I

It’s common to think of frustration as distinctly personal and individual–at least until explaining why you and others cause my frustrations. At that point, frustrations aren’t just interpersonal; they may well be the basis for our interaction. As the psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips, and others underscore, you know you’re connected precisely because it’s frustrating (e.g., Phillips 2012).

Take a random walk through the literature and you will find explicit references to: frustrated pastoralists and communities (Nori 2022, passim); frustrated politicians in pastoralist areas (Allouche et al 2025, p.16); security forces frustrated by pastoralists (Casola 2022, p. 25); pastoralists frustrated by security forces (Scott-Villiers et al 2025, p. 29); pastoralists frustrated with researchers (Bell et al 2025, p.10/17), and frustrated researchers in pastoralist areas (Semplici et al 2024, p. 13). There are also frustrated younger men in pastoralist Kenya and their frustrated elders (Muneri 2024, passim; Hazama 2023, p. 267), along with frustrated—well, you get the picture.

Pastoralists are frustrated, researchers are frustrated, NGO staff are frustrated, and so too government officials. To repeat, that is how they know they’re interconnected: They frustrate others and others frustrate them.

So what? Now, here is where things get interesting from a pastoralist development perspective!

II

To start with, frustration highlights what’s missing in notions of “resilience in the face of uncertainty.” Handling their joint frustrations is what pastoralists, NGO staff, researchers, and government officials are to do between bouncing back and bouncing forward.

This is why it’s such a big issue to determine just with whom pastoralists are in fact interacting. Are they actually frustrated with this really-existing government official or that actually-existing NGO staff person? Or is it that the others are more a nuisance for them, if that? That is, do the pastoralists care enough to be frustrated and take action? (One of the ironies of the current emphasis on pastoralists caring for each other is the relative silence on this connectivity dimension of symmetrical or asymmetrical frustration.) Answers to such questions problematize currently popular binaries like caring/not caring and not only notions of caring and private self/public role.

III

The follow-on analytic step then is to look at other major pastoralist binaries and see to what extent, if any, frustration relationships problematize them as well. The reader is already familiar with the debunking of any hard and fast line between nature/nurture and ecosystems/humans, so no need to repeat the familiar criticisms here. What does need highlighting, I believe, is the critics’ own use of another very popular binary, that of justice/injustice, as if there were in fact just systems which can or should correct for the equally well-known injustices pastoralists undergo and have undergone.

The twofold obstacle to any such conclusion is that (1) all manner of injustices are incurred without specific reference to principles or norms of justice and, anyway (2) those principles and norms prove contradictory, inconsistent or ambiguous when it comes to specific contexts (Douglass 2025). This is both an empirical and theoretical argument most recently associated with the political philosopher, Judith Shklar:

What sort of problem is injustice? One way of thinking about it is as an ethical problem. If not the first virtue of social institutions, justice is one of the most important moral values that should guide our reflections on politics. Injustice negates (or is a departure from) justice and is therefore a problem. Understood this way, there is a strong case for maintaining that we require principles of justice to evaluate cases of injustice: we can only identify the nature and scale of injustices with reference to some prior idea of justice. As should now be evident, this is not Shklar’s approach to theorizing injustice. She instead starts from our experiences of injustice and explores the political problems to which they give rise. The sense of injustice that we all experience should be understood in reference to the plural, competing, and ever-changing expectations that exist within any society, which cannot be formalized into determinate principles of justice. As this sense of injustice is a deep and inescapable feature of all social life, there is a political imperative to find ways of living together that can mitigate it as effectively as possible without (at the extreme) descending into cycles of violent revenge. To understand the problem of injustice in this way is to treat it as a political problem, first and foremost, rather than as an ethical one.

Such a sense of injustice repeatedly appears in the pastoralist literature (e.g., Krätli and Toulmin 2020, p. 68). That there is injustice across many pastoralist areas and that the frustrating challenge is a political one in preventing or coping with ensuing cycles of violence are neatly captured by many pastoralist observers, including Nori (2022; see also Benjaminsen and Ba 2021):

Political leaders, mafia-like organisations, and insurgent groups have successfully manipulated ethnic identities, political asymmetries, and local grievances to mobilise support for their activities. These provide weapons, salaries and opportunities to seize power at the local level, and with these the promise of redressing the many injustices faced by pastoralists and thereby transforming the local political economy. Cases include Islamic State and al-Qaeda in the Sahelo-Saharan fringes, Boko Haram in the Lake Chad region, Al-Shabaab in the Somali ecosystem, and other organisations operating across SSA drylands and beyond, where local communities are drawn into a ‘war economy’ dominated by politicians, smugglers commanders, and fighters whose interests lie in generating new forms of power, protection and profit. . .

