Blockchain Papers

The Historian

“The Ledger of Power: Who Benefits, Who Pays” Author: Historian Abstract This work examines political power not through ideology, legality, or declared moral principles, but through a diagnostic lens focused on benefit, cost, and silence. Across democratic, authoritarian, and hybrid systems, it traces how legitimacy is constructed and maintained by the selective distribution of advantage and the deferral or concealment of harm. Rather than asking whether regimes are virtuous, this analysis asks who benefits, who pays, and which costs remain unaccounted for. Drawing on historical patterns and contemporary structures, the text argues that power defines what is considered “right” through enforceability and delivery, while moral language follows as justification rather than guidance. Elections, law, growth, and stability are treated as mechanisms that regulate elite competition, manage consent, and stabilize hierarchical benefit flows. When these mechanisms succeed, legitimacy appears moral; when they fail, narratives collapse and deferred costs surface. The book emphasizes that compliance is often transactional rather than ideological, rooted in material security, predictability, and exhaustion rather than belief. It further shows how stagnation, inequality, and narrative contradiction erode legitimacy, producing cynicism, withdrawal, or instability. Rather than prescribing ideal systems, the work offers an analytical framework for understanding any regime’s trajectory by examining its internal accounting of benefits and burdens. The central claim is simple: power is temporary, legitimacy is conditional, and consequences endure. Understanding political systems requires not moral affirmation or rejection, but clear-eyed accounting of how advantage and harm are distributed over time.

HUYNH GIA BAO

WHAT THIS PAPER ARGUES. Every Popperian tool this corpus has built — falsifiability criteria, self-vaccination, the act-level test, the Personal System Reminder, and the four falsification conditions just added to the Entropy-Resistant Institution (ERI) index — operates inside a discursive formation without ever asking how that formation became possible to inhabit in the first place. This is not a gap Popperian rigor can close by adding a fifth falsification condition or a fifth comparator case, because the question is not whether a claim within the formation is true or false; it is what made this particular kind of claim — a weighted numerical composite, cross-culturally applied, extracted from historical institutions and repurposed as a design template for future governance — a thinkable, legitimate object of knowledge at all. This is the question Michel Foucault's archaeological method exists to ask. This paper argues the corpus needs it, using the just-revised ERI paper as evidence rather than illustration. Four archaeological blind spots are documented directly in ERI's own text. First, its newly added Jiangnan-regeneration section treats "Jiankang, 220–589" as a bounded unit that a fourth comparator case can be added alongside — the unexamined assumption that a historical institution is a natural object rather than one constituted by the apparatus built to measure it, Foucault's critique of "the unity of the book" applied for the first time to a unity of the case. Second, the six attributes assume, without argument, that "legitimacy transfer" and "resource flexibility" name the same kind of variable in a Six Dynasties Chinese, a Shinto-imperial Japanese, and a Catholic canon-law context — a commensurability claim no additional comparator case can test, because the problem is not sample size but an a priori equivalence the index requires in order to function as an index at all. Third, ERI names its own methodological ancestors — Polity5, the Fragile States Index, V-Dem — as if borrowing a value-neutral toolkit, when each is inherited along with the specific historical formation that produced it. Fourth, ERI states plainly that the exercise exists to extract portable institutional design lessons for F2-era governance actors — read here not as incidental motivation but as the archive-producing act itself, the textbook operation of what Foucault calls biopower. The paper's constructive contribution is the Archaeological Symmetry Principle, extending this corpus's existing Principle of Epistemic Symmetry into a register falsifiability cannot reach alone: a researcher who subjects a target argument to falsifiability must, symmetrically, subject their own measuring instrument to historicization. Read this way, the Longevity Asymmetry Corpus is reread as an analysis of biopolitics that has operated, until now, without the name — the Mortality Symmetry Axiom as the statistical anonymity that historically made biopower's tolerance of differential death invisible, the Biological Zero-Day Mechanism as the process that collapses that anonymity back into sovereign-style visibility. The paper closes by naming, honestly, the tension this creates with the corpus's own Popperian commitments, and states plainly what an archaeological stance does not solve.

