Short Abstract

This panel explores how non-state actors exercise agency and reimagine development amid state collapse and uncertainty. It examines how grassroots groups and civil society, as well as violent non-state actors, construct alternative futures, reshaping power, governance, and development from below.

Description

This panel continues a conversation started at the 2025 DSA on non-state actors in political crises, by turning to the spaces of possibility that emerge amid uncertainty. As states collapse under conflict, authoritarianism, or other forms of political crisis, non-state actors are asserting new forms of order, care, and legitimacy from below. While state structures disintegrate, their agency becomes more certain, inventive, future-oriented—and at times opportunistic—resulting in a paradox of uncertain states but certain non-state actors.

Yet, non-state actors such as civil society groups and grassroots movements are not merely responding to state failure or humanitarian emergencies; they are actively imagining and constructing alternative futures. We have also seen violent non-state actors playing similar roles. Across the global South and beyond, these actors demonstrate agency under constraint, redefining what “development” means through self-organisation, mutual aid, and everyday governance, especially where traditional institutions have failed.

The panel asks: How do non-state actors navigate uncertainty to reproduce social life and reimagine governance? How do they exercise agency in contexts of systemic collapse? How do their initiatives unsettle dominant understandings of development, power, and the state? What alternative logics of development do they enact? And how might these experiences compel development studies to move beyond state-centred frameworks towards more plural, grounded, and relational understandings of power and agency?

We welcome theoretical and empirical contributions that engage with these questions, particularly those exploring how non-state actors act as architects of alternative worlds, expanding the conceptual boundaries of development beyond institutions and crises.

This Panel has 2 pending paper proposals.
Propose paper