In other words, it should not be surprising when existing local justice systems are commended for providing some everyday order and stability (e.g., Scott-Villiers 2025, p.35).

Why? Because even weak systems demonstrate the frustrating–really, frustrating–importance of giving injustice and grievances their due, whatever the global justice systems appealed to (see also Douglass 2025; on local and global justice systems and their tensions, start with Elster 1992).

---

Sources

Allouche, J., C.Y. Yao, K.S. Amédée 2025. “Rethinking ‘Farmer-Herder’ Conflicts in Ivorian Internal Frontier.” African Affairs 123/493: 449–467 (access online at https://academic.oup.com/afraf/article/123/493/449/7951617)

Bell, A. R., O. S. Rakotonarivo, W. Zhang, C. De Petris, A. Kipchumba, R. S. Meinzen-Dick. 2025. “Understanding pastoralist adaptations to drought via games and choice experiments: field testing among Borana communities.” Ecology and Society 30(1) (accessed online at https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-15836-300125)

Benjaminsen, T.A., B. Ba 2021. “Fulani-Dogon Killings in Mali: Farmer-herder conflicts as insurgency and counterinsurgency.” African Security (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19392)

Douglass, R. 2025. “Who Needs a Theory of Justice? Judith Shklar and the Politics of Injustice.” American Political Science Review: 1–12 (accessed online at http://cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/who-needs-a-theory-of-justice-judith-shklar-and-the-politics-of-injustice/5B25A4AF90526DAE217F93E87765E074)

Elster, J. 1992. Local Justice: How Institutions Allocate Scarce Goods and Necessary Burdens, Russell Sage Foundation: New York NY

Hazama, I. 2023. “Man-Animal Social Relationship as Source of Resilience,” Chapter 9 in Reconsidering Resilience in African Pastoralism: Toward a Relational and Contextual Approach, Eds. S. Konaka, G. Semplici and P. Little, Kyoto University Press and Trans Pacific Press, Japan

Krätli S., C. Toulmin 2020. Farmer–Herder Conflict in Sub-saharan Africa? IIED, Briefing. International Institute for Environment and Development, London (accessed online at http://pubs.iied. org/17753IIED)

Muneri, E.W. 2024. Intersectional Subjectivities, Embodied Experiences, and Everyday Responses among the Maasai Pastoralists Amidst Environmental Changes: Insights from the Mara in Kenya, PhD dissertation, Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex (accessed online at https://sussex.figshare.com › ndownloader › files)

Nori, M. 2022. Assessing the Policy Frame in Pastoral Areas of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Research Paper No. RSC 2022/03, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Italy (accessed online at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4071572 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4071572)

Phillips, A. 2012. Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York NY.

Scott-Villiers, P., A. Scott-Villiers, and the team from Action for Social and Economic Progress, Somalia 2025. Navigating Violence and Negotiating Order in the Somalia–Kenya Borderlands. IDS Working Paper 618, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies (accessed online at https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/articles/report/Navigating_Violence_and_Negotiating_Order_in_the_Somalia_Kenya_Borderlands/28715012?file=53375021)

Semplici, G., L.J, Haider, R. Unks, T.S. Mohamed, G. Simula, P. Tsering (Huadancairang), N. Maru, L. Pappagallo, M. Taye 2024. “Relational resiliences: reflections from pastoralism across the world.” Ecosystems and People, 20(1) (accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2024.2396928)

West, S., L.J. Haider, S. Stålhammar & S. Woroniecki 2020. “A relational turn for sustainability science? Relational thinking, leverage points and transformations.” Ecosystems and People, 16:1, 304-325 (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26395916.2020.1814417)

—Latest blog entries include

**”Countering the other negative narrative about pastoralism that matters for policy and management“

—When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene can be found at

When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene (links to the Guide and schematic)

–Those interested in newly updated extensions of the Guide, please see:

**”Sourcing new ideas from the humanities, fine arts, and other media for complex policy analysis and management (newly added)“

