By Dr. Adnan Bouzan
Politics, in our contemporary reality, is no longer a rational practice for organizing shared life; it has become a form of organizing domination. What we face today is not a passing malfunction in the management of power, but a transformation in its very nature. Politics has been severed from its historical function as an expression of the general will and has instead become an instrument for reproducing control, regulating society, and perpetuating existing relations of power.
In this context, politics cannot be understood in isolation from the social structure from which it emerges. Power does not operate in a vacuum, nor is it exercised as an individual moral deviation; it is constituted as the product of material and economic relations that determine who holds decision-making authority and who is pushed to the margins. When the state is reduced to an apparatus of repression, this should not be seen as a historical exception, but as a concentrated expression of its function once it becomes detached from society and elevated above it.
Justice, from this perspective, is not an abstract moral value, but a revealing criterion of the nature of the political system. When politics produces permanent inequality, accumulates privileges in the hands of a few, and reduces the majority to mere labor power or a silent mass, we are confronted with a politics whose function is to manage social conflict rather than resolve it. Pluralism, in this case, is not suppressed because it is inherently dangerous, but because it threatens both the monopoly of power and the monopoly of meaning.
Regimes do not collapse solely because of their corruption, but because their structures become incapable of representing the social contradictions they themselves have produced. When they fail to contain these contradictions within legitimate political frameworks, they resort to extra-political tools: violence, ideology, and fear. Religion, nationalism, or the external enemy are then invoked—not as genuine intellectual convictions, but as mechanisms for disciplining society and redirecting conflict away from its real roots.
The most dangerous aspect of this trajectory is not repression itself, but its transformation into a form of public consciousness. When submission is redefined as stability, silence as wisdom, and injustice as an unavoidable price, power has succeeded in converting material domination into ideological hegemony. At that point, coercion is no longer imposed solely from outside, but is reproduced from within society itself, presented as a rational choice or a practical necessity.
We are therefore not facing a transient political crisis, but a structural crisis in the meaning and role of politics. A state that does not express real social interests, is not subject to accountability, and does not separate power from force inevitably turns into an apparatus for managing crises rather than resolving them, and into a structure that preserves itself by obstructing any genuine horizon for change.
From this perspective, politics must be reclaimed as a liberatory act, not as a technical management of power. A politics understood as a legitimate arena of social struggle rather than a tool for its erasure, and as a space for producing shared meaning rather than imposing it by force. The human being becomes the end of politics only when their role as a historical agent is restored, rather than being treated as an object of control and administration.
Here, politics stands before its fundamental test: either it is reclaimed as a horizon of liberation and social justice, or it continues as a mechanism for perpetuating domination until the moment of explosion. Between these two possibilities there is no middle ground, but a historical trajectory that always resolves in favor of those who possess awareness of the mechanisms of domination and the capacity to dismantle them.