The Conclusion begins by summarizing the extensive terrain surveyed in Chapters 2–5 on key concepts of sociality, temporality, (in)efficiency, and power, and aggregates findings on institutional origins, maintenance, and change. It then brings work under different conceptual headings into dialogue and identifies many opportunities for mutual enrichment across schools, traditions, and approaches. With respect to the endogeneity problem, our wide-ranging engagement with a number of literatures show it to present local problems, but not a general threat. Indeed, the four concepts together reveal institutional causal autonomy to be overdetermined across a huge number of conditions. Finally, the chapter holds no expectation of, nor does it advocate the pursuit of, a unified theory of institutions. Instead, it sees ample room for mutually intelligible work relying on a “fish-scale model of omniscience,” with unique specialties exhibiting just enough tangency with other work to sprawl continuously across the social sciences.

The final chapter brings the discussion back to the definitions of resistance, female agency, and the link to the aesthetization of politics. In order to understand Shi‘i women’s self-inflicted pain practices as a sign of power and resistance, we need to examine the various structures and forms of power existing within the social structures and fields within which women operate. Shi‘i women in this study share and articulate nationally and transnationally their role in contributing to the historical continuation of Shi‘i actions of resistance through the introduction of a new definition of the new Shi‘i woman, representing it as a declaration of their true "Shi‘a-ness." Shi‘i women use performativity, language, symbols, and signs to construct a new version of the "Shi‘i woman" that is able to counter and resist male hegemonic power structures. As a conclusion for the book, the chapter argues that through women’s ritual practices of self-inflicted pain, a new female aesthetization of the feminine subject is defined, produced, and articulated on and through the female body. The newly defined Shi‘i woman is a symbol of the performativity of power dynamics but also the performativity of women’s actions resisting existing power structures that lead to a female Shi‘i transnational collective reordering of power.

The conventional (political science) account of three new institutionalisms created no distinctive space for power, which has correspondingly been treated in a scattershot fashion across a wide range of schools and approaches. This chapter extracts power from its conceptual entanglements and identifies a number of ways in which it shapes and is shaped by institutions. While very strong power-centered approaches leave little space for autonomous institutional effects, even small wedges of separation can position institutions as intervening or moderating variables, while deeper institutionalization can reverse their causal priority. Beyond causal relations, “institutionalized power” binds the two at a deeper, constitutive level. The chapter ranges widely for applications, going beyond self-identified theories of institutions to draw on examples from the French Revolution, international relations, totalitarianism, “weapons of the weak,” the control of violence, politeness, and other issues that spotlight still-untapped possibilities for studying power and institutions. Not surprisingly, sharpening the focus on power also yields new insights into institutional origins, stability, and change.

The interaction of developing states with investment treaty law and arbitration constitutes an important part of the ongoing debate about the legitimacy of the investment treaty regime. However, the authors contend that the concern is often sidelined and that developing states and their concerns are frequently lumped together under the broader rubric of investment treaty law as a threat to national sovereignty and a constraint on regulatory autonomy. By focusing on the formal equality between contracting state parties and the reciprocal nature of international investment agreements (IIAs), the chapter contends that such narratives tend to mask the presence of power disparities, which considerably shape the involvement of developing states in the creation, diffusion and internalization of investment treaty law. The authors seek to counter these narratives by drawing on new empirical data to expose a range of structural, normative and institutional power inequalities. By using the optics of power and focusing on how developing states learn from and internalize investment treaty law, the chapter peers behind the formal structures of investment treaties and ISDS to identify the underlying processes and actors and to question the legitimacy of the prevailing norms and institutional arrangements.

While community psychologists show commitment to social justice concerns, there has been a long-standing neglect of critical social scholarship in knowledge produced in the field. It is useful to see power as an organizing principle in community psychology, to further critical reflection about the theories and methods adopted in community research and their implications for transformative practice. We present the findings of an empirical study of trends in community psychology journals, showing that community psychologists study a wide range of topics, with emergent interests in children, youth and families, and difference and exclusion. However, there remains a preference for preventionist theory and likewise a stronger focus on social epidemiology and a paucity of empirical research employing critical and participatory methods. Thus, community psychologists still rely too heavily on individualist and biomedically oriented epistemological foundations and methods. We argue the dominant epistemological positions can be shifted through enhancing criticality and understandings of power, to address gaps in theory and method. We advocate for the importance of fostering reflexivity; critical consciousness and critical action; developing a sense of historicity in understanding communities; strengthening interdisciplinarity and extradisciplinarity; and endorsing methodological pluralism, innovation, and concern for the social impact of knowledge.

This chapter develops a critical language ethnography approach to community-based research. The authors propose that this approach can offer rich qualitative insights into those everyday interactions through which children and adults acquire and impart locally accepted norms for language use in their communities while also co-constructing social identities and collective practices that can resist and change oppressive structures. The chapter reviews ethnographic projects that work not only to depict the cultural underpinnings of community life but that also seek to disrupt those structural forces that produce inequities across communities. By integrating insights from the fields of Language Socialization (LS) and Critical Ethnography (CE), the authors seek to bring into conversation complementary subfields within anthropology, sociolinguistics, and education that share a commitment to community-centered research. The chapter is organized thematically around three themes of power, praxis, and positionality and it provides a critical case analysis to illustrate the ways in which a critical language ethnography can be used to analyze everyday interaction in communities.