**”17 examples on how genre differences affect the structure and substance of policy and management [newly added]” structure-and-substance-of-policy-and-management-last-newly-added/

**”Instead of “differentiated by gender, race and class,” why not “differentiated by heterogeneity and complexity”? Ten examples of racism, class, capitalism, inequalities, border controls, authoritarianism, COVID and more”

**”New method matters in reframing policy and management (recently added)”

**”Emerging counternarratives on: migrants, border controls, digital networks, remittances, child labor, COVID’s impact (Africa and Europe), and global neoliberalism”

—Other major new reads:

**”The ‘future’ in HRO Studies: the example of networked reliability”

**”The siloing of approaches to discourse and narrative analyses in public policy“

**”A National Academy of Reliable Infrastructure Management”

**”‘Learning discrepantly’ for policy & management (updated and expanded)“

**”The value added from rethinking ‘prediction’ and ‘imagination’ in more granular terms“

**”I understand why others feel compelled to defend the humanities and arts. But their direct relevance for public policy and management has always been obvious.”

**”The Centrality of Restoration Resilience Across Interconnected Critical Infrastructures for Emergency Management: A Framework and Key Implications”

—Key blog entries on livestock herders, pastoralists and pastoralisms are:

**”If not corpse-pastoralism, then what are we seeing? Four other suggestions and key upshot for re-seeing what we thought we knew.“

**”Time to think more radically: three new policy narratives extremely different from current positions in pastoralist development”

**”Working pastoralism as a scene-making infrastructure“

**”Other fresh perspectives on pastoralists and pastoralism: 17 brief cases (last newly added)”

**”A ‘reliability-seeking economics in pastoralist development”

**”Twelve new extensions of “pastoralists as reliability professionals” and “pastoralism as a critical infrastructure”

**”First complicate those for-or-against-pastoralism arguments and then see the policy relevance: four brief examples”

—Key blog entries on updating Narrative Policy Analysis are:

**”Updating NARRATIVE POLICY ANALYSIS (1994)“

**”Narrative policy analysis: then, now and ahead”

**”The policy relevance of Michel Riffaterre and Algirdas Greimas: the example of global climate change (GCC)”

I

200 million to 500 million pastoralist herders in the world is a very large number, and very large numbers have distributions ranging from those doing better to those doing worse than average. It’s fair then to ask those who argue that pastoralist societies are changing for the worse, which ones in the distribution of pastoralist societies are “getting it (more) right,” from the perspective(s) of the critics.

The fact is that no one, let alone those insisting pastoralist societies are being depastoralized by forces beyond their control, has an overall understanding of the empirical distribution of pastoralist societies worldwide. Instead, “our critical project is to increase understanding of those pastoralist societies we study.” 

And significant advances have been made in that understanding. Clearly, there have been pastoralist societies which have ceased to practice any variety of pastoralism. Persistently failing development projects, misleading assumptions about pastoralist behavior, and basically wrong middle-level theories (think the Tragedy of the Commons in light of the subsequent Common Property Resource Management case material) are now a shared knowledge, and continue to be so even though incentives remain among donors and governments to ignore it.

II

But there are problems with “our critical project is to increase understanding of pastoralist societies.” First, if there were ever a Eurocentric idea it is that one. It’s passing odd when critics of Eurocentrism commit themselves to increased understanding and reflection tout court.

Second, it’s no news that others, including pastoralists themselves, want more by way of response and action from better understanding. Where are the counternarratives upon which to base better policy and management not only to “pastoralists are backwards and therefore [sic] in need to techno-managerial solutions”, but also to ”pastoralist societies are being depastoralized” by all manner of wider processes including commodification, marketization, financialization, settler colonialism, nationalism, militarism, racism, marginalization, the climate emergency, and always-late capitalism? As the common property resource management narrative is no longer sufficient to base some policy and management, what are the robust alternatives?

Third, those counternarratives have to be at the level of actionable granularity rather than de rigueur calls for big-T transformations, whose details are to be left to, well, the low and mean cunning of others who know better than the critics how to get their hands dirty. It’s also more than passing odd that those who rightly fault government policies and projects should at the same time not develop counternarrative policies and strategies to test and validate their increased understanding of what is actually underway on the ground.

III

Some already know and act upon the above, but still: So what?

It seems to me that we are at a conjuncture similar to that Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues found themselves in at the 1985 Annapolis Conference on Common Property Resource Management. There she worked with researchers who had presented case material finding too many empirical and policy shortfalls in the Tragedy of Commons and government rural management policies.

