I

To be honest, I’ve thought of pastoralists I met as working people. That’s because I saw my grandmother, Ruby (Simpson) Roe, work for years at the assembly line of Ford Motor Company in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Hands-on work is what she did. Now, most herders I met in Botswana, Kenya, and Zimbabwe didn’t dress like her, talk like her, live in a house like hers, but in these eyes of mine they were all working people.

This means the gorge rose when I read Moravia’s ghastly Which Tribe Do You Belong? Ditto ick for Naipaul, who was no better than Ruark on colonial Kenya or Monsarrat about Bechuanaland. Better instead to talk to Bessie Head face to face (I did) or read that great, great, great workers’ novel, God’s Bits of Wood, by Ousmane Sembène (translated by Francis Price).

I don’t wear this background as a badge of merit, but offer it by way of explaining why I’ve found some academic studies of pastoralists also to be alien and alienating. There, herders are portrayed as anything but working people. Why? Because, well, it’s their unique practices and incommensurable world-views that set them–and all of us–apart. Now, I get the part that their tasks are not the same as on automobile assembly lines of the 1940s to 1960s, and yes, I also get the irreducible particularity of Being. But, folks, I can’t shake away working people.

II

All this is my long way of trying to stay open to thinking differently about herder behavior and pastoralism. True, we are very good at critiquing those glossy pictures of smiling Maasai jumping into the air while holding their cellphones, but pointing out (as if it mattered just as much) that the beads being worn have long come from Europe or further afield. I think we are less adept in making lateral connections, e.g., where today young herders wait around like urban gig workers elsewhere.

Let me extend that simile to provoke your thinking further. Instead of talking about grazing practices, herd mobility, shortage of herder amenities, overall poor living conditions and their marginal social status, think of practices as performance, mobility and herding itineraries as travel, scant amenities as the role of, say, everyday music while herding, and all that poor or picturesque clothing as, well, fashion in its right. To do so means we end up describing “scenes” more than “issues”. As in, e.g., the frequently narrativized “downtown” scenes for the arts, music and lifestyle alternatives, where that “alternative” carries a quite different valence that the “marginal’s” of many pastoralism studies.

In shifting the policy and management focus from issues to scenes, we are explicitly shifting to a central focus on what have called frictional, improvisational contact zones that everyday pastoralism shares with other scenes organized around (alternative) performances, travel, music and fashion. That this analytic shift–probably still far-fetched to some!–complicates official and academic policy narratives about pastoralism is a welcome one in my view. How so?

III

If we stick with the conventional view of herders as their own unit of analysis, we’ve been trained to think of informal contact zones as the decreasing space between two blades of modernity’s scissors: One blade is everyday pastoralism commodified by really-existing markets and state interventions; the other blade is everyday pastoralism disciplined into categories from really-existing officials, consultants, and social scientists.

The contact zones I am talking about, however, are a response to the scissors cutting one way only. Whether the zones are formal or informal is not the point. Pastoralism is, to use the phrase, an “infrastructural form.” It is a scene-making device that is exceptionally adept at rendering all that unromantic, unsentimental dust and sand and dirt in photos of herds and herders alive with working relations and affordances that necessarily extend beyond market and state.

____

Source. I shamelessly borrow (the errors are my mine alone) from Jennifer Park (2026), “index Magazine and the Downtown Interface: Art, Music, Fashion, and Indie Publics in 1990s New York,” Fashion Theory (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1362704X.2026.2712394

Even [Robert] Fogel, the staunchest advocate of econometrics and the counterfactual method, adopted a more conciliatory approach toward “traditional” historians following the intense debates of the 1970s. Fogel’s shift in tone reflected his intellectual maturation, shaped in part by his debates with noncliometric historians. He told [Douglass] North that his views on historical method grew closer to those of more “traditional” historians like Geoffrey Elton and Lawrence Stone because of a “better understanding about what each of us was getting at.” He moved away from the revolutionary rhetoric of his early career, conceding to his opponents that humanistic history was “complementary” to scientific history and therefore not destined to disappear (Fogel 1979: 2, 48; 1983). . .

