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Paper short abstract

While Trump’s designs on Greenland signify an “anti-policy” for rejecting foreign policy guidelines, the move is not arbitrary. It is guided by the idea of the “sovereign individual” replete with tropes of nineteenth century imperial racism and of the radical men’s rights movement’s masculinism.

Paper long abstract

President Trump’s designs on Greenland exemplify “anti-policy” as it abandons the traditional rules of state policymaking and the liberal international order. It involves inefficient use of economic and political capital. It hardly advances the national interests, and it alienates allies. Further, it reflects impulsive behavior rather than shrewd expert planning. However, the absence of traditional policymaking does not mean his designs on Greenland and elsewhere are non-sensical. In Trump’s discursive world, traditional foreign policy models are replaced with such simple tropes as the racism of late nineteenth century imperialism and the vulgar masculinism of the radical wing of the men’s rights movements. These tropes rely on naturalistic metaphors to premise a fascist world (dis)order valuing action for action’s sake. This paper will firstly describe the Trump team’s public justification for acquiring Greenland to show how it fails as sound policy. It will secondly show that a more compelling explanation is found in discourses of the natural man for whom state regulation and social norms signify unjust impositions on the sovereign (male) individual. This interpretation leads to deeper narratives drawing on Europe’s scramble for Africa after the 1884 Berlin conference and to the men playing the Great Game of imperial expansion. This resulted in characters like Cecil Rhodes who, guided by social Darwinism, similarly pursued expansion for expansion’s sake and challenged any oversight on his ambitions. We should similarly look to the logics of male exceptionalism bespoken by the likes of alleged human trafficker and manosphere leader Andrew Tate.

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This paper examines the dual meaning of anti-policy as being against ‘bad’ things (immigration, terrorism, corruption) and against using policy as a technique of governing. Using the Heritage Foundation’s ‘Project 2025’, we explore how anti-policy is producing a new form of illiberal governance.

Paper long abstract

This paper introduces the panel’s theme. The rise of anti-policy has become a defining feature of the contemporary political landscape. By ‘anti-policy’ we mean discourses, programmes and measures aimed at preventing or combatting ‘bad’ things (e.g. anti-terrorism, anti-trafficking, anti-corruption) or things deemed woke such as anti-racism, multiculturalism and DEI. But anti-policy is also an argument against using policy itself as a tool of government. While the ‘anti’ prefix suggests these policies are oppositional, reactive and repressive, anti-policies typically create spaces for actions and programmes that are productive and performative of a new form of governance.

Whereas anti-policies appear to be defined by the fields that they oppose (e.g. drugs, immigration, discrimination, globalization, communism and even liberalism), we argue that this leaves strategically undefined what they are for, which legitimises the mobilisation of largely unbounded and unchecked resources and power for their implementation. The result is often political leaders’ hasty creation of bricolage platforms for governing through personal networks and independent, autonomous action.

In this panel we ask, how should we interpret the rise of anti-policy? What are the contours of this emerging form of governance? What are its key features? How does it operate, and what should we call it? In this paper we explore these questions through an analysis of the Heritage Foundation’s ‘Project 2025’, their ‘Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise’, and the way these ideas have been implemented, for example in the Department of Health and Human Services.

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In 2026, the US withdrew from the UNFCCC, framed as “contrary to US interests.” This paper argues the exit isn’t incoherent anti-policy but a populist struggle over valuation: protecting fossil fuels from devaluation and market discipline, mirrored in EU ETS debates.

Paper long abstract

On 7 January 2026, President Trump issued a memorandum directing the United States to withdraw from 66 international organisations, treaties, and conventions deemed “contrary to the interests of the United States, including its economic interests” (Trump 2026). Among these was the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The withdrawal followed the earlier U.S. exit from the Paris Agreement and formed part of broader retrenchment from other climate institutions. Conventional policy analysis framed the move as illogical and self-defeating, since the UNFCCC functions primarily as a procedural organisation within a multilayered climate governance architecture. Critics argued that exit would weaken U.S. influence over regulatory standards, diplomatic negotiations, and market-making functions in climate governance.

This paper contends that ‘the exit’ is not incoherent anti-policy but reflects a deeper contestation over valuation in climate governance (Battistoni 2025; Fraser 2023). The UNFCCC was targeted because it institutionalised an eco-modernist valuation regime that reclassified fossil fuels from ‘free gifts of nature’ into objects of accounting, subject to pricing and market constraint. The exit thus represents an attempt to protect fossil fuels from devaluation and market discipline—an ‘anti-devaluation’ rather than ‘anti-market’ logic (Colgan et al. 2021; Wood 2019). Similar dynamics are evident in recent EU Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) debates, where East European populist leaders have called for suspension of the ETS2 to avoid market discipline.

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This paper examines the German parliament’s 2024 anti-anti-Semitism resolution as a form of anti-policy. I use ethnographic research with Jewish activists and right-wing politicians to argue that the resolution reveals continuities between liberal anti-politics and illiberal authoritarianism.