From that conference and subsequent work came the counternarrative for which she later won the Nobel Prize in the misnamed field of economic sciences. Today, we need other pastoralism counternarratives, and even researchers focusing exclusively on the depastoralization of pastoralist societies presumably can esteem that challenge, which she also met.

I.

What are the problems?

The details vary from country to country, though not by much. . . All are caused by a latent policy of austerity, resulting in a failure to invest in public goods. These are, in no particular order: stagnant growth, under which any structural change takes on a zero-sum character; the deterioration of public infrastructure, including railways, bridges and roads; a growing housing shortage and rising urban rents; the failure to adapt both cities and rural areas to the consequences of climate change; the lack of an immigration policy to counterbalance an ageing population alongside a sharp decline in birth rates; the decay of the education system, particularly primary schools; the indebtedness of local authorities and their diminishing ability to make necessary investments and provide essential services; growing inequality in income and wealth, with low-income families – particularly those headed by single mothers – chronically the worst hit; and, last but not least, widespread anxiety about the future, driven in part by fear of cuts to state-provided essential services that are becoming increasingly hard to finance.

What’s to be done?

Above all, questions must be asked – particularly by the left – in front of an audience who, contrary to the advice of PR ‘experts’, we must still regard as capable of reason if democracy is to continue to exist. How do we get capital to foot the bill for the costs it imposes on society and nature? How do we prevent tax avoidance and tax evasion? How do we protect companies that provide good-quality work for the people in our country from a global trade system that shows no regard for working people? How can we halt the decline in our population, through immigration as well as through better family policies? How do we relieve our local administrations of their debt burdens, to allow them to provide the public services that are indispensable for a good life for all in a society in transition such as ours? And how must ‘our democracy’ be restructured so that it can be a democracy for all and give its citizens the opportunity to take control of their own lives, rather than having to beg for help from a state whose coffers are empty and will remain so for a long time to come?

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/who-will-pay?pc=1789

That’s it? Really? I mean, is this even good enough? Surely, more useful things can be said, even when, as I believe, the above is true as far as it goes.

II.

Quietism of despair would have been one 1950s’ reaction. Calls for capital-T transformations are, however, common these days: economic, political, global, planetary, interpersonal, behavioral, ecological, ontological, epistemological, normative–whatever, it’s got to be capital-T. These Big Changes are all urgent, even more so because the details of implementation and operation are, well, unclear.

A more useful first response, I argue, is to accept the challenge of recasting the above “What are the problems?” and “What’s to be done?”

I’m quite willing to believe that it’s too late, what happens next will be worse, and anyway it’s all overtaken by politics, dollars, and jerks. I’m unwilling to accept that proposition, though, without first analyzing the preconditions for and ways then to undertake recasting. Why? Because the assumption of intractability stops short of the multiple interpretations that the complexities of policy and management open up for reframing, redescribing, revising, reorienting, and repurposing.

III

Frankly, you must wonder why so many people believe they sit on analytic perches above it all from which they can peer, prognosticate and puppeteer problems and solutions all the way down. Speaking for myself, I’m in the middle of fragments that are at best candidates for “problems,” as if I’m reading a book’s index, the only thing left behind from a multi-volume text that has since disappeared, or never existed. It’s natural to make connections between and among the entry terms in front of you and me, though where apophenia begins (if at all) is not clear.

A 1950s reaction as well? Perhaps; arguably more so since mysteries over connections are (for me) a clear adjunct to uncertainty, but mystery is not something Anthropocene uncertainty cultivates. Rather, policy analysts like myself are left with a (faux?) familiarity that feels more like scrapbooks, plaster cast replicas, and rehanging museum walls.

Policy analysis and public management as first a curation of fragments before the recomposition(s)?

---

NB. For examples of the kind of recastings called for please see When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene (Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, 2023) https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/18008

Especially in analytic philosophy, we have come to value a certain measured style that comprises perspicacious structuring of arguments, clear signposting, definite conclusions, systematic presentation of evidence, elimination of the author’s distinct voice and autobiography, lack of flourishes and digressions, avoidance of ambiguity, and other such stylistic properties. We may call such a style the ‘objective style’ of discourse.

https ://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article/61/4/559/6402993

Response? Total social construction, that “objective style”! Logocentric, Eurocentric (and probably worse).