Like the proponents of the “old” economic history in their day, he now contended that economic models and statistical techniques served merely as tools to support narrative history, rather than as replacements for it. In his final book on antebellum slavery, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (1989), he set out to illustrate the complementarity of scientific and traditional methods by integrating cliometric analysis with a qualitative, interdisciplinary exploration of the political institutions, social norms, and ethical perspectives that made and unmade the slave system over three hundred years (Fogel 1989). Fogel described Without Consent or Contract as a “narrative history” that fell into the “traditional” rather than the “scientific” mode, because it was a narrative only partly based on cliometric methods. In his opinion, a narrative spanning three hundred years could not be scientific, as there was no scientific procedure for integrating and interpreting the various pieces of quantitative and qualitative evidence used in constructing the story.

(accessed online at https://read.dukeupress.edu/hope/article/doi/10.1215/00182702-12511398/409321/Dehumanizing-Economic-History-Cliometrics-from; footnotes deleted for ease of reading; underlines are mine)

Let’s repeat that last sentence, shall we? There is no scientific procedure for integrating and interpreting the various pieces of quantitative and qualitative evidence used in constructing a longer term narrative.

A recent article “questions the analytical and empirical dominance of the term ‘resistance’ and contends that the term may at times obscure the proactive, enduring and often existential dimensions of political action which might be better captured by the term ‘struggle’” (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2158379X.2026.2681610). An earlier article on resistance, however, finds:

As is often noted, resistance is a term that seems impervious to stable definition. The term has a number of conceptual neighbours which are not quite its synonyms, and sometimes even function as its antonyms: dissent, rebellion, opposition, revolt, insurrection, revolution, protest, civil disobedience and conscientious objection. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01916599.2018.1473955; internal footnote deleted)

Oops, no ‘struggle’ in that list either.

Just as I have distrust speculative metaphysics, so too I distrust discussions at these levels of terminological abstraction. Meanings are in the uses of the respective term and differentiated uses emerge across a run of events, situations and contexts (cases). That’s why really-existing practices are the starting point of analysis. What is called resistance of state-imposed agendas here might well be defense of still-evolving practices there.

I’m hardly the first to have been struck by the analytic tip in my profession, policy analysis: What used to be dealt with at the local, regional and even national levels, at least when I started out in the early 1970s, must now be addressed first and foremost globally (think “global warming”). What I was unprepared for was how “the local” has been consigned to analytic oblivion as the tip proceeded.

Let me give an example from the field of Infrastructure Studies. To be clear, I agree with every word in the following:

Infrastructures should be understood as plural, active, and dynamic, producing a range of impacts, both planned and unplanned, on the places and societies they traverse and inhabit. These insights reinforce the characterization of infrastructures as socio-technical networks, while their multiple and often ambiguous effects partially challenge the intentionality presumed in [Michael Mann’s 1984] conceptualization of infrastructural power. For example, recent scholarship highlights the unanticipated costs or forms of violence that infrastructures can impose on disenfranchised communities and regions.

The socio-technical nature of infrastructures is clearly reflected in their politicization and contestation, which reveal competing social interests across multiple scales. Commonly regarded as background systems, infrastructures rarely occupy public attention until they fail to meet expectations, whether through malfunction, inadequate supply, or clashes with users’ interests and needs. Increasing attention has also been paid to infrastructures’ negative externalities, or “public bads,” including ecological, social, and psychological harms, revealing both conflicting local perspectives and broader changes in societal priorities and beliefs, as well as new forms of collective identity and agency, manifested in labor strikes, acts of sabotage, or protests. (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1368431026145776; internal citations deleted)

To me, this passage represents hard-won insights over years of research, namely: the units and levels of analysis are socio-technical, networks, across scales, contingent on context, and often with unanticipated and unintended impacts.

But then comes the irresistible updraft in the article’s next sentence:

These dynamics are not confined to the local scale: transnational infrastructures are increasingly implicated in broader geoeconomic contexts, as exemplified by the Houthi attacks on the Red Sea shipping lanes, the shutdown of major Chinese ports under Beijing’s zero-COVID policy, and the disputes surrounding the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

Well, yes, that’s true of course, but still: Just what is happening at the lower scales of analysis? Indeed, how do actual operations of critical infrastructures unfold at the local and regional levels?

