Theme Panel: Political Action in a Broken World

August 25, 2025 APSA Annual Meeting, Theme Panels Comments Off on Theme Panel: Political Action in a Broken World

Co-sponsored by Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

In-Person Roundtable

Participants:

  • (Chair) Elisabeth Robin Anker, George Washington University
  • (Presenter) Geoff Mann, Simon Fraser University
  • (Presenter) Hagar Kotef, SOAS, University of London
  • (Presenter) Cristina Beltran, New York University
  • (Presenter) Elisabeth Robin Anker, George Washington University

Session Description:
This panel faces the difficulties of political work in a broken world. How do we challenge or even navigate utterly shattered systems, without completely breaking ourselves or retreating inward, when everything falls apart and action seems futile? From radically different perspectives, we will each ask about the possibility of working forcefully and ethically in a morally compromised political world, of employing impure strategies of resistance when all else fails, of making due out of nothing to nevertheless make the world (slightly) better. Without dismissing the importance of utopian thinking, we seek to highlight here rather modes of invisible or disreputable action under the radar — actions that might otherwise seem morally compromised, insufficient, or non-cathartic.

Geoff Mann examines uncertainty in the face of ongoing climate catastrophe, and the possibility of unexpected solidarities in the shared experience of climate unwinding. He is interested in considering what walls it might break down or undermine to claim that because of ecological unwinding this time is “different”, especially regarding what people expect of others when they can’t form what we usually call “expectations” about the future. Hagar Kotef examines the medical facility in the detention camp Sde Teiman, opened in October 2023 for detainees from Gaza, and asks how medical ethics can be adhered to within such a broken place. The medical facility puts physicians in an impossible bind: On the one hand, refusing to treat patients there (many, at least in the first week, Hamas militants who took part in the Oct 7th attacks) would reproduce the complete abandonment of these people by the Israeli medical system, as Israeli hospitals refused to treat them. On the other hand, treating them also implicates the doctors in torture and war crimes. Based on a series of interviews with physicians who worked in the facility, Kotef asks what–if any–are the ethical, legal, and “right” options available for these physicians. Cristina Beltran examines what emerges from democratic political failure; she contends that the presence of an increasingly multiracial and gender diverse conservatism in the US exposes the need for liberals and progressives to reckon with their own demographic fantasies and political failures, including mistaken and often limited accounts of solidarity, persuasion, identity, and movement building. In the wake of Donald Trump’s 2024 victory, a multiracial and gender-diverse conservatism is here to stay and Latinx citizens are likely to be an increasingly significant aspect of the American Right, but this does not mean that U.S. demographics now favors conservatives. Instead, taking up various accounts of loss, failure, and aesthetics, she argues that the rise of multiracial conservatism offers progressives the difficult but necessary opportunity to reimagine practices of democratic world-making that promise not only justice, but pleasure, joy and beauty. Libby Anker argues for a political strategy of “Going Low” to fight dirty for democracy and economic equality. She calls for strategies that fight for radical futures made without presumptions of exemplarity, without investments in moral goodness or pre-justified action. She argues against the moralizing righteousness of the claim to “Go High”, especially when fighting against the global forces of fascism and capital that reject laws, norms and moral standards in their quest to dominate the political. Going Low entails searching for and articulating political visions of democracy that come from places deemed low-moral, low value, or low class, those that take the low road to fight for equality when the chips are down but the stakes are high.