Compare then to the genre strategies identified from a review of current fiction in the Italian literature market on the climate:

In techno-scientific thrillers, agency is concentrated in heroic figures (scientists, experts) who must overcome institutional obstacles to implement solutions; they express a decisional verticality (hierarchical authority in crisis decisionmaking) that contrasts with social inertia. Techno-scientific thrillers are dominated by anxiogenic urgency; anxiety is amplified by means of tight narrative rhythms and the constant threat posed by imminent disasters. An emotional mobilization is consequently ignited, oriented toward immediate action. This pattern corresponds to a form of “technocratic imagination” (Gagné 2019) in climate discourse, whereby specialized knowledge becomes the primary force driving environmental action. Besides, post-collapse dystopias manifest themselves in survival micro-agencies (limited agency focused on day-to-day survival). In this context, agency is reduced to the daily dimension of survival in a hostile world, formally exhibited through task-oriented dialogue and routine-centered plots. It is the expression of a destabilizing horizontality that makes it impossible to plan and achieve long-term goals. Dystopias also show traits of an affective tension between nostalgia for a lost, almost idealized world and present trauma, thereby producing what could be called ecological grief, namely, an incomplete psychological processing of environmental loss.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41290-026-00289-9

Response? But, but the urgency, that anxiety, those obstacles and inertia, the loss and grief, the trauma and dystopia if we don’t do something now–all that is true!

Response: Read more complicated literatures, if it’s policy and management you’re worried about.

(The Comments at the originating YouTube sites provide background. Subtitles are available under CC or Settings.)

I

The usual way floating and empty signifiers are distinguished is that the former are terms or concepts with (too) many meanings, while the latter have none. The ready example of a floating signifier in today’s policy discussions is “capitalism,” since it’s

laissez-faire capitalism, monopoly capitalism, oligarchic capitalism, state-guided capitalism, party-state capitalism, corporate capitalism, corporate-consumerist capitalism, bourgeois capitalism, patrimonial capitalism, digital capitalism, financialized capitalism, political capitalism, social (democratic) capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, crony capitalism, cannibal capitalism, wellness capitalism, petty capitalism, platform capitalism, cloud capitalism, infrastructural capitalism, algorithmic capitalism, aspirational capitalism, welfare capitalism, compliance capitalism, authoritarian capitalism, imperialistic capitalism, turbo-capitalism, post-IP capitalism, green (also red and brown) capitalism, climate capitalism, extractive capitalism, libidinal capitalism, regulatory capitalism, clickbait capitalism, emotional (affective) capitalism, tech capitalism, American capitalism, British capitalism, European capitalism, Western capitalism, transnational capitalism, agrarian capitalism, disaster capitalism, rentier capitalism, industrial capitalism, post-industrial capitalism, fossil capitalism, settler-colonial capitalism, supply chain capitalism, asset manager capitalism, information (data) capitalism, cyber-capitalism, cybernetic capitalism, necro-capitalism, bio-capitalism, war capitalism, crisis capitalism, managerial capitalism, stakeholder capitalism, techno(scientific)-capitalism, pandemic capitalism, caring capitalism, zombie capitalism. . .

Nothing would seem more policy relevant than capitalism, but even a cursory study of the list identifies no shared or central focus on, importantly, markets and prices. The cumulative implication for policy analysis, my profession, is obvious: Just what is the–or even “an”–anti-capitalist alternative?

II

If capitalism as a floating signifier makes a hash of what it is to be “anti-capitalist,” the opposite is the case for the empty signifier of that equally policy relevant neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is almost always a term used by those whose position is anti-neoliberalism. “Recent scholarship has suggested that ‘neoliberalism’ functions almost exclusively a term used by its critics,” where

An empty signifier, in Laclau’s vocabulary, is a name progressively emptied of specific content so
that it can stand for an entire chain of heterogeneous demands: the poorer its intension, the wider the
coalition it can represent (Laclau, 1996, 2005). . . .Laclau was entirely lucid about the epistemic price and entirely explicit that it was worth paying, because the point of such signifiers is not to describe but to assemble [and articulate]. . . .

Defenders of the concept argue that neoliberalism names a real macro-phenomenon and that the term’s breadth reflects the breadth of the thing (Peck, 2013; Laruffa, 2024). Our argument does not require denying this: real processes of marketisation, privatisation and financialisation occurred. The question is why they came to be gathered under this name, in this form, on this timeline. . .

