Introduction: contemporary political agency in the age of globalization

This book aims to fill the gap between the theory and the practice of political agency. In political and social-science literature, political agency is an understudied topic. There is much research focusing on specific political actors and on the different modes of political action: who the actors in the contemporary political context are and what they do. But a sustained investigation of the notion of political agency as such is missing – what political actorness means today, and what ‘doing’ politics means in the present context, are questions which are not often posed in political science. The absence of these research questions is troubling because it signals a narrowness of the theoretical and indeed political perspective. By not asking the more theoretical question of what being a political actor means, current political science tends simply to follow the traditional understanding of political agency as rooted in conventional domestic (parties, unions, bureaucracy, etc.) and international (states) images of political actorness, while ignoring the new forms of political agency in today’s public arena, whether domestic, international, or indeed ‘intermestic’ or transnational. All in all, this narrow perspective fails to fully capture politics as it is now, and does not aid our attempts to understand how our social and political world works. We badly need a more sophisticated and updated understanding of our world. This is not just a theoretical deficit; it is far more serious, as the practice of political agency is undergoing tumultuous change and we are lagging behind in our ability to fully capture it. Profound transformations are altering our grasp of politics, political actors, political action and, indeed, even political agency itself. Without new intellectual equipment, we run the risk of misinterpreting our political life, and, ultimately, of losing control of it.