Between Force and Power
In anticipation of the relaunch of the AGAPE Seminar & Studio in January 2025, I am publishing a series of dispatches revisiting the histories, theories, and proposals developed during our earlier gatherings. Each installment is designed to clarify and expand upon the key concepts that emerged, laying the groundwork for the conversations ahead.
This dispatch interrogates the mechanisms of control that sustain domination in the Age of Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide. It explores how force, the raw application of strength, transitions into power—an insidious and systemic architecture that perpetuates dominance long after Empire’s forces have withdrawn from the battlefield. Through this lens, the text examines the interlocking forms of power—ruling, disciplinary, normalizing, and optimizing—that build and maintain Empire’s control.
Once, there was a conqueror who ruled through unmatched strength. His armies were vast, his weapons terrifying, and his victories swift. Wherever he marched, he made his intentions clear: submit or be destroyed. The people he conquered bowed—not out of reverence, but out of fear of the sword. His empire grew rapidly, built on the ruins of the defeated and held together by the ever-present threat of his might.
But dominance built on force alone is precarious. Over time, the conqueror found himself surrounded by whispers of rebellion. Though his victories had been absolute, they were fleeting. Each crushed uprising was soon followed by another. The cycle of conflict drained his coffers, stretched his armies, and bred resentment among the conquered. The conqueror began to see the cracks in his dominion: force alone could not hold it together. Dominance gained through strength would always demand more strength, leaving him both exhausted and vulnerable.
Then came the councilor, a cunning advisor who offered a new strategy. “Victory need not be fought for every time,” she said. “Instead of crushing the defeated, make them enforce your rule themselves. Build laws that bind them. Write stories that glorify you. Make the world forget there was ever a time before your reign.”
The conqueror listened and began to change his tactics. After his next victory, he did not burn the enemy’s city to the ground. Instead, he summoned their leaders and declared a law: anyone who sought to trade, worship, or even travel would need his permission. This was the first rule, and to enforce it, he built a council—not of his soldiers, but of the defeated people themselves. They became the gatekeepers of his will, ensuring no one could act without his approval.
At first, the people resisted. They traded in secret and traveled through hidden paths. But the conqueror anticipated this and stationed watchmen at key crossings, punishing violators publicly. “See how the law protects order?” he proclaimed, masking his control as necessity. Exhausted by resistance and fearful of reprisal, the people complied—not out of agreement, but out of resignation.
Satisfied with this initial success, the conqueror turned to the councilor again. “The law binds them, but they obey only because they fear what I can do,” he said. “What happens when they think I am no longer watching?”
“Then they must come to believe the law is theirs,” the councilor replied.
So, the conqueror commissioned a grand history. Scribes wrote of his strength, his wisdom, and how his laws had brought peace and prosperity. “Before the conqueror,” the stories claimed, “there was chaos. It was he who saved us.” These tales spread far and wide, told by elders to children, sung by bards in the squares. Over generations, the people began to forget they had ever lived differently.
Years passed, and the conqueror’s empire flourished—not because his armies marched, but because his rules had become systems. Judges enforced his laws. Priests praised his vision. Merchants followed his trade routes. The conqueror himself rarely needed to intervene. The people policed themselves, enforcing his dominance without his presence.
“This is the beauty of systems,” the councilor told him. “You have built a machine that runs itself. Your strength is no longer conspicuous because it is omnipresent. Even those who never saw your sword now follow your rules.”
But the councilor offered a warning: “This power depends on belief. If the people cease to trust the stories—if they see the chains for what they are—the system will falter. And when it falters, you will need your armies again.”
The conqueror dismissed the warning, confident in his invincibility. Yet, beyond his borders, whispers of rebellion grew louder. In hidden valleys and dense forests, fugitive planners assembled in community. They shared memories of life before the conqueror’s rule, passed down by the oldest among them. They told stories of a time when people walked freely, traded openly, and made their own laws.
The fugitive planners refused to live within the conqueror’s system, choosing instead to (re-)create alternatives grounded in care and confluence. Their assemblies grew steadily in strength, number, and purpose, invisible to the conqueror’s watchmen. When they rose against the empire, they did not confront its armies in open battle. Instead, they dismantled its systems piece by piece—chipping away from the outside while infiltrating and sabotaging from within. Through these acts, they exposed the coercion concealed beneath the empire’s laws, revealing the fragility of its seemingly invincible order.