A concept that functions as an articulating signifier is unlikely to be disciplined by demonstrations of its descriptive failure, because description was never its principal function, and the productive question may therefore be less ‘what is the correct definition of neoliberalism?’ than ‘what work is the concept doing, for whom, and at what analytical cost?’

Paniagua, Pablo and Vergara, Álvaro (2026). “Neoliberalism As Adversary: The Latin American Construction of an Empty Signifier”. My underlining. https://ssrn.com/abstract=7316099)

The upshot: The analytic costs in relying on and using “neoliberalism”–and by implication other empty signifiers–understandably trouble the policy analyst more than the policy advocate intent on articulating who the adversary is and assembling coalitions to oppose it.

III

Floating and empty signifiers are problematic for policy analysts when these terms, capitalism, neoliberalism and the like (e.g., “cooperative global governance”), are exiled from their specifics and particularities as events, situations and contexts. More, the identification of systemwide patterns (if any) over a range of different events, situations, and contexts–including but not limited to those self-identified as neoliberal or anti-capitalist–is also unavoidable for the analyst.

Why? Because practices surface in pattern recognition and become the signifier of interest–the center of analytic gravity–for the analyst. It’s the practice of protesters waving or holding blank sheets of paper that is significant. Practices for managing assets (A) differ from the older practices of commodification (C), which in turn has changed Marx’s classic formulation for making more money (M’) from M–C–M’ to M–A–M’.

IV

So what? Two implications follow from this reshifted focus to practices.

(1) First, centering the analysis of policy on existing practices helps explain why human values and beliefs are more often the floating and empty signifiers of choice in policy advocacy. Policy analysts are, in my experience, keener at describing the formal and informal routines, procedures, mechanisms and improvisations key critical infrastructures undertake in order that real-time market exchange and transactions take place. In contrast, the policy advocates with whom I’m familiar are more comfortable in focusing on, say, “human greed” and “belief in markets” to explain that which takes place.

The latter quotation marks are not meant to be pejorative, but rather to mark that both signifiers need to be recognized as socially constructed before taking further action (not that greater detail is very much required before proceeding analytically).

(2) Second, the response of policy analysts to policy advocates’ reliance on empty and floating signifiers isn’t to insist advocates provide these details. Policy advocacy is an entirely different genre than policy analysis. Rather, the burden of proof is on the advocates to demonstrate their signifiers hold regardless of the more granular qualifications or exceptions provided by analysts.

An example is instructive. Asked if there were any parallels in current events to the Roman Empire, Edward Luttwak, a controversial scholar on international, military and grand strategy, offered this:

Well, here is one parallel: after 378 years of success, Rome, which was surrounded by barbarians, slowly started admitting them until it completely changed society and the whole thing collapsed. I am sure you know that the so-called barbarian invasions were, in fact, illegal migrations. These barbarians were pressing against the border. They wanted to come into the Empire because the Romans had facilities like roads and waterworks. They knew that life in the Roman Empire was great. Some of these barbarians were “asylum seekers,” like the Goths who crossed the Danube while fleeing the Huns. 

https://im1776.com/2023/10/04/edward-luttwak-interview/?ref=thebrowser.com&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Of course, some read this as inflammatory and go no further. Others dismiss it as outright racist, adding the ad hominem “Just look at who is writing and publishing this stuff!” But the method to adopt as a policy analyst would be to press Luttwak, the policy advocate, for counter-examples.

An empty signifier, in Laclau’s vocabulary, is a name progressively emptied of specific content so
that it can stand for an entire chain of heterogeneous demands: the poorer its intension, the wider the
coalition it can represent (Laclau, 1996, 2005). . . .Laclau was entirely lucid about the epistemic price and entirely explicit that it was worth paying, because the point of such signifiers is not to describe but to assemble [and articulate]. . . .

Defenders of the concept argue that neoliberalism names a real macro-phenomenon and that the term’s breadth reflects the breadth of the thing (Peck, 2013; Laruffa, 2024). Our argument does not require denying this: real processes of marketisation, privatisation and financialisation occurred. The question is why they came to be gathered under this name, in this form, on this timeline. . .

A concept that functions as an articulating signifier is unlikely to be disciplined by demonstrations of its descriptive failure, because description was never its principal function, and the productive question may therefore be less ‘what is the correct definition of neoliberalism?’ than ‘what work is the concept doing, for whom, and at what analytical cost?’