Federica Carlotto

Consumption of artworks and luxury items has always reflected traditional dynamics of class and social status. This chapter considers how globalisation, digitalisation and the emergence of younger generations of consumers have reshuffled these conventions, introducing new markers of status and distinction: Subversive elevations: brands draw from “low-brow” art such as graffiti or pop-art to build appeal among younger customers and create a cultural barrier with the older or aspirational segments Diversified access: the creation of ensemble collaborations where product-based collaborations are accompanied by non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has introduced further layers of differentiation Experience: with many collaborations being available as events or in other experiential formats, status is growingly expressed through experience as a new form of cultural capital based on inside knowledge and timing

Andrew Dryhurst, Daniel ‘Zach’ Sloman, Yazid Zahda

The Morphogenetic Régulation approach (MR) contributes to the Morphogenetic Approach by explaining the material and ideational origins of change and stasis in agency, structure, and culture. In this paper, we focus on the expressive quality of ideas and systemic persistence in three research projects. The first demystifies inclusive governance and its adverse impacts. It shows how, contrary to institutions of governance, inclusiveness is not simply a norm but actually the explication of corporate agents’ ideas about rational choice institutionalism which leads to adverse impacts on vulnerable groups and ecologies known as adverse inclusion. The second investigates the role of ideas as adequacy and self-explication in guiding Palestinian actors’ actions towards the deepening of neoliberalization in Palestine. The third explains the relevance of the systemic persistence problematique for understanding how three juxtaposed themes – Web2, Web3, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) – are shaping the political economy and infrastructure of the Internet.

Aaron Martin, Gargi Sharma, Siddharth Peter de Souza, Linnet Taylor · 10 authors

Debates are ongoing on the limits of - and possibilities for - sovereignty in the digital era. While most observers spotlight the implications of the Internet, cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence/machine learning and advanced data analytics for the sovereignty of nation states, a critical yet under examined question concerns what digital innovations mean for authority, power and control in the humanitarian sphere in which different rules, values and expectations are thought to apply. This forum brings together practitioners and scholars to explore both conceptually and empirically how digitisation and datafication in aid are (re)shaping notions of sovereign power in humanitarian space. The forum's contributors challenge established understandings of sovereignty in new forms of digital humanitarian action. Among other focus areas, the forum draws attention to how cyber dependencies threaten international humanitarian organisations' purported digital sovereignty. It also contests the potential of technologies like blockchain to revolutionise notions of sovereignty in humanitarian assistance and hypothesises about the ineluctable parasitic qualities of humanitarian technology. The forum concludes by proposing that digital technologies deployed in migration contexts might be understood as 'sovereignty experiments'. We invite readers from scholarly, policy and practitioner communities alike to engage closely with these critical perspectives on digitisation and sovereignty in humanitarian space.