From Story to Theory
The tale of the conqueror reveals the interplay between force and power, exposing the mechanisms by which dominance is maintained and extended. Force, defined by its raw and immediate application, secures victories through direct confrontation. Yet it is finite—exhaustive, unstable, and contingent. Each act of domination demands renewed effort, leaving the victor perpetually vulnerable to resistance. Power, by contrast, transcends the moment of victory. It transforms the outcomes of force into systems and structures that perpetuate dominance, embedding control into protocols, narratives, and institutions that regulate behavior and suppress resistance without continuous confrontation.
This shift from force to power is not merely tactical but paradigmatic. It represents a refinement in the logic of control, ensuring that dominance is no longer dependent on repeated displays of strength but instead becomes woven into the social fabric itself. Power reconfigures victory into enduring authority, creating an architecture of dominance that shapes the boundaries of what is possible and permissible.
The Limits of Force
Force is the most conspicuous and dramatic expression of dominance. Its logic is straightforward: overwhelm opposition through superior strength. Military campaigns, police crackdowns, and acts of physical coercion exemplify the operations of force, asserting control through the direct application of power.
However, force is inherently limited for three reasons. First, each act of force depletes resources—whether soldiers, money, or political capital—making sustained campaigns unsustainable over time. Second, force resolves immediate conflicts but leaves unresolved tensions, as the defeated retain their capacity and desire to resist. Third, force fails to embed control into enduring systems, requiring renewed confrontation with each challenge, creating a cycle of conflict that undermines stability.
Force, while effective in the moment, is a temporary solution to an enduring problem. It may win battles, but it cannot secure lasting authority.
The Emergence of Power
Power begins where force ends. It emerges not from the act of victory itself but from the systems built in its wake. Power transforms the outcomes of force into rules, norms, and structures that dictate behavior, creating an order in which compliance becomes automatic and resistance appears futile.
Power achieves this transformation through several mechanisms:
Rule Creation: Rules, standards, statistics, and best practices translate the brute outcomes of force into structured authority, embedding dominance into the routines of daily life.
System Building: Institutions and networks enforce these rules, diffusing the burden of control across a broader infrastructure, thereby minimizing the need for direct intervention.
Perception of Inevitability: Power relies on the perception that resistance is futile or unimaginable. By institutionalizing the memory of force’s initial victory, power deters future challenges without the need for repeated confrontation.
Expansion of Control: Power grows as allies, bystanders, and even the defeated align themselves with the established system, reinforcing dominance and marginalizing dissent.
Where force compels through its conspicuous application, power governs through inconspicuous omnipresence, embedding itself in the systems that regulate life and shaping the boundaries of what can be imagined or contested.
Four Forms of Power
In our time—the Age of Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide—Empire wields four distinct yet interlocking forms of power: ruling powers, disciplinary powers, normalizing powers, and optimizing powers. The concatenation of these powers forms a dense, self-reinforcing architecture of control that sustains and perpetuates systems of dominance.
Ruling Powers
Ruling powers assert themselves through ritualized spectacles that glorify the “achievements” of Empire’s dominant groups—wealthy white men, their proxies, and their redeemers. These spectacles construct illusions of superiority and authority, legitimizing domination and entrenching hierarchical power. Tactics of shock and awe—military parades, televised bombings of alleged “terrorist” strongholds—employ overwhelming force and visual grandeur to intimidate dissent, normalize violence, and solidify the ruling class’s control.
Equally insidious are public holidays celebrating the supposed benevolence of founding fathers, hagiographic portrayals in film and literature, and the ostentatious pomp and ceremony surrounding the public appearances of figures of authority. These carefully choreographed performances reinforce Empire’s narratives, portraying hierarchy as natural and domination as both inevitable and virtuous.
Disciplinary Powers
Disciplinary powers operate through routine examinations that transform the biases of the dominant class into seemingly objective standards and stereotypes. These evaluations categorize and rank individuals, embedding hierarchies into the structures of daily life. Teachers grading students, employers appraising workers, and social workers scrutinizing welfare recipients illustrate how these processes reinforce systemic inequality under the guise of meritocratic assessment. These examinations are deliberately designed to ensure that subordinate groups—particularly the colonized and racialized—are consistently deemed deficient, internalizing a sense of inadequacy. Meanwhile, dominant groups are routinely affirmed as exemplary, encouraged to see their privilege not as a product of systemic advantage but as evidence of inherent merit.