The article, like so many others, is off and running to the international, global and now planetary levels–understandably so, since that’s analytic tip after all–but: Even if what the article continues to say is just as true as the above quotes, that truth needs to be pushed further, especially as variation in inter-infrastructural connectivities at the local and regional levels matter so often and so directly for policy and management.

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NB. For more on this analytic tip, see my 1994 Narrative Policy Analysis.

I

My proposition is that these three statements are true–and majorly so–as far as they go: 1. The most difficult part of undertaking a conventional policy analysis is predicting the consequences of business as usual and our proposed alternatives; 2. More generally, the mess we are in today–and not just as policy analysts–is our inability to predict the future(s); and 3. When it comes to predicting, we often lack the imagination to connect the policy and management “dots” right in front of us.

It is easy enough to quibble with the three. My point here, however, is that even if the statements were true, they’d still need to be pushed further, and the way to do that is to recast conventionalized understandings of prediction and imagination. Why a rethink? Because in doing so, present problems of prediction and imagination can become more tractable to policy and management.

To telegraph ahead, the issue is to find levels of granularity via the recast issues (no guarantees these levels are there) that become more actionable in comparison to current understandings.

II

Let’s start with the following example by way of illustrating the last point:

Once an artificial island, the ancient site of Soline was discovered in 2021 by archaeologist Mate Parica of the University of Zadar in Croatia while he was analyzing satellite images of the water area around Korčula [Island].

After spotting something he thought might be human-made on the ocean floor, Parica and a colleague dove to investigate.

At a depth of 4 to 5 meters (13 to 16 feet) in the Mediterranean’s Adriatic Sea, they found stone walls that may have once been part of an ancient settlement. The landmass it was built upon was separated from the main island by a narrow strip of land. . . .

Through radiocarbon analysis of preserved wood, the entire settlement was estimated to date back to approximately 4,900 BCE.

“People walked on this [road] almost 7,000 years ago,” the University of Zadar said in a Facebook statement on its most recent discovery. . .”Neolithic artifacts such as cream blades, stone [axes] and fragments of sacrifice were found at the site,” the University of Zadar adds.

accessed online at https://www.sciencealert.com/road-built-7000-years-ago-found-at-the-bottom-of-the-mediterranean-sea)

This artificial island has also been part of an installation work by German filmmaker and moving image artist, Hito Steyerl, and described as: “submerged by rising waters that speak both to geological deep time and contemporary climate upheaval” (accessed online at https://aestheticamagazine.com/flooded-worlds-parallel-realities/).

Take another look at the photo. You too can see the submerged island, its causeway to surface land, and imagine how the still-rising waters will inundate more ahead in the climate emergency. The problem arises when the preceding “imagine” is treated as a premature demand to shift from the granularity in front of you to a prediction about what is to happen more broadly, now and ahead.

For take a further look at the photo and reread the accompanying text and ask what that displayed level of granularity now enables you to ask: “But what about the presettlement template displaced by the Neolithic roadway and settlement and their own follow-on effects?” “Or for that matter, what about what’s been preserved here from having been submerged for so long? What does this tell us about how the retreat from rising sea level was managed, at least here and then?”

That is, in asking such questions you end up focusing on: “What happens next here and now?” I mean that literally: “What happens next at and around the submerged site? Are they to be protected (that is, why these sites and not other worthy candidates for infrastructure protection in the face of the climate emergency)?”

Initially, you may think the above example lays the basis for predicting the need to do something with respect to the climate emergency elsewhere and over the longer haul. I instead am suggesting that really-existing accomplishments that happen over time and at that site–if you will, the track record of building on affordances provided by setbacks then and there–go to reframe a pertinent policy relevance. People already understand what are case-specific accomplishments and setbacks in ways that a broader “infrastructure success or failure with respect to the climate emergency” can be understood by others only later on.