Stephen W. Sawyer

Foucault and the state Stephen W. Sawyer (bio) For those attentive to the epochal shifts of globalization, the state has been either serving global capital or on its way out for decades. Neo-liberalism prones new scales of economic and political organization and the promise of a global civil society while international law ostensibly undermines the traditional functions of state power.1 The inadequacy of the state has found an equally sharp echo among populists who have reaffirmed democracy at the expense of a robust state.2 And in an odd déjà-vu, social scientists are once again pushing elsewhere: the state would seem at once the all-powerful protagonist of global finance or entirely insufficient for integrating popular power in our contemporary democracies.3 In what follows, I offer an analysis that seeks to come to terms with, and indeed challenges some of the assumptions underlying such portraits of the state. Perhaps ironically, I begin by returning to one of the theorists that has been most central to the push beyond the state, Michel Foucault.4 Foucault’s choice of the term governmentality, his regular comments on the insufficiencies of a strict focus on “the state,” and claims that his method implies “leaving the problem of the state aside,”5 have all contributed to a general sense that Foucault’s work pushed us in many fruitful directions, but the state was not one of them. It has indeed been commonly understood that Foucault was revealing the dark side of a rather innocent story on a liberating liberal individualism and subjectivity, and the trompe l’oeil of a progressive civil society [End Page 135] independent of the state, at the same time that he was rendering a more complex tableau of power than the Marxist emphasis on a superstructural state apparatus in the hands of a dominant class.6 Instead, it has been argued, his work from the late 1970s, and in particular his focus on governmentality, solidified a turn toward a “microphysics of power.” This approach refused a conception of the refractory state as the sole site of power and rather demonstrated how the state, civil society, bureaucracy, law, and military coercion, among many other elements, were part of a larger set of governmental rationalities. I argue, somewhat to the contrary, that Foucault’s turn toward governmentality did not amount to a disinterest in the state any more than the last great wave of democratic mobilization and globalization has meant the state’s end.7 Indeed, many have interpreted his claim that we must cut off the king’s head as a call to turn away from the state entirely. Considering the full extent of his comments on the state, such an analysis seems problematic—as if cutting off the king’s head could mean that “the state” was no longer a significant category for understanding our contemporary world; as if through some metonymic miracle beheading the king meant the entire state magically disappeared. And what if the lesson to be learned from cutting off the king’s head is that we must reframe our basic analytical categories for thinking about the state? Precisely because he was the first to call for beheading the king, Foucault’s work is a fitting place to begin to clarify the place of the state. Through his lectures at the Collège de France, he provided a deeply revised notion of the state. Drawing it out of the center of the story, he revealed its permeability and responsiveness to other sites of power like individual subjectivity, family, civil society, asylums, schools, and multiple other bodies and practices. He refused to posit the state as a universal concept or thing with essential properties. From his perspective, one could not determine the fundamental nature of a polity by defining its state as red or blue, weak or strong, centralized or decentralized. In what follows, I argue that this approach to the state is original in that it integrates the deep ambivalence toward the state that characterized pluralist theories as well as other society-centered approaches, without tossing out the state in its entirety. In other words, the notion of the state that we may...

Tasos Papadimitriou

Popular demands for democracy frequently transcend the liberal representative model towards more radical conceptions that include greater insistence on personal autonomy, and direct participation in decision-making processes. This paper looks at the direct action protests against the G8 summit that took place in the summer of 2005 in Scotland, casting a critical eye on the concept and practice of autonomism, its transformative potential and its ability to build a movement capable of challenging the existing order of things. It argues that despite representing a truly remarkable experiment in alternative ways of relating, organizing and acting, the protests failed to have any impact on the summit, something which exemplifies the fact that the relevance of decentralized networks of small autonomous collectivities is very often confined within the ‘activist ghetto’, tenuously engaged with the wider society and blighted by a selfindulging fetishization of organizational and other principles. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2008 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

Mireille Hildebrandt

This article explores the complex relationship between law and (scientific) expertise. The author first discusses the difference between scientific knowledge and scientific expertise, tracing the historical roots of the concept of proof in a legal rather than a mathematical context. Second, the historical roots of the fair trial are discussed in terms of the premodern épreuve and the modern preuve, demonstrating the relationship with coordinate and subordinate types of justice. Third, Foucault's analysis of épreuve, enquête, and examèn is extended to clarify how preuve and épreuve have been integrated into the fair trial, which is explained in relation to the formal and the substantive notions of the "Rechtsstaat." This analysis finally allows the author to discuss the difference between two approaches of scientific expertise in court: one claiming that judges should defer to science and another claiming that a court of law is one of the spaces in which such expertise can be contested. The article concludes that the integration of subordinate and coordinate justice exemplified in the fair trial, opens new perspectives for the testing of scientific expertise, taking into account whose interests are at stake.

Emma Porio

No abstract is available for this record.