Normalizing Powers
Normalizing powers transform the biases embedded in disciplinary systems into seemingly objective statistical “facts.” By using biased surveys and data manipulation, they rationalize stereotypes that depict marginalized groups as inherently “inferior.” Social scientists and technocrats employ these mechanisms to shape public policy, reframing ideological constructs as technical realities.
Through the aggregation and analysis of data derived from disciplinary processes, normalizing powers “prove” the inadequacy of subordinate groups while affirming the supposed merit of dominant ones. This process objectifies meritocracy, manufacturing legitimacy for hierarchical systems under the guise of impartial analysis.
Optimizing Powers
Optimizing powers utilize the statistical “facts” produced by normalizing powers to formulate variable controls and feedback systems that compel marginalized groups to conform to the standards of the ruling class. These powers promote self-regulation, encouraging individuals to internalize systems of domination by framing compliance as a pathway to progress, efficiency, or self-improvement. Social engineers, management consultants, and public relations professionals deploy these mechanisms to shape behavior, reinforcing systemic inequities under the guise of neutrality and advancement.
Optimizing powers present subordinate groups—particularly the colonized and racialized—with a seemingly attainable path to inclusion by emulating the performance of dominant groups or adhering to their dictates. However, this path is an illusion that obscures the structural barriers sustaining exclusion. A key tactic of optimizing powers is the strategic fractioning of “talented tenths” from subordinate groups, empowering these individuals as proxies and redeemers who serve the interests of the dominant groups (the white man, the colonizer). These proxies function to uphold and legitimize the existing hierarchy while reinforcing the very systems of power that maintain their group’s subordination.
The Architecture of Domination
The interplay between these four forms of power creates a deeply entrenched and self-sustaining architecture of domination:
Ruling powers construct spectacles that exalt hierarchy.
Disciplinary powers embed these hierarchies into daily routines and practices.
Normalizing powers reframe these hierarchies as objective truths.
Optimizing powers compel compliance with these truths, making domination appear natural and inevitable.
This architecture is insidious, drawing its strength from its inconspicuousness and omnipresence. It masquerades as neutral, necessary, and virtuous, masking its reliance on coercion and exploitation. However, when its foundations are exposed, its fragility becomes apparent. Resistance requires not only opposing the conspicuous forces of domination but also dismantling the inconspicuous systems that sustain them.
By exposing the mechanisms of ruling, disciplinary, normalizing, and optimizing powers, we can begin to unravel the logics that perpetuate dominance, creating space for alternative systems rooted in autonomy, care, and confluence.
The Danger We Face
Those who seek to expose and resist the mechanisms of power inevitably face a sophisticated matrix of violence—physical, cultural, institutional, carceral, and behavioral. Empire’s architecture of domination is designed to suppress dissent and enforce compliance, deploying coercive tactics that target both individuals and communities to maintain the status quo. Each form of violence functions not in isolation but as part of an interlocking system, ensuring that resistance is met with layered and often inconspicuous forms of repression.
“Guns and Bombs” – Physical Violence
Empire’s most immediate and visible response to rebellion is the spectacle of brute force, physical violence. This includes the militarized policing of domestic unrest, the bombing of communities labeled as threats, and the targeting of activists through direct confrontation. Physical violence serves not only to threaten and brutalize rebels but also to destroy the material and symbolic spaces where rebellion takes root—be it neighborhoods, protest camps, or autonomous zones.
Militarized force functions as a spectacle as much as a weapon. Heavily armed police, drones overhead, and live-streamed military strikes on “terrorist” enclaves send clear messages to those who might resist: the full force of Empire will descend upon those who dare to challenge it. This violence enforces fear, silences dissent, and reinforces Empire’s monopoly on the means of destruction.
“Smoke and Mirrors” – Cultural Violence
Cultural violence operates in more subtle but equally insidious ways. Empire obscures historical realities, mystifies the conditions of oppression, and distorts narratives to delegitimize resistance. Through propaganda, media, education, and cultural production, it erases histories of rebellion and resistance while promoting myths that sustain its hegemony.
This violence often masquerades as enlightenment or entertainment. Textbooks exclude anti-colonial struggles; films portray rebels as violent disruptors of order; and media narratives frame activists as irrational or extremist. Empire’s cultural machinery constructs a false consensus, where systemic domination appears natural, rebellion seems futile, and those who resist are cast as dangerous or deluded.