This chapter provides an overview of how Adler’s social theory of cognitive evolution helps us study international orders. First, we compare and contrast world ordering theory with its main alternatives in International Relations, starting with Ikenberry’s. Second, we elaborate on the key building blocks of cognitive evolution theory, including evolution and process, communities of practice, creativity and learning, social order and bounded progress. Third and finally, we raise a number of critical questions about Adler’s theory, in order to chart new avenues for future research. We ask about the role of material forces, the interaction of multiple orders, the conceptualization of power and agency, the place of communication and the normative extensions that the theory suggests. We conclude by presenting the following chapters in the book.

Foucauldian-informed discourse analysis (also known as poststructuralist discourse analysis) is an important method for identity researchers because it focuses on the understandings people use to make sense of themselves. Foucauldian-informed discourse analysis examines what ideas people use to make sense of themselves; how these ideas come to be “thinkable” at that moment; and the consequences for what someone can say, think, feel or do when thinking with these ideas. In so doing, it offers a critical approach that also opens up directions for more affirmative ways of thinking. In this chapter, we explain some key concepts informing Foucauldian-informed research, including discourse and genealogy; power as productive, diffuse, and disciplinary; normalization, confession, and governmentality; and subject positions and technologies of self. We discuss how psychologists developing discourse analysis in the UK both engaged with, and blended, Foucauldian concepts with other linguist approaches, producing a diverse body of work. With no established procedure for Foucauldian-informed discourse analysis, this chapter offers two worked examples from separate projects related to identity and health, showing the reader how these concepts can be operationalized in the study of identities. Using an analysis of body mass index (BMI) and data from a study on how couples in long term relationships navigate lifestyle advice after a diagnosis of coronary heart disease, we showcase the value of Foucauldian-informed discourse analysis for identity researchers, particularly when identity is central in the organization of neoliberal societies.

Like Hobbes, Spinoza portrays the social order as arising out of a state of nature in which people aren’t constrained by laws, in which we may do whatever we can do, and in which our natural egoism makes life insecure and wretched. Unlike Hobbes, Spinoza thinks right is coextensive with power even in civil society, not only in the state of nature. Spinoza’s best argument for this arguably relies on two assumptions: if there were a natural law constraining our behavior, it would have to be based on a divine command; but God cannot be a lawgiver; prescriptive laws assume that the commanded can disobey; and no one can disobey an omnipotent being. Although Spinoza takes right to be based on power, he denies that sovereigns have a right to rule just as they please. Like Machiavelli and Hobbes, he is conscious of the fragility of political power. Even if the sovereign’s right is theoretically absolute, individuals are roughly equal in power; so any sovereign must depend on having at his command a group of people who will obey his enforcement commands without being coerced. Like Machiavelli, he prefers forms of government in which this de facto constraint is institutionalized.

This chapter similarly relies on analysis of the Les Affiches advertisements to examine the ways maroons reimagined their status and identity, took possession of forms of capital and raw materials that upheld and sustained plantations’ divisions of labor, adopted tactics of militancy, and reclaimed their time. The fugitive advertisements give some revelation into the minds of runaways by speculating the actions they took perhaps in minutes or days just before or after they fled. Rather than interpret these actions through the lens of enslavers’ foreshadowing of maroons’ movements for the purposes of surveillance and re-enslavement, this chapter employs subaltern analysis of maroon actions as linked to a broader sense of collective consciousness regarding freedom and liberation. Runaways exhibited more oppositional behaviors such as passing for free, appropriating material goods, bearing arms, and escaping for longer durations of time – leading to escalating grand marronnage before the Haitian Revolution.

Chapter 5 focuses on the material and sensory conditions of Harare’s Magistrates’ Courts at Rotten Row. It specifically examines how human rights lawyers and their clients incorporated the material and sensory conditions in these courts into their courtroom performances, which drew attention to the shortcomings of the courts as spaces in which to the display state authority. While the Magistrates’ Courts were full of spatial and symbolic trademarks that aimed to highlight the power of the law, the political and economic situation in Zimbabwe after 2000 had severely damaged the courts’ material condition. The real and symbolic effects of this material decline undermined law’s authority. For human rights lawyers, these conditions were further indicative of the government’s preoccupation with law’s coercive rather than legitimating utility. Through visual, olfactory and auditory reminders of the horrific conditions in police detention, ZANU-PF demonstrated its control over activists' and lawyers' bodies and minds. Lawyers and their clients, however, also used these sensory dimensions to contest the state's authority. By calling attention to their dirty, damaged and smelly bodies in the dock, lawyers and defendants aimed to expose the decline in moral and professional conduct they observed within Zimbabwe’s judicial and police services.

Chapter 4 introduces the rules and importance of theory, then derives a Unified War Theory (UWT) that leverages insights from earlier chapters to define key aspects and relationships pertaining to politics, strategy, and combat. The chapter also establishes theory’s relevance to strategy, historical analysis, warfighting, and doctrine, then relates politics, power, influence, and ideology to war, including how autocratic and democratic governance reduces but cannot eliminate the potential for conflict. The chapter defines the nature and character of war, outlines the levels of war and strategy, and explains that cause, capacity, and will to fight comprise the “engine of war.” Additional analysis includes war’s fractal nature, warfighting domains, chance, chaos, and momentum. Next, the chapter presents a “fluidic” metaphor and defines force “viscosity,” a property based on directness, acceleration, restriction, cohesion, and concentration that reconciles war’s regular and irregular forms. The chapter offers a “war-viscosity algorithm” that illustrates the dynamics of viscosity, including how and why war’s forms change, and it concludes by examining the UWT’s value and implications vis-à-vis historical analysis, domain theory, terrorism, nuclear weapons, and ethics.