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Short abstract

We examine the emergence of a neofascist mode of governance in contemporary Ecuador through the analytical lens of Walter Benjamin’s reflections on sovereignty, violence, and the tradition of the oppressed. We show how the state of exception has been turned into a permanent technology of rule.

Long abstract

This paper examines the emergence of a neofascist mode of governance in contemporary Ecuador through the analytical lens of Walter Benjamin’s reflections on sovereignty, violence, and the tradition of the oppressed. Drawing on Benjamin’s insight that “The ‘state of exception’ in which we live is the rule” (Benjamin [1942] 2024: 32), we argue that the government of Daniel Noboa has transformed the state of exception from a temporary juridical measure into a permanent technology of rule. The sovereign's exceptional decision paradoxically becomes a new everyday reality, producing a political order where illegality becomes governmental method rather than deviation. This normalization of emergency powers is intertwined with racialized state violence, the aestheticization of political authority, and the consolidation of oligarchic colonial power structures.

We situate Ecuador’s current crisis within broader Latin American histories of “preventive counterrevolution,” (Fernandes, 1982) showing how the invocation of a crisis triggered by “narcoterrorism” functions as a discursive apparatus to criminalize dissent and dismantle autonomous popular organization. At the same time, we highlight the emergence of what Benjamin calls the “true state of exception” (Benjamin 2024: 32): collective uprisings such as the 2025 national strike that interrupt the temporal and material flows that enact capitalist and neofascist domination. These moments, where the body of the collective suspends the delegation of power, reveal alternative sovereignties and temporalities that challenge linear narratives of progress, crisis and reform.

In short, we contribute to STS debates on rising international authoritarianism, the technopolitics of neofascism, and the epistemologies and practices of crisis.