By controlling the stories a society tells about itself, cultural violence normalizes oppression and delegitimizes alternatives, ensuring that Empire’s worldview becomes the only conceivable reality.
“Policies and Procedures” – Institutional Violence
Institutional violence is deployed through bureaucratic systems that surveil, regulate, and constrain lives under the guise of neutrality. These systems create and enforce policies designed to monitor and suppress potential rebels, often targeting them through mechanisms that appear impartial or necessary.
From zoning laws that dismantle protest spaces to immigration policies that marginalize dissenting communities, institutional violence polices livelihoods in insidious ways. Surveillance technologies track movements, monitor communications, and compile databases of suspected agitators. Licensing requirements, audits, and “risk assessments” become tools to suffocate grassroots organizing and resistance efforts.
Institutional violence operates behind a mask of order and efficiency, rendering its victims invisible while presenting its repression as an unfortunate but unavoidable aspect of governance. Its power lies in its ability to act without spectacle, disqualifying dissenters before they can openly resist.
“Prisons and Fortresses” – Carceral Violence
Carceral violence directly confines and excludes those who resist Empire’s systems. From mass incarceration to detention centers and fortified borders, these structures are designed to contain rebellion, both physically and symbolically.
Prisons and detention centers incapacitate individuals who challenge the system, isolating them from their communities and forcing them into regimes of control and surveillance. Border walls and immigration detention facilities ensure that vulnerable populations remain out of sight and excluded from access to resources and autonomy.
Carceral systems reinforce the divisions of Global Apartheid, segregating populations by race, class, and nationality. These structures not only confine rebels but also send a chilling message to others: the price of dissent is confinement, exclusion, and erasure.
“Carrots and Sticks” – Behavioral Violence
Behavioral violence works through incentives and punishments to manipulate individuals and foster compliance with Empire’s agenda. Unlike physical or carceral violence, this form of repression reshapes behavior through more subtle forms of coercion, aligning actions with the interests of the ruling class.
Examples include surveillance-based reward systems that encourage conformity—such as social credit scores or workplace monitoring tools—and punitive measures like fines, demotions, and public shaming for those who deviate from prescribed norms. These mechanisms operate under the guise of efficiency, self-improvement, or progress, making compliance appear rational while masking its coercive underpinnings.
Behavioral violence discourages rebellion by fostering complicity, creating the illusion that one’s best option is to play within the rules of the system rather than oppose it. Over time, individuals internalize domination, policing themselves and each other in ways that serve Empire’s goals.
Liberation
The fugitive planners in the opening story teach us that true liberation lies not in opposing the force of Empire directly but in dismantling the systems of power that sustain its dominance. Force may be met with resistance in the moment, but enduring freedom requires challenging the structures that normalize oppression, the narratives that legitimize inequality, and the mechanisms that compel compliance.
Liberation begins with exposure. The mechanisms of rule, discipline, normalization, and optimization must be laid bare, their inconspicuous operations rendered starkly to those who live under their weight. This exposure disrupts the myths of inevitability that sustain Empire’s control, revealing that its power is neither natural nor immutable.
Dismantling these mechanisms requires more than critique; it demands the creation of alternatives. Fugitive planners remind us that care, confluence, and collective flourishing are not merely values but practices—ways of building systems that prioritize relational autonomy and mutual support over hierarchy and exploitation. Resistance thus becomes an act of world-making, imagining and enacting infrastructures where life thrives beyond Empire’s logic of domination.
However, such resistance does not come without risks. As we have seen, Empire’s response to dissent is multifaceted, employing physical, cultural, institutional, carceral, and behavioral violence to suppress rebellion and enforce compliance. This violence seeks to isolate and intimidate, to render resistance futile by making it appear dangerous, disorganized, or impossible. Yet, as the maroons demonstrated, even the most entrenched systems of domination are vulnerable to disruption.
We must confront the interlocking forms of power and violence that sustain Empire. This is not a simple task. It takes vigilance, creativity, and the collective courage to imagine worlds that Empire insists cannot exist. Investigating these dynamics further is the critical work of the next series of AGAPE gatherings. Through these assemblies, we will deepen our understanding and strengthen our resolve to envision and build futures beyond Empire’s reach.
