Politics in essence is an extremely contested phenomenon as it was historically understood as the art of government/state, as public affairs in most general viewpoints, as the non-violent resolution of different disputes, and, finally, as power and the distribution of various kinds of resources [...]
There are many official and unofficial as well as academic and non-academic approaches and formal/informal definitions of politics and its functioning in society. However, as the most universal concept, it can be concluded that politics is simply the ability to direct and administer a state (in ancient Greek – polis or a city-state) or some other political organizations (like multilateral, international, supranational, etc.). In essence, the administration of the state or other political subjects is a matter of art.
The state can be defined as a political association that establishes autonomous/sovereign jurisdiction within defined territorial borders. In addition, sovereignty is the practice of superior political authority that is reflected by the state to be the only and superior creator of laws and power to protect them within the borders of the state (real or imaginable). In practice, there are two types of state sovereignty: external and internal.
External (political) sovereignty considers the state’s ability to act as an independent actor in international relations. However, practically, it implies two crucial points:
1) That states have to be from different viewpoints (or at least legal) equal in relations with each other; and
2) That the territorial integrity followed by the political independence of a state is inviolable.
Internal (political) sovereignty of the state, however, refers to the territory within the state borders by the supreme political power (government, in practice backed by armed security forces). Finally, politics is closely related to the concept of authority which is the ability to influence the politics of others, basically, based on required duty and obey.
Nevertheless, as can be expected, the understanding and especially some official definitions of politics is historically speaking very highly and even essentially contested matter. In practice, there exists a high degree of disagreement about very practical issues on which aspects of social life and human environments can be applied to the art of politics. According to one approach, a person by birth is political which simply means in the practice that the fundamental essence of political life is going to be seen in any inter-human relationship including, for instance, gender relations (male/female). However, in popular usage around the world (but especially in the West), the restricted framework for politics is designed. In order words, it is, basically, understood that politics is working only on the governmental level dealing with state affairs. In Western societies, politics, in addition, has to involve political party competition followed by multiparty elections for different levels of authority. In general, politics as a sociohistorical phenomenon is extremely limited in both space and time.
The traditional understanding of the phenomenon of politics was that it is “the art and science of government” or “management of the state affairs”. However, in this case, the practical problem is still unresolved: it was never reached a common agreement about the scope of which activities and levels of state management the government is responsible for. For instance, some of the focal questions are:
1) Is the government restricted only to state affairs?;
2) Does the government have the right to interfere in the affairs of the church, local community, or family?;
3) Does the government take place in a (liberal) economy?; etc.
Historically, the philosophers of political science have been dealing with two crucial questions applied to the phenomenon of politics:
1) Do other creatures except human beings exercise politics; and
2) Is it possible for society to exist without politics?
Some of them claimed that other creatures (like bees) have politics and that some kind of society, at least theoretically, (like Utopian) can exist without politics. In practice, nonetheless, politics is applied only to human beings; in other words, to those beings who can communicate symbolically and as a result make statements, accept certain principles, argue, and finally disagree. For instance, politics happens in cases when human beings argue about some practical issues in their societies and have certain procedures to resolve the problem in order to find a common agreement acceptable at least by the arithmetic majority (democracy) but not necessary. In the Western (liberal democratic) concept of politics, no (real) politics in cases when there is a monolithic and total agreement on the rights and duties in a society (for example, in the one-party dictatorial/totalitarian system).
However, from the broadest viewpoint, politics refers to certain activities used by human beings to create, defend, and change rules on different levels under which they are living. Politics was all the time closely linked to both conflicts and cooperation and agreements and disagreements. From one viewpoint, there is the practice of opposite arguments, opposite wishes on how to solve the problem, competing political, economic, social, etc. wishes, and beating the interests of the others. In this case, there is disagreement about the rules under which the people of certain societies are living. However, in many practical cases, for the sake of influencing such rules (law) or forcing their practical implementation, people can work with other people. Nevertheless, politics in essence is an extremely contested phenomenon as it was historically understood as the art of government/state, as public affairs in most general viewpoints, as the non-violent resolution of different disputes, and, finally, as power and the distribution of various kinds of resources. Finally, statecraft (political management of the state) can be defined as the art of conducting public affairs and foreign politics to realize national interest: goals of state foreign policy for (supposedly) the benefit of society.
In any case of the acting of the state as an independent political actor either in inner or outer politics, the possession of real power is necessary. The phenomenon of political power can be understood as the ability to influence the results of certain actions, which includes the ability of the state to manage political and other affairs within its own borders without the interference of other (outside) political actors. In this sense, state politics and power are in very close relations, basically synonyms.
Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic
Ex-University Professor
Research Fellow at Centre for Geostrategic Studies
Personal disclaimer: The author writes for this publication in a private capacity which is unrepresentative of anyone or any organization except for his own personal views. Nothing written by the author should ever be conflated with the editorial views or official positions of any other media outlet or institution.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter (X), Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/LegalStatement!
DonatetoSupportUs
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
Power in politicsPower is the ability to make people, states, movements, organizations, or things to do what they would not otherwise have done. It is a matter of fact that politics is seen to be about might rather than right. It can be said that, in essence, politics is power or in other words, the ability of some international actor to get desired results of his/her political behavior by using whatever instruments (legal or not, moral or not, etc.). In the very broadest sense of its meaning, power can be understood as the ability to influence the results of certain ...
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford“For Russia, the war in Afghanistan is a domestic issue, with a direct impact on the drug trade and terrorist attacks on Russian cities”.If the United States were not a superpower, it would be the joke of the planet, a nation whose government tells the most outrageous and ridiculous lies -- and may actually believe them -- and whose corporate media report those lies as gospel truth. The latest whopper comes from the mouth of James “Mad Dog” Mattis, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, who claims the Russians are providing weapons ...
I was 23-years-old the first time I was arrested. It was at the Pentagon— an act of civil disobedience in protest of the U.S. war on Vietnam. My boyfriend, Jerry Rubin, and I were organizers for the National Mobilization Committee Against the War (familiarly called The Mobe).Here we call it the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese more accurately call it the American War. After all, the U.S. was the aggressor. It was our troops that landed on their soil; our planes that bombed their cities and sprayed Agent Orange; our army massacred their civilians, women and children included. Not the other ...
How does the West get away with its pretense of being an alliance of great democracies in which government is the servant of the people?Nowhere in the West, except possibly Hungary and Austria, does government serve the people.Who do the Western governments serve? Washington serves Israel, the military/security complex, Wall Street, the big banks, and the fossil fuel corporations.The entirety of the rest of the West serves Washington.Nowhere in the West do the people count. The American working class, betrayed by the Democrats who sent their jobs to Asia, elected Donald Trump and the American people were promptly dismissed by ...
War with Russia appears increasingly likely as the US and its NATO satraps continue their military provocations of Moscow.As dangers mount, our foolish politicians should all be forced to read, and then re-read, Prof. Christopher Clark’s magisterial book, ‘The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.’ What is past increasingly appears prologue.Prof. Clark carefully details how small cabals of anti-German senior officials in France, Britain and Russia engineered World War I, a dire conflict that was unnecessary, idiotic, and illogical. Germany and Austria-Hungary of course share some the blame, but to a much lesser degree than the bellicose French, ...
The US has been threatening Iran for more than 20 years. Already during the Clinton administration, US Central Command (USCENTCOM) had formulated “in war theater plans” to invade both Iraq and Iran. This posting which includes selected articles from our archives was originally published by Global Research 12 years ago in May 2005. In the wake of the war on Iraq (2003), the Bush administration officially identified Iran and Syria as the next stage of “the road map to war”. Bush’s National Security doctrine contained in the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a continuation of Clinton’s “strategy of ...
The Russian government’s sincere and diligent effort to prevent chaos in Syria and additional massive refugee flow into Europe, all the while avoiding conflict with Washington and its vassals, has been brought to an end by Washington’s intentional attack on a known Syrian army position, thus wrecking the cease fire agreement that Russia sacrificed so much to achieve.The response to this fact by the Obama regime’s ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, reveals that Washington will lie to the hilt in order to achieve its agenda of reducing Syria to the same chaos as Washington has reduced Iraq and Libya. ...
PrefaceThe article has the aim to investigate the situation of female representation in politics in the industrialized contemporary Western democracies. Though women are more and more visible in politics, we can not yet say they have taken an equal position compared to men. Of course, they have had to take a long road and there is certainly a positive evolution, but there are still some mechanisms that lead to different kinds and levels of political discrimination.The focal goal of this article is then, trying to find out what the factor processes are that lead to these discriminations, and which solutions ...
Kosovo obtained part independence when America and many European nations gave the go ahead for the creation of this new nation. However, it is clear that things are not plain sailing because many other nations did not support this elitist adventure, therefore, the wider international community was ignored. Therefore, today we have a situation where some nations support this new state, however, the majority of nations in Africa, Asia, and South America, have not given their consent.Also, the Russian Federation, Spain, and some other European nations, refuse to accept this American led adventure. Therefore, what does the future hold for Kosovo ...
In British mainstream commentary, the 1999 NATO bombing campaign against Slobodan Milosevic’s Yugoslavia is seen as a ‘humanitarian intervention’. Tony Blair still receives much praise for coming to the defence of the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, whose plight was surely serious as they were subject to increasingly brutal abuses by the Yugoslav army towards the end of 1998 and early 1999. Yet the NATO bombing that began in March 1999 had the effect of deepening, not preventing, the humanitarian disaster that Milosevic’s forces inflicted on Kosovo. The bulk of the atrocities committed by Yugoslav forces took place after the NATO ...
