Social Analysis

This special issue examines how authority is simultaneously made and unmade through situated ethical experimentation. We map a continuum of ethical practices, ranging from the improvisational adjustments of everyday life to high-intensity moments of rupture, showing how both ends of this spectrum can unsettle prevailing modes of authority and reconfigure the moral orders that sustain them. Conceptualizing un/doing authority as a hinge between ethical practice and moral order foregrounds the uncertain and often risky work through which legitimacy is enacted, negotiated, and contested. The contributions trace these dynamics across diverse socio-cultural contexts, engaging three globally significant discourses—authoritarianism, participatory governance, and self-help—to explore how experimental practices of authority-making open pathways for imagining and enacting alternative political and moral futures.

In a changing urban environment where community-led peace-building and deradicalization initiatives increasingly appear alongside punitive state interventions, several former criminal gangs in Mombasa, Kenya, have begun transforming themselves into youth groups that pledge to end violence. One such group is the Kali gang, once notorious for violent robberies and local dominance, which underwent a self-directed reform process between 2019 and 2021. Through a community-led research and action (CLRA) project, Kali members engaged in weekly reflective practices, community service, and deliberate restraint from violence. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with former gang members and their communities, this article conceptualizes unlearning violent masculinity as an open-ended, embodied process of ethical undoing. Unlearning violent masculinity thus emerged not as a path to redemption but as a collective, tentative destabilization of entrenched forms of masculine authority.

In marginalized neighborhoods in northeast Paris, community organizers and local government actors have taken to a positive parenting method to reconsider questions of authority in post-colonial France. What was initially a capacity-building program for disadvantaged parents was gradually turned into an experimental ethical field. Finding in it an expert-sanctioned moral framework that resonates with their own critiques, they grasped it as prefigurative of the undoing of institutional violence and the crafting of ‘human’ state authority. This entailed rescaling the moral teleology, techniques, and assumptions of personhood undergirding this 1970s American self-help method, reorienting it from the intimate domain of parenting to the public domain of French state-citizen relations. This rescaling, however, risked reappearing as a new norm for the disadvantaged parents they sought to empower.

This article examines how the authority to ascribe meaning to violence is contested in contemporary urban Guatemala. Drawing on ethnographic research among young hustlers, I trace how police, journalists, and ordinary citizens construct moral frameworks that render certain deaths justified and certain lives expendable. A crime reporter's portrayal of victim blaming as an ethical imperative serves as a starting point for analyzing how everyday deliberations over deservingness reflect and reproduce lethal logics of exclusion. Authority emerges through networked interactions across digital and urban spaces that collectively authorize killing by transforming murders into moral enforcement. In analyzing public reactions to the deaths of two young men, I show how competing processes of ethical experimentation uphold or challenge dominant understandings of legitimate violence and victimhood in post-war Guatemala.

Non-white community organizers with a forced migration background and white advisors inhabit the institutional subjectivity of ‘bridge builders’, a subjectivity that is important for the success of refugee support activities in Rotterdam. To legitimize their activities, organizers and advisors rely on each other to build what this article terms ‘relational authority’. While organizers foster their connections with refugee communities, advisors use their networks to provide access to Rotterdam's bureaucracy and prevent activities from being seen as mono-ethnic. Power asymmetries surface as the advisors have a gatekeeper role while the organizers focus on settling in. Although the subjectivity of ‘bridge builders’ helps the organizers to stage their migration background as capital, the racialized dimensions of this form of authority-making prove resistant to being ‘undone’.

International development policy requires civil society participation, but it can be difficult for governments and donors to identify representative spokespersons. Networks provide an interface, access, and legitimacy for civil society participation. This article explores the case of one such network in Ghana, and how its leadership crafted authority to represent civil society on the Sustainable Development Goals. This ethnographic research shows that the network's external legitimacy hinged on aligning with hegemonic global moral orders calling for partnerships. Among its members, however, the network's authority was contingent on ethical decisions around brokering resources. This research demonstrates that claims to collective authority were only provisional, relying on the leadership's agility in negotiating two moral frames of legitimacy—partnerships and fair resource brokerage.

In Malaysia, women Islamic preachers use various rhetorical devices and performative styles to (re)shape Islamic gender norms. Focusing on preacher, novelist, and influencer Fatima Syarha, who offers compelling guides for pious life and professional ambition, this article asks how these preachers establish their authority in a public sphere that has become increasingly polarized between secular liberalism and religious conservatism. The answer, it argues, lies in the maximization of the creative possibility of genre to simultaneously extend and subtly subvert religious traditions. Crafting experimental and flexible genres through mixing theology, self-help, and fictionalized accounts of the religious self, some of these women preachers develop new registers of authority. Creatively experimenting with the presentation of the self, they situate women simultaneously at the center and at the receiving end of the Islamic tradition.

This incisive and provocative special issue could not be more timely, coming in a historical moment of extreme political-legal and cultural transformations across the world, from the ostensible decline and fall of democracy in the US to international realignments and reconfigurations of power and knowledge that render genocide permissible, or at least ignorable. The rise of the MAGA movement and the Trump regime's autocratic and militarized reconfiguration of US governance are emblematic of such transformations; and their resonances with Hindutva politics later discussed here underscores the global diffusion of anti-democratic populist political forms that have marked the turn of the twenty-first century.