant forces of society and as such can be unduly deterministic (implying that the future is set in stone). For example, some radical feminist accounts of women’s sexual subordination to men under patriarchy are criticised for being totalising. Critics argue that these accounts (a) make women appear totally powerless by denying or ignoring subversive and emancipatory forms of sexual agency, (b) reinforce the binary categories of man and woman by trying to explain everything in those terms, and (c) ignore the intersectional character of gendered oppression by generalising about men and women without attending to differences of race, class, disability, geographical location, and so on. 

Criticising an account for its totalising ambitions does not have to mean rejecting it altogether or saying that it cannot explain anything - just that it cannot explain everything.       

White supremacy / white supremacist

In public discourse, ‘white supremacy’ usually refers to the belief that people who are white are superior in some way, intellectually, physically, morally, to people of other races. On this understanding, we can identify as ‘white supremacist’ those individuals who hold explicitly racist views and the organisations they form, such as neo-Nazi parties, the Ku Klux Klan, and other far-right or fascist groups. 

However, a more useful understanding of white supremacy recognises it as not just a set of ideas, but instead as a system. In his book The Racial Contract, philosopher Charles Mills argues that we should think of White Supremacy as ‘the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today’. It is a system that both sets up the sorting of people into different racial categories and functions to elevate those who are placed into the category of white (or we might say, racialised as white) over and above others. It is unnamed in that it is not commonly acknowledged. It is specific to the modern world in that, while various ideas/systems of hierarchical racial categorisation existed earlier (e.g. Aristotle’s idea of non-Greeks as ‘natural slaves’), the category of ‘whiteness’ was invented and promoted specifically through European colonial projects from the 1500s onwards, partly in order to crush joint rebellions between indentured servants and slaves on colonial plantations, and to justify genocidal policies towards indigenous peoples. 

This broader usage of ‘white supremacy’ is especially common in a US context. Describing contemporary America as a white supremacist society points to the ways that, although past forms of slavery and explicit or legally enforced systems of segregation have been dismantled, stark racial hierarchies persist. The criminal punishment system and its legitimating ideologies of black criminality, social attitudes that stigmatise non-normative family structures, an education system segregated by ability to pay, and algorithms that deny parole to people who live in certain postcodes, for example, continue to function - unnamed - to oppress those who are placed in the category of non-white (e.g. racialised as black or indigenous). However, while attending to the specificities of US settler colonialism is important, white supremacy is not just an American phenomenon but a global one, with racism baked into the functioning of most (if not all) modern states. 

In contrast to seeing white supremacy as only a set of explicit beliefs, this understanding also allows us to see how ideologies that purport to go beyond race can in practice work to prop up white supremacy. For example, norms of ‘civility’ which are often used to demonise anti-racist protest, and liberal ideals of ‘color blindness’ and formal legal equality which fail to recognise systematic disavantage, can be critiqued as white supremist insofar as they naturalise and reproduce structural oppression.