III

One consequence of “infrastructure success and failure” only being better understood retrospectively is that predicting success ahead entails not really understanding what has been predicted. I’m speculating here that if we dial back the terminology to the more granular level of specific accomplishments and specific setbacks, we are also better positioned to be more usefully abstract–less granular in some of our scenarios–about what’s ahead.

For example, surprise and contingency often produce the granular, if not idiographic, conditions and demands for improvising real-time management of critical infrastructures. Setbacks and accomplishments abound, which in turn produces two further findings. These, however, lack the same level of granularity of many of the preceding conditions: namely and more abstractly, real time infrastructure operators in the face of the climate emergency also face what is predictably unimaginable and what is so taken for granted it is not even predicted.

1. The predictably unimaginable. It’s no surprise when experts predict disasters with unimaginable consequences because they cannot specify scenarios of sufficient granularity for action or not. But–and keeping with our climate examples–in practice this means we start with the worst-ever floods and earthquakes in the US and then argue that the Magnitude 9 earthquake off of the Pacific Northwest will be unimaginably worse. We don’t say, at least in my experience: As unimaginable disasters are indescribably catastrophic, we need to narrow our focus to something like a M9 earthquake. Why? Because by narrowing we frame what we know and don’t about really-existing improvising and ingenuity with respect to the worst-ever floods and earthquakes that have happened.

2. The taken for granted in no need of prediction. Stay with the assumption that a M9 earthquake in the Pacific Northwest will be unimaginably catastrophic, especially under dynamic climate conditions. Indeed, that conclusion is taken-for-granted knowledge by many of our interviewees–so taken for granted, it isn’t a prediction as much as it is a given. (Other givens may include, e.g., the presence of an Incident Command System or equivalent.) But the infrastructure necessity to improvise in any earthquake means there are no other givens. From the infrastructure control room and field operators perspective, nothing is predictably taken-for-granted in these conditions and thus predictions can be–and often are–besides the point.

Both cases, 1 & 2, stand out because their backdrop conditions are all those other scenarios granular enough to be actionable in real time, either by way of emergency preparation or during immediate disaster response. In both cases, there is no workaround for what is actually improvised because the level of granularity isn’t there to specify beforehand (or during) one or more such scenarios. Either way, however, what happens is accomplished even if later judged less as a success, whereas even a real-time setback needn’t be a failure.

Where then are we to find the actionable granularity, if it exists?

IV

One answer is to start with those really-existing improvisations and cases of ingenuity in major disasters. Here too this means dialing back the terminology from imagination and creativity to quick fixes, operational redesigns and just-in-time activities involving one but often more personnel (virtuosos, as described to us by some). Efforts to restore critical infrastructures during immediate emergency response (e.g., through placement of mobile telecommunication towers) almost always entail real-time improvisation, within or across the infrastructures involved. Indeed, improvisations may become the only key real-time interconnection between the systems during those times.

What does this mean practically?

Policy and management upshot. It means capitalizing on and leveraging existing initiatives that have already “seen the light” with respect to the centrality of interconnectivities for improving restoration resilience (again keeping with sea level rises, think port traffic services, marine exchanges, and harbor safety committees). The priority in focusing on those who actively acknowledge the centrality of interconnectivities is made all the more visible because these remain early days in thinking through emergency management in terms of infrastructural connectivities. Even when global factors such as climate and economics clearly influence major disasters, that acknowledgement needs to be pushed further, as variation in inter-infrastructural connectivities at the local and regional levels matter so often and so directly for policy and management. . . .

[To be continued]

—Latest blog entries include

**”Thinking infrastructurally: how escape, escapism and the inescapable matter when conventional risk management fails“

**”A renewed relevance of “refusal” in rethinking social tolerance and the politics of care“

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—When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene, along with schematic, 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)

This working paper updates many blog entries prior to its June 2023 publication. 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)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/07/03/major-read-sourcing-new-ideas-from-the-humanities-fine-arts-and-other-media-for-complex-policy-analysis-and-management/

**”17 examples on how genre differences affect the structure and substance of policy and management [newly added]: https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/02/27/seventeen-short-examples-on-how-differences-in-genre-affect-the-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” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/08/31/major-read-instead-of-differentiated-by-gender-race-and-class-why-not-differentiated-by-heterogeneity-and-complexity-t/

