(Concentric Circles of Positionality, Transaction, Hope, and Agency)
Purpose:
To recognize how positionality within empire shapes protections, bargains, consequences, hope, and agency — including what kind of change each position believes it can make, and what it actually affords.
Center of Empire
- Defines reality, enforces its continuation, disciplines, polices and punishes dissent.
- Agency here = structural control, ability to set the rules.
- Leverage for change = maintaining continuity, preventing rupture.
Inner Protective Circles (Closest to Center)
Positionality: Highly protected, secure, buffered from violence.
Transaction: Silence or rationalization in exchange for maximum privilege and mobility.
Economy of Hope: Don’t need to hope; security feels guaranteed.
Impunity/Consequence: Can act with impunity; rules bend for them.
Affective Range: Permitted only mild reformist critique.
Agency Affordance: Agency feels unlimited — reality appears to bend to their will (as long as Empire is not substantially challenged).
Leverage for Change: High resources but low willingness; attempts at change reinforce empire’s legitimacy (“benevolent reformers”).
Taken-for-granted assumption: “The system works for people like me.”
Middle Circles (Buffered but conditional)
Positionality: Protected but precarious; can see cracks in the façade.
Transaction: Invest in reform/innovation for buffered belonging.
Economy of Hope: Invests hope in empire’s continuity to secure gains.
Impunity/Consequence: Partial impunity; critique tolerated if framed as “improvement.”
Affective Range: Tightrope — reformist dissent allowed, deeper dissent punished.
Agency Affordance: Agency experienced as negotiation — influence possible but bounded.
Leverage for Change: Moderate — can mobilize reforms, policies, programs, but usually within empire’s terms.
Taken-for-granted assumption: “Empire can and must be fixed.”
Inner Edges (Precariously Buffered)
Positionality: Simultaneous exposure and complicity; fragile protections.
Transaction: Survival tied to walking a tightrope; heavy investment in compliance.
Economy of Hope: High-stakes hope — compliance may secure minimal safety.
Impunity/Consequence: Almost no impunity; retaliation is swift.
Affective Range: Severely restricted; dissent must be disguised.
Agency Affordance: Agency feels conditional and risky — survival often prioritized over transformation.
Leverage for Change: Small but potent when collective — shifts can reverberate precisely because of proximity to exposure.
Taken-for-granted assumption: “If I try hard enough, maybe I can still be protected.”
Outer Edges (Unbuffered, Unprotected, Complex)
Positionality:
- Fully exposed to empire’s violence; abandoned and criminalized.
- No consistent protections or buffers — survival depends on improvisation.
Transaction:
- No viable transaction with empire for security.
- Instead, multiple alternative arrangements arise: kinship networks, grassroots movements, but also extractive and violent economies (cartels, militias, survival crime).
Economy of Hope:
- Empire offers no credible hope.
- Hope is redirected: sometimes to life-affirming horizons (community, spirituality, land, justice movements), and/or to immediate survival logics that may reproduce lateral violence.
Impunity/Consequence:
- Zero impunity vis-à-vis empire — subject to hyper-criminalization.
- But impunity may exist within survival structures (cartels, gangs), depending on who controls the territory.
Affective Range:
- Critique unrestricted, but often delegitimized or ignored by empire.
- Expressivity shaped both by solidarity and by the brutal pragmatism of survival under violence.
Agency Affordance:
- Agency often discounted or invisible by empire.
- Affordances of agency can take divergent forms:
- Life-affirming: resilience, refusal, solidarity, alternative cosmologies, collective care.
- Life-depleting: coercion, organized crime, violence as survival/economy.
- Life-affirming: resilience, refusal, solidarity, alternative cosmologies, collective care.
- Both are responses to abandonment, precarity, and systemic violence.
Leverage for Change:
- Tremendous potential to generate paradigms outside empire’s logic (e.g. Indigenous resurgence, grassroots justice).
- Also vulnerable to co-optation, repression, or being eclipsed by survival economies that perpetuate harm.
Taken-for-granted assumption:
- “Empire has never been for us; we must survive outside it — but survival pathways are often fraught and contradictory.”
Reflective Invitations
- Position & Shift:
- Where do you most often locate yourself?
- How has your position shifted across life, work, relationships?
- Where do you most often locate yourself?
- Ancestral Lines:
- Where were your ancestors in relation to different empires?
- What sacrifices were made (or forced) for survival, belonging, mobility?
- How did they (and you) become agents of empire, knowingly or not?
- Where were your ancestors in relation to different empires?
- Economy of Hope:
- How much of your life-energy is invested in hoping empire will deliver safety or stability?
- What might you be protecting by sustaining this hope?
- What other horizons of hope exist outside empire’s bargains?
- How much of your life-energy is invested in hoping empire will deliver safety or stability?
- Agency & Change:
- How has your positionality shaped the kind of agency available to you?
- What kind of change do you think you can initiate — and what kind of change is structurally foreclosed?
- How does recognizing these limits and possibilities shift your sense of responsibility and relational accountability?
- How has your positionality shaped the kind of agency available to you?
Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures 