Potentiality, political protest and constituent power: A response to the special issue
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Emergent forms of political protest and constitution often provide limit cases for their contemporary theoretical models, and transnational protest movements from Occupy to Democracy in Europe 2025 are no exception. The recent special issue of the Journal of International Political Theory offers a number of different conceptual paths towards understanding these developments, revising and refreshing categories like civil disobedience, opposition, resistance, as well as constituent and destituent power. However, the plurality of perspectives in the special issue leads to a certain degree of uncertainty in the use of terms. This response to the special issue begins with a reflection on its major conceptual developments, addresses the missed encounter with Giorgio Agamben’s theory of ‘destituent potential’ and develops a framework for contrasting different theoretical approaches to political protest and constitution through their relation to potentiality. This taxonomy of emergent forms of political protest and constitution complements the substantial theoretical developments undertaken in the special issue by making the important conceptual relationships between them more readily visible. As well, by demonstrating the applicability of potentiality to the study of International Relations, this framework contributes to the project of the theoretical investigation of international politics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.022 | 0.038 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".