**”New method matters in reframing policy and management (recently added)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/07/15/major-read-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” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/02/23/emerging-counternarratives-on-migrants-border-controls-digital-networks-remittances-child-labor-covids-impact-africa-and-europe-and-global-neoliberalism-newly-added/

—Other major new reads:

**”The ‘future’ in HRO Studies: the example of networked reliability” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/10/17/the-future-in-hro-studies-the-example-of-networked-reliability-as-a-form-of-reliability-seeking/

**”The siloing of approaches to discourse and narrative analyses in public policy” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/07/25/major-read-the-siloing-of-approaches-to-discourse-and-narrative-analyses-in-public-policy/

**”A National Academy of Reliable Infrastructure Management” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/08/21/a-national-academy-of-reliable-infrastructure-management-resent/

**””Learning discrepantly” for policy & management (updated and expanded)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/07/08/major-read-learning-discrepantly/

**”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.” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/01/21/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” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/08/09/the-centrality-of-restoration-resilience-across-interconnected-critical-infrastructures-for-emergency-management-a-framework-and-key-implications-research-report-f/

—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.” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/07/17/if-not-corpse-pastoralism-then-what-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” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/05/01/time-to-think-more-radically-three-policy-narratives-for-pastoralist-development-that-are-extremely-different-from-current-positions/

**”Other fresh perspectives on pastoralists and pastoralism: 17 brief cases (last newly added)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/05/11/other-fresh-perspectives-on-pastoralists-and-pastoralism-17-brief-cases-last-newly-added/

**”A ‘reliability-seeking economics in pastoralist development” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/01/16/a-reliability-seeking-economics-in-pastoralist-development/

**”Twelve new extensions of “pastoralists as reliability professionals” and “pastoralism as a critical infrastructure” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/12/20/new-extensions-of-the-framework-for-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” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/08/12/four-briefer-points-of-policy-relevance-for-pastoralists-and-herders/

—Key blog entries on updating Narrative Policy Analysis are:

**”Updating NARRATIVE POLICY ANALYSIS (1994)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/10/14/updating-narrative-policy-analysis-1994/

**”Narrative policy analysis: then, now and ahead” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/06/04/narrative-policy-analysis-then-now-and-ahead/

**”The policy relevance of Michel Riffaterre and Algirdas Greimas: the example of global climate change (GCC)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/07/16/the-policy-relevance-of-michel-riffaterre-and-algirdas-j-greimas-the-example-of-global-climate-change/

“commensuration – the process of measuring according to a common standard, or bringing things into relationship for quantification or proportional comparison”

Market software exists in the transmission grid infrastructures to establish and operate on the basis of real-time energy prices. Centralized control rooms there turn out to be an unique organization formation to balance competing demands under pressures of real-time load and generation. This means preventing the physical and operational collapse of the infrastructure while undertaking these market transactions. (There have been notable cases where market designs and transactions have physically endangered the underlying infrastructure for those markets.)

The control rooms we have studied do a great deal of boundary work in ensuring an autonomy or semi-autonomous position because of the real-time urgency in having to make hour-by-hour decisions for an entire, complex system. Two important practices seeking to do so deserve mention.

An important part of the boundary work is the control’s unique (but not guaranteed!) capability of achieving team situational awareness in times of emergency (where “keeping the bubble” can be thought of as a kind of mutuality-in-autonomy). Second, the importance of improvisational behavior when push comes to shove. Ingenuity in assembling options for the next step ahead can be observed in situations where formal protocols and procedures do not apply or have yet to be rendered.

So what? The cognitive and behavioral demands on operators and the worlds in which they work are more differentiated and variegated than supposed by outsider-analysts who assume a fully commensurable or commensurated system.

