What is society?

Democratic Organizing and Political Change: Toward a Research Agenda

Abstract Democracy depends on people having the capacity to act collectively and navigate difference, yet political science often overlooks the transformative work that enables this. This essay foregrounds democratic organizing: sustained, relational, and strategic work that transforms people – reshaping their identities, relationships, and sense of what is possible – while building the collective capacity needed to act together across difference and inequality. Distinct from mobilizing, it does so through sustained relational investment rather than episodic activation. Drawing on U.S. and global examples, we present a conceptual framework built around three analytically distinct principles: interdependence as the proper ontological unit of analysis, power with as the mode of collective capacity-building organizing produces, and the politics of possibility as an orientation toward democratic futurity that keeps people engaged when outcomes are uncertain. We situate these principles within existing scholarship on collective action and civic engagement, extending that literature to address what it has systematically overlooked. We then outline a concrete research agenda for studying organizing as a central engine of democratic development.

Educating for character in imperfect societies: the right and responsibility to learn to say that 2 + 2 = 4

The End of DEI

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is one of the most polarizing issues in business and society. Advocates claim that DEI enhances fairness, while critics argue it undermines meritocracy. The problems often stem from the practice of DEI—reducing it to demographic diversity—rather than its principle. This paper proposes an alternative framework—Potential, Synergy, and Inclusion—that preserves DEI's objectives while addressing its weaknesses. Potential emphasizes recruiting individuals for their capacity to create future value rather than past achievements. Demographics can be informative about an applicant's trajectory, but many other aspects of their background are also relevant. Synergy focuses on building teams with complementary skills and perspectives. One such synergy arises from cognitive diversity, for which demographics are only a partial source. Inclusion enables employees to voice ideas, challenge norms, and overcome structural frictions. While DEI is viewed as advancing only minority groups and primarily aligned with one side of the political spectrum, the proposed approach seeks to grow the pie for the benefit of all.

«Soft Collectivism»: An Ethical Critique of the ESG Regime

The ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) regime has consolidated as the principal normative architecture of corporate activity in Europe. Academic critique of the phenomenon has been predominantly technical—divergence among rating agencies, agency problems, and empirical ineffectiveness—ethical critique remains pending. This article advances such a critique from the convergence of three traditions: the libertarian ethics of natural law in its Rothbardian formulation; Hayekian spontaneous order theory and its economic correlate in the Austrian theories of dynamic efficiency and synergasia (Ravier); and Catholic Social Doctrine, from Rerum Novarum to Caritas in Veritate. The principal conceptual contribution consists in coining the analytical category of soft collectivism to name how the ESG regime operates: it subjects the firm through conditioning rather than command, hollowing out the content of rights without altering their juridical form. The mechanics of this subjection operate through soft law, institutional isomorphism, the spiral of silence, and the bootleggers-and-baptists coalition within a state culture that Bagus's counterfactual criterion identifies as indirect coercion. The convergence between Catholic subsidiarity and Hayekian spontaneous order—two formulations of the same formal structure—yields a unanimous verdict against the ESG regime. Against the bureaucratic simulacrum of social responsibility, the article posits genuine entrepreneurial responsibility—voluntary, prudential, subsidiary, and oriented to real service—as the only coherent alternative within the converging ethical demands established by the analysis.

How the Land Speaks: “Native Culture” as Mediating Politics in Individual–Group Relationality

Indigenous peoples are often valorized as automatically politicized collective subjects, backgrounding the precise mechanics of individual-to-group political formation. In the case of “Native Hawaiian culture”, a locally invoked category of norms, practices, and knowledge, this article examines its semiotic bases for motivating Indigenous resistance in Hawaiʻi. Beginning with settings of socialization and education, “Native Hawaiian culture” is taught to emerge from the land and ancestors. In subsequent politicized registers, this indexicality of “culture” transforms to produce new forms of value, whereby “culture” encompasses lands and ancestral heritage, which actors then see as facing episodes of colonial elimination. In this register, one’s own experiences, ancestors, and lands link to those of an encompassing national scale. In this individual-to-group semiosis, individuals’ experiences are reconstrued as instantiations, or tokens, of the larger, actionable political type. This article shows how rendering a political formation depends on “Native culture” not as a stable given, but as a mediating process of semiotic reconfiguration.

BRICS development: multicentricity, network structure and expansion

The article discusses the organizational evolution of the BRICS association in the context of a fundamental transformation of global political organization. The authors proceed from the premise that contemporary global politics is increasingly moving away from a purely hierarchical model toward a more complex, multicentric structure, in which network interactions between states, non-state actors, and their associations are beginning to play a key role. Within this approach, BRICS is viewed not simply as an economic association, but as a unique network structure whose flexibility and multilayered nature allow it to successfully adapt to new global trends. The main research focus of the work is on identifying the specific features of BRICS’s organizational ties as an association of states from the Global South and on analyzing the impact of its large-scale expansion in 2024-2025 on these ties. The authors demonstrate that, unlike formal international organizations with a rigid hierarchy (e.g., NATO) and even other club formats (G7, G20), BRICS builds interactions based on the principle of a complex network. This network encompasses not only the intergovernmental level (summits and ministerial meetings), but also a diversified grassroots infrastructure: over a hundred working groups, business and expert councils, university networks, and a rapidly developing partnership between cities and municipalities. This density of the network, according to the authors, ensures the stability of the association even during periods of weakening political coordination at the highest level. The article devotes particular attention to the dual nature of BRICS expansion. On the one hand, the transformation of the “old five” into the “big ten” (with the addition of Egypt, Iran, the UAE, Ethiopia, and Indonesia) enhances the global legitimacy, representativeness, and economic weight of the association, strengthening its position as a center of a multicentric world. On the other hand, the authors identify a range of internal challenges associated with the increasing complexity of network structures: more cumbersome and slower decision-making, competition for leadership between “old” and “new” members, the expansion and potential overload of the agenda with national and regional priorities, and the risk of new nodes and interest groups forming within the network. The article contributes to the study of the transformation of global political organization and offers a framework for understanding the role of informal network structures in contemporary world politics.