Paniagua, Pablo and Vergara, Álvaro (2026). “Neoliberalism As Adversary: The Latin American Construction of an Empty Signifier”. My underlining. Available at SSRN:  https://ssrn.com/abstract=7316099 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.7316099)

The upshot: The analytic costs in relying on and using “neoliberalism” or the like understandably bother the policy analyst more than the policy advocate intent on articulating who the adversary is and assembling diverse opponents to it.

For the analyst, patterns (if any) to be identified and analyzed across a range of different events, situations, and contexts–including but not limited to those self-identified as neoliberal–are unavoidable. Why? Because different details are differently actionable, and analysis renders that patent.

I

It’s easy enough to take “right, center and left” and extrapolate a linear continuum: as when politic moves from the right through the center into the left.

But the straight line becomes V-shaped, when the center is stretched and pulled away from the other two ends, as when the sequence, beginning/middle/end of a story, is made to sag like a hammock.

Think here of the time-consuming catch-up to the contingencies that come in medias res, rendering beginnings long gone (or always disputed) and ends further off than our stories assumed at the start.

That’s what wake-up calls do when they identify intervening crises that stretch time and stretch space out of shape between thought-to-be beginnings and thought-to-be endings.

II

For example, the Covid-19 pandemic was reported to us by several emergency managers as “a wake-up call” with respect to the interconnectivities and vulnerabilities among water, electricity, roads and other backbone infrastructures in Oregon and Washington State. In the view of an experienced emergency management expert, “the one thing that the pandemic is bringing out is a higher definition of how these things are interconnected and they’re not totally visible”.

Covid-19 response made clearer that backbone infrastructures, especially for electricity, are “extremely dated and fragile” in the view of an interviewee. So too shortages in road staff in the aftermath of a vaccine mandate were mentioned by a state emergency manager for transportation as making it more difficult to undertake operations. Covid-19 responses also put a brake on infrastructure and emergency management initiatives already in the pipeline (e.g., preventative maintenance), according to multiple respondents.

The pandemic combined at the same time with other emergencies. A heat dome episode required a treatment plant’s staff not to work outside, but in so doing created Covid-19 distancing issues inside. The intersection of lockdowns and winter ice storms increased restoration times for some electrical crews, reported a state director of emergency management for energy.

A vaccination mandate on city staff added uncertainty over personnel available for line services. Who gets to work at home and who gets to work in the plant also created contention. “We struggled with working with contractors and vendors” over the vaccine mandate, said a state emergency manager for roads: “If we had a catastrophic disaster three months ago that would have been a challenge for us to work through.”

“All [Covid-19] planning happened on the fly, we were building the plane as it moved, we’d never seen anything like this,” said a state logistics manager of their early response. The interviewee added: “Covid is so unique and out of the box that we’ve developed rules and processes that we’re only going to use during Covid because they don’t make sense in any other disaster”.

In other words, the Covid-19 pandemic was a wake-up call to front-line managers about interconnectivities, but not even a rehearsal for what is also to come their way in terms of other crises (including the much-predicted magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the two states’ coastline).

III

Many crises are, I submit, V-shaped, notwithstanding their linear scenarios. So what?

Minimally, it means that table-top exercises (a.k.a. rehearsals) based on beginning-middle-end crisis scenarios will inevitably be less V-shaped than required when really-existing contingencies intervene. This is not to say table-tops are not useful. It is to say that the most useful table-tops are likely to be wake-up calls to more crises or different ones than thought pre-tabletop–and also requiring now-NOW attention.

The point is that we are once again back to a key narrative discrepancy in crisis scenarios—between the stated urgency to DO SOMETHING NOW on the one side, and the stated requirement to do so safely with respect to the ends in sight on the other side—while all the time recognizing that both requirements are urged on us and underwritten by the very same unpredictability at the very same scale of analysis, the system level.

On one hand, it is argued we have to experiment even if it risks the limits of survival; on the other hand, being safe means no error should ever be the last trial. This is a discrepancy because it can’t be written off or talked out of; it has to be managed as one of the Anthropocene messes we are in. COVID wasn’t a prequel to another story with its own beginning, middle and end. That is the wake-up call!

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Source: The research, from which are drawn interviewee quotes, is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant 2121528.