Yes, of course, refusal as a political new beginning

To refuse is to say no’, Carole McGranahan (2016: 319) argues. ‘Refusal marks the point of a limit having been reached: we refuse to continue on this way’ (ibid.: 320, italics in original). As a political stance, refusal does not signal the ending of the predicament but indicates a new beginning. Many studies converge in defining refusal as constitutive and generative of something new, including political spaces, communities and subjects (ibid.: 322). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dech.12726

And yet, refusal can entail a nonpolitical

[Maurice] Blanchot rejected de Gaulle and the false choice between civil war or the general — the civil war was already underway in Algeria and continued after de Gaulle came to power — but he also refused to formulate a political demand, a different path, a different solution. The refusal was “silent.” In this way, there was a difference between Blanchot’s refusal and other contemporary interventions (Roland Barthes, Socialisme ou Barbarie, the Situationists, etc.) that took the form of political analyses and mobilization. Blanchot did not mobilize. The rejection was, of course, a political intervention — or, at least, an intervention in politics. . . .

[But the] refusal did not give rise to a political community in any traditional sense. There was no identity, no nation, no republic, not even a working class, nor a program around which the community could unite. . .As Blanchot put it, “the refusal is accomplished neither by us or in our name, but from a very poor beginning that belongs first of all to those who cannot speak.” The refusal was, therefore, a mute statement. It pointed to a gap in representation and did not refer to any recognizable political subject. https://illwill.com/the-movement-of-refusal#fn62 (endnotes deleted)

Huh? A more complicated example of not-speaking as refusal

The basic principle to adopt, Sihem [the meeting facilitator] suggests, is that ‘there is no absolute truth’ (ma famash heta haqiqa thabita). Some participants nod their heads in agreement but Fethi, a young man. . ., intercepts with an objection:

“Fethi: Well, there are absolute truths for some people. We live in a Salafist neighbourhood and these guys believe they enact God’s law from the time of the Prophet (peace be upon him).
Sihem: Okay yes. But you can ask them to explain their point of view. What is their rationale (logique) for following this old law to the letter?
Fethi: No, you can’t ask them for their reasons. I know these guys, they are neighbourhood kids (oulad houma). I grew up with them and went to school with them long before they became Salafist. I even have a cousin who is a Salafist. They don’t engage in conversation if someone asks them to explain their position. They just turn around and leave.
Sihem: That’s the biggest problem in our country [Tunisia]. The dictatorship wanted people to be naive and uncritical. This is why we have so much extremism among our youth. But I encourage you to keep trying to speak with your Salafist neighbours. If they leave the discussion with one single doubt about their position, then you have won. This is the power of dialogue (hiwar).
Fethi retorts: Maybe this is case with other people. But not with the Salafists. They are convinced. They want to live in God’s country.”

. . . the democracy promotion aid that I interrogate here focused on the way people spoke to people they already knew or knew enough about. This was definitely the case in communities that training programmes designated as being in conflict. In practice then, the public sphere they aimed at forging through training did not posit interlocutors as biographical strangers. It is also important to highlight that both Shaja ̔a members and Salafists deliberated with their respective publics (like-minded peers) through their associational life, mosque attendance, in cafés, and on social media. What they chose not to do was to speak to each other with a view to bridge their different worldviews. https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.14317?af=R (my underline)

So what?

The preceding underlining sounds a bit like advocating social tolerance, doesn’t it? Neighbors put up with what they disapprove of in the name of something like comity. There is some truth in that, but the matter’s more usefully complex.

The opposite of tolerance isn’t intolerance: In being intolerant, you’re still disapproving. The actual opposite of putting up with what one disapproves of is, as others have pointed out, indifference–not caring one way or another about whatever. And therein, I think, lies the insight.

What is going on with the neighbors is, actually, a kind of caring. Yes, it is caring one way rather than other ways, but whatever way it too is part of the public sphere. Practices of caring are of course socially constructed, but the “politics of care” is a rather narrow way of summing up the point made in the Tunisia or other cases for that matter.

It’s all well and good to insist that efforts to decouple, disengage or otherwise detach from the political is itself political. But that is hardly the human starting point for refusal: It is, after all, the planet that refuses to prioritize us, and in response we invert by refusing anything like closure on the matter through our seriatim crisis scenarios. We label this “nature’s indifference,” but only because we refuse any denial that our priorities matter, and matter well beyond caring one way or another. No wonder “repair” looms large in all this.

