It is really only a convention to confine the politics of otherness to this chapter, since there are political implications raised in other chapters as well, such as Chapter 3, on methodology. Clearly, for example, there are implications in how one treats others when attempting to research them: as sources of data, a rational typification, or as fully subjective agents with minimal hierarchies established between others and researchers.

It is also conventional to consider politics as operating at two levels. At one level, politics describes the operation of the state and its various apparatuses, such as the armed forces, the civil service and those organizations regulated by the state, in various degrees of proximity and distance, which might include the media and the education system. Politics at this level both organizes and justifies the use of state power, sometimes itself based on vested interests of well-organized groups such as ruling classes or various elites, including those based on claims to privilege on the grounds of ethnicity or gender. However, following various rejections of such “top-down” accounts of social order, including Foucault's (e.g. Foucault 1977), it is also common to think of politics in a much more extended and elaborated way, to cover more or less any kind of conflict between individuals or groups and ways of resolving it. Famous examples of this kind of politics include identity politics, where various social groups, including youth, struggle to assert themselves and claim their rights.