Dangerous arenas: why activists struggle for change in technocratic institutions

Abstract

Emancipatory activism is often channelled into institutions. While this can be interpreted as a success, it may also demobilize activism. The growing literature on the co-optation of emancipatory struggles and the technocratic exercise of power in transnational politics explains these dynamics with the depoliticizing character of institutions: struggles are depoliticized through institutionalization. Participation in institutional politics is therefore a dangerous undertaking for activists. But why do activists, who are aware of these depoliticizing effects and their corresponding trade-offs, still decide to participate? Bringing recent studies of technocracy in transnational politics into conversation with political theory of activism, we argue that activists in struggles such as social inequality, environmentalism and transformative justice are aware of institutional depoliticization and consciously navigate dangerous arenas in their activism. Based on aspirational politics, they combine incremental and radical visions for change. Such participation is best described with a “perspective of investment”. We conceptualize activists vis-à-vis the institutions they enter, and classify reasons why they do so. We show for the arenas of economic development and transitional justice that through aspiration even technocratic institutions that stabilize (neo)imperial orders can provide spaces of solidarity, resistance, and visions for a new international order.