ABSTRACT
This chapter considers politics as operating as at two levels. At one level, politics describes the operation of the state and its various apparatuses, such as the armed forces, the civil service and those organizations regulated by the state, in various degrees of proximity and distance. Politics at this level both organizes and justifies the use of state power, sometimes itself based on vested interests of well-organized groups such as ruling classes or various elites. At the macro level, otherness has clearly been a major issue in the exercise of state power and in the ideologies that accompany it. Interest grew in the emergence of spectacular youth cultures in the UK during the 1970s and 1980s, much discussed as a form of symbolic politics, a form of cultural resistance to the authority of parents, teachers, police and, through them, the state. Womanist theology has its roots in the historical suffering of black people in America.
