Conceptualising the Political Imaginary: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

The political is changing its shape. Ideologies are no longer stable, but instead build hybrid combinations. Populism is getting popular. In addition, there are new forms of political experiences, online and offline movements, and a new kind of political consciousness, which does not necessarily follow the logic of political institutions and is sometimes anti-political or post-truth. These phenomena are signs of a deep transformation of the political imaginary. Yet, the imaginary is a collective structure that organizes the imagination and the symbolism of the political. Against this background, it becomes evident that traditional concepts of political science and sociology have difficulty explaining how the political is constituted, since these disciplines have not, by and large, addressed the question of how the political is imagined. In general, these disciplines have focused on political institutions and actors, and sometimes scholars take the political culture into account, but they are mainly still using the traditional framework of the civic culture (Almond and Verba 1963). The understanding of how political principles are shared or how institutions are legitimized is still incomplete. It is the intention of this issue to reopen this question and to contribute to further work on the political imaginary.

Echoing and re‐echoing refugee policies in the international system: The Lebanese state and its political imaginary

“…Departing from this perspective, the article explored how Lebanon has cast refugee reception as a set of representational practices enacted and reenacted in its contextual strains, logics of socio‐political control and political imaginaries. It has shown how Lebanon has performed and spatialized refugee stay as a danger to its sectarian make‐up and to its geopolitical representations of “the self” and “others.” Contributing to theoretical debates on how refugee practices travel (Janmyr, 2021) and how states embed such practices within a broader imaginary forming and transforming the political (Browne & Diehl, 2019, p. 394), the article analyzed how Lebanon has sought to echo and reecho prescriptions for refugee solutions in the face of its international interlocutors.…”

“…By recasting hospitality as a risk and contesting prescriptions for refugee stay, the political elite have enacted Lebanon's refugee policy as an assemblage of governing strategies and geopolitical tactics. In this regard, they have embedded representations of asylum within a broader “political imaginary” (Browne & Diehl, 2019) framed here as a set of symbolic practices and ideas seeking to legitimize and reproduce ruling class agendas. The following figure captures some of the tactical motives and objectives underlying such refugee representation practices (Figure 1).…”

“…This article sets out to contribute to the debate on how Arab states, generally regarded as recalcitrant implementers of refugee norms and rule breakers in the international system, have sought to shape the understandings and practices of refuge (Chatty & Fakhoury, 2021). More broadly, it also hints at how states draw on the question of asylum to craft "political imaginaries" (Browne & Diehl, 2019) defined as certain ways of seeing, representing, and enacting the political to entrench power structures and strategies of governance.…”

Imaginaries of patienthood: Constructions of HIV patients by HIV specialist health professionals

“…The analytical approach takes its cue from recent syntheses of social epistemology and the sociology of imaginaries (Browne & Diehl, 2019). Following Goldman (1999), the analysis attended to group consensus about things which were considered to be true; in other words, judgement aggregation or disaggregation.…”

Beyond Exception and Supremacy: Adwa in the Black Radical Imaginary

“…In conceptualizing the black radical imaginary, I draw on the recent work of political theorists Paula Diehl and Craig Browne, who described the political imaginary as -a collective structure that organizes the imagination and the symbolism of the political, and therefore organizes the instituting process of the political as well‖ (2019). Diehl and Browne theorize the political imaginary based on Charles Taylor's theorization of the social imaginary in his 2004 book, Modern Social Imaginaries, where Taylor stresses the relational dimension of the way people imagine their social existences, -the expectations that are normally met and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations‖ (Taylor, 2004;Diehl & Browne, 2019). Diehl and Browne took Taylor's concept and focused it on political life, which makes it more relevant for my purposes.…”