Short Abstract

The panel examines how individuals, societies, places, and regimes become polarised through their hegemonic placement along the axis of failure-success. It further explores how these polarised positionalities shape politics and belonging, while also being creatively contested.

Long Abstract

The panel explores how the concept of failure has been used to polarise communities, create tension and division, and how it can also be challenged through creative and unconventional approaches that open up sites for politics beyond polarisation. The concept of failure has recently gained momentum as an analytical lens in the humanities and social sciences, with scholars examining the power dynamics, cultural narratives, and expectations embedded within it. Research has explored experiences of moral failure at the personal level, as well as the collapse and dysfunction of infrastructures and everyday systems. Failure is also understood as revealing the limitations, exclusions, and contradictions of national projects by deeming certain political and social forms “obsolete,” delineating “communities of value,” and casting out those portrayed as having failed.

Building on this scholarship, the panel aims to deepen anthropological understandings of how failure functions as a tool of polarisation and takes on different lives in global politics and hierarchies of belonging. We are particularly interested in examining the conditions and frameworks through which something, someone, or someplace becomes marked as failure, and how value axes – failure vs. success, good vs. bad, or accepted vs. rejected – are constructed, operationalised, and contested to, e.g., legitimise state hegemony in national state-building or memory politics, and to manage the identities of the states, regions or groups in relation to existing global East/West and North/South hierarchies and symbolic divisions.

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