Whilst there are no golden ages, it is abundantly clear that the world today is in a very unhealthy state. From Eastern Europe to North Africa to the Middle East, countries, in recent years, have been severely destabilised, resulting in carnage and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of lives.And at the heart of that destabilisation is American and British foreign policy.But how have we arrived at this situation in the world today? And what are the roots of America and Britain’s ‘humanitarian intervention’?A lot of people answer the above questions by citing the illegal American and British invasion of ...
Robert Mueller, a former director of the FBI who is working as a special prosecutor “investigating” a contrived hoax designed by the military/security complex and the DNC to destroy the Trump presidency, has yet to produce a scrap of evidence that Russiagate is anything but orchestrated fake news. As William Binney and other top experts have said, if there is evidence of Russiagate, the NSA would have it. No investigation would be necessary. So where is the evidence?It is a revelation of how corrupt Washington is that a fake scandal is being investigated while a real scandal is not. The ...
Right now the US mainstream media is obsessing over Donald’s alleged womanizing and female groping soap opera as the Clinton’s/MSM’s pruriently entertaining smokescreen, neatly designed to cover up Hillary/Bill’s serial raping and her criminal lead role as enabler/strong armed intimidator of past victims.Meanwhile, barely noticed in a virtual media blackout in the West are at least a half dozen high alert, significant international developments this last weekend that all strongly indicate the extreme danger of a nuclear war breaking out at any time against Russia and its Eastern alliance. Again, do not pay attention to the US deceivers behind their Oz-like curtain ...
Led by the US and NATO, the clash of imperialist powers accounts for the absence of stability not just in the Middle East and Africa, but also the Ukraine and parts of Asia. Behind the rhetoric of democracy, national security, and anti-terrorism there are direct diplomatic and indirect diplomatic efforts through government-financed and pro-business NGO’s. There are overt and covert military operations carried out by the US, EU, China, Russia and their less powerful allies motivated by aggressive intentions for spheres of influence and markets. Behind the “war on terror” and regional conflicts around the world rests the reality of ...
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has become a serious danger not only to his own nation, but to many others as well. His actions and statements in recent years should seriously worry his neighbors and the entire world.The last tyrant ignored by the international community was the genocidal butcher Adolf Hitler, who unleashed World War II, invading scores of countries and killing millions of people. Regrettably, Western leaders have tried to appease Erdogan, thereby creating a monster.Strangely, some nations in the Islamic world have treated him respect, while many Western countries consider Turkey as one of their key allies. To ...
In examining the future, we must look to the past.As we watch the media today, we are spoon fed more and more propaganda and fear of the unknown, that we should be afraid of the unknown and have full faith that our government is keeping us safe from the unknown. But by looking at media today, those of us who are old enough will be reminded of the era of Cold War news articles, hysteria of how the Russians would invade and how we should duck and cover under tables in our kitchens for the ensuing nuclear war.Under this mass ...
One of the most hyped “events” of American television, The Vietnam War, has started on the PBS network. The directors are Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Acclaimed for his documentaries on the Civil War, the Great Depression and the history of jazz, Burns says of his Vietnam films, “They will inspire our country to begin to talk and think about the Vietnam war in an entirely new way”.In a society often bereft of historical memory and in thrall to the propaganda of its “exceptionalism”, Burns’ “entirely new” Vietnam war is presented as “epic, historic work”. Its lavish advertising campaign promotes its ...
This article is excerpted from Fawaz A. Gerges’s forthcoming book, ISIS: A History.Although the spectacular surge of ISIS must be contextualized within the social and political circumstances that exist in Iraq and Syria and beyond, the group’s worldview and ideology should be taken equally seriously. Ideology is, after all, the superglue that binds Salafi-jihadists known as revolutionary religious activists or global jihadists of the ISIS variety to each other. The Salafi-jihadist movement emerged from an alliance between ultraconservative Saudi Salafism (or Wahhabism) and revolutionary Egyptian Islamism which was inspired by the Egyptian master theorist, Sayyid Qutb. The Afghan war against ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]
It is unreasonable to ask taxpayers to pay billions more dollars for NATO’s budget because they get less and less peace, security and stability, says Jan Oberg, director of Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research.NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the bloc’s security spending would see its biggest increase since 2014, by 4.3 per cent in 2017. This is a response to US President Donald Trump‘s criticism of NATO countries failing to increase military budgets.Stoltenberg also said the alliance has combat-ready forces along Russia’s border.“NATO’s four multinational battle groups in the Baltic countries and Poland are now fully operational, ...
Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic
