“Policies & Procedures” - Institutional Violence

Written By Muindi Muindi

The next session of the Against Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide (AGAPE) research group, “Policies & Procedures”, is on institutional violence. Empire uses institutional violence to surveil, administer, and control lives, often through bureaucratic means that appear neutral. Policies and procedures identify and suppress potential rebels, policing livelihoods in insidious ways.

This dispatch serves as both a reflection on the gathering of this session’s co-facilitators and a primer for our upcoming conversation. At the end of this primer, you will find links to suggested media offerings to explore in preparation for our meeting.

Discussion Questions:

The Gap Between Procedure and Reality

  • What is the space between watching institutions bend and break their own procedures and asking, “How can they do it?” How does this gap—between observing institutional violence and questioning its legitimacy—shape our perception of governance and compliance?

  • Compare this to the space between following procedure dutifully in a meeting and stepping out to the bar afterward to laugh with colleagues about its absurdity. What happens in these moments where belief in procedure and recognition of its absurdity coexist?

  • Consider police procedurals on television, where bending or breaking the rules is framed as necessary to catch the “bad guy.” How does this narrative reflect and reinforce the dissonance between procedural promises and institutional behavior?

The Aesthetic of Neutrality

  • Gray walls, uniform furniture, and impersonal language—how do institutions use aesthetics to convey objectivity and suppress dissent?

  • Are policy and procedure a style guide masquerading as rationality? How does deviation from this style create friction and reveal cracks in the system?

Institutionalized Promises and Their Failures

  • Policies promise safety, prosperity, and fairness, yet their failures often leave harm unaccounted for. How do these failures manifest physically and psychologically in those navigating institutional spaces?

  • What does survival look like for those who need these promises to be kept if they are to have a life and livelihood?

Friction as a Clue

  • Friction often arises when individuals fail to conform to the style guide and behave in an “off-brand” manner. How can we read these moments of friction as clues to systemic contradictions?

  • How do people navigate and resist institutional violence in these moments of rupture?

Who Gets to Break the Rules?

  • Let’s talk about who has to comply with procedure as a matter of survival, who can break it when it suits them, and who couldn’t care less about the rules in the first place.

  • What does it mean to live in a world where some people’s improvisations and deviations from procedure are excused (or even celebrated), while others are punished harshly for the smallest infractions? How does this disparity shape experiences of power and resistance?

Pre-Session Primer

It is fitting that this session on institutional violence—policies and procedures—follows our discussions of physical violence—guns and bombs—and cultural violence—smoke and mirrors. Institutional violence does not sustain itself; it is upheld by the threat of physical force and legitimized through cultural obfuscation. Its power lies in its ability to appear neutral, objective, inevitable. To see through this illusion, let us begin with a story.

Imagine a pronghorn antelope moving across the region now known as the U.S.-Mexico border. For the antelope, the border does not exist—there is no “crossing,” only movement.

Now contrast this with the white nationalist militiamen who patrol these lands. They do make sense of the border. Picture a few of them, armed with AR-15s, watching an antelope to their south as it moves northward. As it approaches, one of them fires a shot, killing it. He turns to his companion and sneers, “Ain’t nuthin’ gonna cross the border without papers on my watch.” His companion laughs.

Whether or not you find the joke amusing, you can likely make sense of it—despite its absurdity. Governments do not issue papers to antelopes. Antelopes do not seek permission before migrating. The very notion is ludicrous. And yet, we understand the joke because its underlying message is clear:

We have the right—or if not the right, then the might—to kill those we decide are trespassers.

The killing of the antelope is not simply an act of “border enforcement”; it is a performance of power. The militiaman asserts his prerogative to name, his prerogative to kill. The absurdity of naming the antelope a trespasser—when it cannot possibly recognize itself as such—is precisely what clarifies the nature of his power.

When he kills a migrant, we are conditioned to blame the migrant—they should have known better, they didn’t follow proper procedure, and the policy is to detain or kill those who do not cross according to procedure. This logic distorts our perception of the border, so that we argue about policy and proper procedure, masking the physical violence that structures its existence. Paradoxically, the meaning of the border is most fully revealed not when it disciplines those who “should have known better,” but when it destroys those who could not have known—when its violence is laid bare against beings who cannot even conceive of their supposed crime, those who cannot be expected to know the policy and follow the proper procedure.

The clearest articulations of the border’s function emerge in the caging of children torn from their caregivers, in the disruption of animals’ migratory routes, in the production of dead zones where no vegetal life can take root, and in the damming of freshwater flows. These acts are not incidental—they are constitutive.

I do not say this to frame these beings—human or otherwise—as the “innocent victims” of bordering regimes, but to expose a deeper reality. Global Apartheid, as a regime of governance, as an assemblage of policies and procedures, guns and bombs, smoke and mirrors, cannot fathom the significance or agency of these forms of life and is thus unconcerned with their extermination. It can only recognize the significance and agency of those who ought to know better—what psychoanalysts call “subjects supposed to know”—not those who could never have known.

This is why Global Apartheid does not merely result in Planetary Ecocide—it necessitates it. The elimination of those who “should have known better” is not its ultimate aim; rather, it serves as the alibi that justifies the mass destruction of those who could never have known. Global Apartheid ensures that their extermination appears not as an atrocity, but as a regrettable side effect of order—an administrative accident, a necessary cost of optimization.

That is its logic. That is its horror. And this is the meaning of policies and procedures.

Policies and procedures do not prevent dispossession, denigration, or extermination. They merely demand that those subject to them accept blame for their own suffering—that they internalize the belief that their exclusion, displacement, or death is the result of their own failure to know the policy, to follow the proper procedure. Even when knowing and following such procedures would have made little or no difference.

Because the deeper horror is this: knowing ourselves to be the antelope—the one who could be killed to prove a point—is too much for us to bear. We would rather suffer for breaching policies and failing to follow procedures than confront the fact that, often, there is nothing to justify our suffering but the raw power of those who make us suffer. And so, we obsess over policy and procedure, disavowing the reality that no policy, no procedure, no compliance can grant us immunity from violence that was never about rules to begin with.

Those with power—those who do not live in terror of dying as the unintended consequence of routine disciplinary action, as a regrettable side effect of order, as the collateral damage of society’s pursuit of progressive optimization—do not take policy and procedure seriously. This is not to say that they do not follow them, but rather that they play them like a game. They move freely within and around the rules, reframing their deviations as nimbleness, flexibility, or strategic adaptation. Those without power, meanwhile, must adhere strictly—every misstep punished as incompetence, disorder, or defiance. The same authorities that grant themselves the permission to bend their own policies enforce procedural obedience upon those they govern.

This asymmetry is everywhere. Those who improvise freely are rewarded for their agility, their audacity, their refusal to be bound by rules. But those who resist power—whether through formal opposition or institutional procedures—must follow every rule to the letter. It is the logic of politics, the logic of governance, the logic of the workplace. Donald Trump moves through the world like a man in perpetual improvisation, rewriting norms, ignoring conventions, making it all up as he goes along. Those who would oppose him—from journalists to politicians to civil servants—must prove their legitimacy by demonstrating procedural correctness at every step. Look at him. He does whatever he wants. I follow the rules. Therefore, you should side with me. But it never quite works. Because rule-following does not determine power—power determines whether rules even apply.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Western musical tradition and training, where improvisation is framed not as a birthright, but as a privilege earned through discipline. One may only improvise after mastering the fundamentals. In classical music, in choral singing, in conservatory jazz programs, free improvisation is reserved for those who have first demonstrated technical mastery. Learn the rules, then you may break them. But who determines when mastery has been achieved? Who grants permission to break the rules?

A singer who joins a classical choir without formal training is not told, You have a voice, sing—they are told, You must first learn the notation and the theory. Only after proving one’s literacy is there room for instinct, for the ear that hears harmonies without reading notation, for the voice that understands intervals without calculation. The unspoken message is clear: if you do not have the proper training, you do not belong here. The freedom to improvise is not merely a matter of skill—it is a matter of legitimacy.

This logic is not about ensuring competence. There are those who can cite every definition, every guideline, every historical reference, and still produce nothing that resonates. They wield technical knowledge as a shield, insisting that their work must be correct because it follows the rules, because it adheres to the proper procedure. And when their failures are exposed, when the results do not match the performance of competence, they respond not by listening but by retreating deeper into proceduralism. We have followed the rules; therefore, we must be right.

The same pattern plays out in institutions, where those in power weaponize policy and procedure as a shield against accountability. Loyalty to procedure is not an accident. It is not an oversight. It is not a bureaucratic quirk. It is a deliberate strategy—an intentional, near-religious commitment to ensuring that any challenge, any critique, any demand for transformation can be dismissed as improper, premature, illegitimate. It is a mechanism for maintaining control, ensuring that change, if it must happen, occurs only through prescribed channels, only at the discretion of those who already hold power. And if those channels are slow, if they are inaccessible, if they are structurally incapable of producing the change required, that is not a flaw in the system—that is the system functioning exactly as intended.

Movement is not illegal, but it is made impossibly difficult for some. Travel is not forbidden, but only certain passports can improvise, can be spontaneous, can move without preemptive justification. Someone with a Swedish passport can decide today that they want to fly anywhere in the world, and—so long as they have the money—they can go. No visas, no background checks, no waiting in embassy lines for weeks or months or years. Even when restrictions exist, they are minor inconveniences, not barriers.

Contrast this with those for whom movement is a high-stakes gamble, a desperate improvisation requiring calculation, sacrifice, and risk. Someone with a Kenyan passport might spend years attempting to secure a visa, learning every policy, obeying every procedure at every turn, only to be denied for reasons that are arbitrary, opaque, or simply never explained. And yet, when the Kenyan migrant recognizes that the policies and procedures are rigged, when they improvise to achieve greater mobility, it is they who are cast as the violator, as someone who has failed to follow proper procedure. The improvisation required for them to move is not to be seen as skill, as resilience, as adaptation—it is framed as deception, as an illegitimate attempt to bypass the rightful order of things.

And what of those who wait instead of improvising? Those suspended in bureaucratic limbo, waiting for decisions that never come? A woman in Portugal spends three and a half years waiting for an immigration appointment, caught in a system where time itself becomes a form of control. A person seeking asylum waits indefinitely, because delay is not a failure of the system—it is the system.

Waiting is not incidental. It is a sorting mechanism.

For some, time is rigid, structured, mapped in linear progression: school, university, job, retirement. To deviate from this path is to risk failure. Parents and grandparents, having built their lives within this framework, insist that the structure is necessary, that to improvise is to invite ruin.

But what happens when the rules are outdated? When the plan that once guaranteed stability no longer holds? What happens when we realize—too late—that we have spent years following a path that no longer leads anywhere?

What happens when we realize that the waiting itself was never necessary?

A person spends their life believing they must endure, that they must be patient, that their time will come. And then, years later, they look back and ask: Why did I wait so long? Not because they should have known better, but because everything in the world around them trained them to believe that waiting was the only option.

And so the question remains:

If we did not wait—if we refused to wait—what might we do? What might we create if we embraced improvisation, moving freely and spontaneously? What might we claim for ourselves?

Suggested Media

Muindi Muindi
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