Paper long abstract

On November 7th, 2024, the German parliament passed an anti-anti-Semitism resolution titled, “Never Again is Now: Protecting, Preserving, and Strengthening Jewish Life in Germany.” Despite criticism from legal experts–one of whom referred to the resolution as a “practical impossibility” and “likely unconstitutional”--Human Rights NGOs, and academics, (many of them Jewish), the resolution passed with an overwhelming majority. Although constrained by the constitution, the resolution calls to “consistently utilize repressive measures to their fullest extent”. Throughout the resolution, anti-anti-Semitism is articulated as a vague, moralistic abstraction, functioning as a form of liberal anti-politics. Yet rather than foreclosing politics, this abstraction expands a political horizon in which repressive, majoritarian, and right-wing projects can be legitimated through appeals to minority protection. For many Jewish political activists and their right-wing interlocutors, the strength of the Bundestag resolution lies in this ambiguity: concrete manifestations of the resolution exist outside of constitutionalism and liberal-democratic norms. Drawing on ethnographic research with Jewish activists and their allies, I will analyze Germany’s anti-Semitism resolution as an act of anti-policy: both as anti-political moralism and as an authoritarian practice that discombobulates liberal politics. I argue that such ostensibly benign anti-political moves not only reinforce the violences of the liberal status quo but also actively invite political projects that exceed the normative limits of the liberal state. This dynamic is particularly salient for religious minorities, whose political engagements often unsettle dominant distinctions between liberal moralism and illiberal repression.

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This paper theorizes "anti-policy" not as a failure of governance, but as a modality of power. Ethnographic data from Iran's disability bureaucracy reveals how 'governing through chaos'—via procedural absurdity and infrastructural failure—produces a politics of suspension and exhaustion.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on an ethnography of Iran's welfare bureaucracy, this paper argues that what Shore and Wright term "anti-policy"—decisions made arbitrarily and incoherently—is not an anomaly, but a central logic of statecraft.

My analysis begins with a material artifact: a tactile paving for the blind in a local welfare office that leads directly to a closed wall. This "crooked line" serves as a metaphor for a system that operates not through rational implementation, but by governing through chaos. In this modality, the state's failure to create coherent, rights-based policy is not a weakness; it is the very mechanism that grants it power.

I demonstrate how this 'anti-policy' approach—manifested in floating budgets and strategic inaction—generates a "Politics of Suspension." This is not a grand conspiracy, but an emergent logic where systemic fragmentation becomes a resource for governance. By rendering the law perpetually present on paper but absent in practice, the bureaucracy traps citizens in what I call the 'administered life': an exhausting struggle waged through personalized negotiations with street-level bureaucrats. This shifts the political terrain from collective rights-claims to tactical, relational bargaining.

Ultimately, this paper contributes to the anthropology of policy by showing that "anti-policy" is not merely an "anti-politics machine." In contexts of scarcity and fragmentation, it is a durable technology of rule. The system sustains itself not despite its chaos, but precisely through it, transforming bureaucratic failure into a tool for demobilizing dissent and producing an exhausted, yet governable, populace.

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Paper short abstract

Anti-system leaders like Trump practice anti-policy in three meanings. Grounded in personalized power and indifference to law, their governance regimes recall communist and Putinesque power structures, i.e., “patronal politics”—politics that are unstable internally and foment instability externally.

Paper long abstract

“Anti-policy”—decisionmakers systematically flouting the processes and norms of their liberal democracy—is widely practiced today. In this second meaning (panel Abstract), anti-policy is the standard practice of anti-system leaders when they come to power. President Trump embodies such anti-policy: Politics always trump policy (pun intended).

How to make sense of the governance regimes dominated by anti-policy in this meaning? Viewing Trump’s and other such leaders’ actions through the lens of liberal governance norms is a non-starter; A different playbook guides them.

Using examples from Trump’s presidency, we argue:

• Anti-policy/anti-system governance regimes recall communist and Putinesque power structures, i.e., “patronal politics” that “[revolve] chiefly around personalized relations” (Henry Hale, 2015). Trump reigns through capricious, personalized power, and indifference to law reminiscent of Vladimir Putin. Trump’s goal of dismantling the “system” through operations like DOGE is achieved through setups characteristic of communistic practice.

• This kind of anti-policy invites the deployment of anti-policy in another meaning: policies that counteract something (e.g., anti-system, anti-narcotics trafficking) (first meaning, panel Abstract).

• Anti-policy in both above meanings incorporates what appears, from the vantagepoint of liberal democratic governance, to be arbitrary or incoherent decisions and enforcement thereof (third meaning, panel Abstract). Trump’s anti-drug policy seems incoherent from a liberal democratic perspective, as his administration both bombed Venezuelan boats allegedly smuggling drugs and pardoned a major convicted drug trafficker. Yet this approach aligns with Trump’s personalized, patronal politics.

• Patronal politics, grounded in informal power, are inherently unstable internally and foment instability externally, i.e., in foreign relations.

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Paper short abstract

This paper explores hospital-to-community shift in England’s mental health system as an ambivalent form of anti-policy. Using Tess Lea's policy ecology framework, it looks at how care is enabled through community while responsibility and accountability are displaced onto boundary-spanning roles.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyses England’s hospital-to-community shift in mental health reform through the lens of anti-policy. It argues that governance can operate as anti-policy not only through arbitrariness, but also through under-specification, delegation, and the displacement of responsibility, allowing reform to proceed without durable commitments to resourcing, entitlement, and accountability. The paper draws on Tess Lea’s artefactual, ambient, and hauntological modalities of policy and is based on ongoing ethnographic research with Community Connectors in London, with fieldwork beginning in early 2026.

At the artefactual level, strategies, service specifications, and programme designs present community-based provision as the answer to need while leaving responsibility and resourcing flexible and provisional. At the ambient level, reform is enacted through diffuse expectations and moral pressures, as connectors are expected to make fragmented systems workable through coordination, mediation, and everyday improvisation. At the hauntological level, withdrawn services and earlier promises of comprehensive provision continue to structure practice, influencing what connectors and communities are expected to absorb.

The paper takes community-based provision seriously as a site of support, while also showing how the work of making it function can stabilise anti-policy by relocating coherence and burden onto boundary-spanning roles and under-resourced infrastructures. It contributes to the panel by reframing anti-policy as governance through ambivalence rather than chaos alone.