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Other sources:

Stevenson, A. 2017. About Poems and how poems are not about. Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Series #16. Northumberland, UK: Bloodaxe Books.

1. It’s no news that policy analysts can and do confront not so much discrete events with discrete consequences as unpredictable contingencies coupled (loosely?) with uncontrollable aftermaths, about which there is little causal understanding. One mighty obstacle to identifying root causes of any event is the inability to uncover what counterfactual accidents and disasters had been avoided by those contingencies that happened instead. These conditions mean appeals to anything like prolonged stability in the midst of collectively-evident turbulence should be read symptomatically, namely, as escapism.

But not all escapes are escapism. An example helps.

2. The Precautionary Principle insists on avoiding positions that may have extreme consequences in favor of a more cautious approach. The immediate question arises: Where does the control come from to achieve the avoidance of contingencies and/or aftermaths? You can legislate the Principle, but that doesn’t mean you can control its implementation. To think otherwise is escapist.

And anyway, aren’t critical infrastructures the only real-time large-scale mechanism we have to manage for avoiding or otherwise responding to the dreaded events? Here disaster-averted is one you’ve escaped (that is, avoided).

3. So what? The next step is to historicize and particularize all this.

It was once common to understand socio-political polarization and fragmentation in both negative and positive senses. Yes, fragmentation can represent negative segmentation of authority, but it can also reflect positive functional specialization. Yes, polarization can represent the inability to speak with one voice, but it can also reflect transparency of issues and keeping trade-offs public. Yes, conflict can be bad, but conflict can also be good. . .and so on down the list of putative negatives in American society that in specific contexts, situations and events can be net-positive. 

But “on net” makes little sense in static terms of pros versus cons. “On net” has become fuzzier because of complexities that are inescapable when context, situation and event cannot account for or assimilate all that matters for policy and management in real time. But this complexity doesn’t annihilate life; it is life. With that recognition comes no workaround for the improvisation–and revisions–ahead. Is it any wonder that “repair” looms large in all this?

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NB. For a different recasting of many of these points, see Adam Phillips (2026). “Escapism,” chapter 2 in The Life You Want, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York.

I

Thornton lowered his voice. “You see, dearest, it’s been a sea-change since you abandoned the humanities and went off to that professional school. You wouldn’t believe the committees the chancellor puts me on! Of course my lips are sealed. Sealed, sealed, sealed. Ask no more, Peter. Don’t even try!”

“Thornton, this is not going to be your wicked and droll, is it?” Peter said.

“Moi? Everything I’m about to say is entirely fair Though not everything made it into my final report to the chancellor,” added Thornton.

II

“I have to start with the background. One of the first things the new chancellor did was to establish the All Campus Organizing Council. All-COC, which I regret to say it is not, has many mandates, but you need only know it fosters all manner of taskforces. I chaired what is called the interdisciplinary team, of whose acronym I also need say no more. It was milked for an interdisciplinary seminar in that department, a cross-disciplinary conference in another department, a trans-disciplinary workshop off campus. 

“Now, from time to time it was my sore duty to attend the events we sponsor. Some did betray a whisper of humor, but most devolved into a discussion about ethics–you just know a field is going nowhere, when the only thing they end up discussing is ethics! 

“Well, here I am at a seminar in the College of Agriculture, Resources and the Environment. That’s CARE to you. Peter, dear, you must remember it? CARE has produced the stay-soft (all-mush) peach, the BetterLife™ (Bet-her-life!) household insect sprays, and the workerless irrigation technologies (or WITless to its critics). If you believe the reports, a dollar of its research leads to a $2.50 return in agricultural productivity, blah blah market share blah blah. 

“What this research actually means, of course, is the immiseration of farmworkers, the erasure of the family farm, and the concentration of productive wealth into multinationals. Yes, yes, the litany. However, small blessings being what they are, the press sniffed some of what was going on, the mediaship went into its brownian motion, the legislature rumbled, a court case was settled out of court, and, lo, CARE found itself more caring.

“One consequence was my team was asked to come through the front-door and sponsor the Dean’s Seminar Series, ‘What are natural resources?’ The idea was a simple one, as you might expect. Whatever, I find myself at a seminar titled ‘What are natural resources? The perspective of a humane biotechnologist.” No joke; the boredom was palpable. Four people in the room. Finally, I asked the most perfectly obvious question, absolutely no malice intended Peter, so I put forward, with the obligatory outsider preamble of not being a scientist, “What about agricultural biotechnology is natural?” I mean, it is thelr title! So the presenter looks at me, pauses for that longest moment, and says: “But, what’s more natural than a gene!”

“Well, let me tell you Peter you needn’t be a slave to history for one’s eyes to widen, I am feeling very good about myself these days, and just when I’m thinking about having myself cloned, these Mengeles-in-waiting are talking as if they’re ready to take away the very molecules that make me interesting. Well, I mean, really. I knew then these people needed watching.

III

“So, when out of nowhere, the chancellor asks me to chair the very hush-hush committee on the scandals involving the CARE’s new dean, I accepted with alacrity. 

I now must introduce the College’s dean to you, Dean Trumplethinskin. You may have met him when you were there, Peter. He was just a senior faculty member then, one of those kinds of business school types you’re supposed to get used to. He has always had a deplorable reputation for being abrasive in social gatherings and lacking skills for polite company. ‘Grab ‘em by the pussy’ he’d say by way of motivating people.”

Peter snapped his fingers. “Of course! My God, not the Trumplethinskin?’ Thornton nodded grimly, adding for good measure: “He’s at a colleague’s party, she hands him his drink, he barely sips, his face goes sour, she asks what’s wrong, he says, ‘This drink is like screwing in a canoe–fuckin near water,’ and then turns away.”

Thornton continued, “Trumplethinskin was recruited to our campus’s league of nations as the first incumbent of the Walter P. Grapefruit Chair in Anti-Communist Political Economy. It turns out he also arrives just as the start of the CARE’s reorganization wars. The old dean tried to create a Department of Social Studies by merging the College’s Department of Agricultural Economics with College units on park and nutritional sociology. It was Trumplethinskin’s abrasiveness that saved their day. ‘You can’t do that!,’ he shouted. ‘They’re economists, for Christ’s sake, not social scientists! When was the last time any of them were published in Mathematica?’ 

“The reorganization wars left a bad taste. Trumplethinskin’s predecessor fast became the most reviled man in CARE. Muffled screams for ‘evolution, not revolution’ were heard. Faculty meetings would find social scientists hectoring insecticide faculty, ‘Well, at least our research doesn’t kill farmworkers.’ CARE was not a happy place. The old dean retreated to his office. He retired. ‘I leave for the best job in the world,’ he said at his going-away party: ‘I’m going to be a former dean!’

“During all this Trumplethinskin relished less and less the eyrie of his departmental chair. He had reached a stage where it was time to move on, do something to make more money, not more articles on the role of hotel schools in agriculture. What better, then, than the deanship? 

IV

“The search for the new dean was speedy. The other candidates were a cultural historian, whose book, The Social Construction of Nature, was well-received by her two colleagues; a bioengineer, who didn’t own a biotech company and thus had no respect among his peers; and a well-known political scientist who always thought it best to conclude, rather than start, his publications with some variant of ‘We’re still not asking the right questions. . .’ Frankly Trumplethinskin could have crowned himself dean.

“The new Dean’s first task was to take ‘reorganization’ to new depths. He drove though the privatization of the CARE’s agricultural extension service into an online digital platform, weCARE2.edu. He hired a consultant from his own outside firm who recommends that, yes the new Department of Life Sciences should remain, but should be decentralized into autonomous divisions that ‘more matched the unique distribution of faculty expertise, core competencies and disciplinary fields,’ namely, the original private sector focus on insecticides, agricultural technology, industrial forestry, and farm management.

This de=reorganization is then implemented, which meant–of course!–the Dean’s office had also to become a profit center. Which–of course!–made Trumplethinskin far too reckless. Which in turn led to the scandals I ended up investigating. . .”

Thornton paused, took another sip, and actually looked forward to what came next.