ABSTRACT
Clements proposes a new paradigm of compassionate politics. The articulation of social and communitarian spaces is critical to generating progressive, emancipatory, and effective forms of public imagination against ruthless power and dominatory politics. A permissive environment has promoted a politics of inequality and greed, in which the richest one percent of the world’s population has seen its share of global wealth increase from 44 percent in 2009 to more than 50 percent in 2016. The most fundamental social dynamic governing most relationships and the DNA for peacefulness is the norm of reciprocity. A rationale for ensuring that political imaginaries focus attention on how states, societies, and communities might move from dominatory to collaborative power must be developed. A genuine paradigm shift from domination and “power over” others to “power with” others requires movements sustaining egalitarian, relatively non-coercive, and integrative sensibilities. Promoting politics of compassion requires an embrace of diversity, ambiguity, and some degree of disorder, challenging the authoritarian imagination that prioritizes political order and hierarchy in vain attempts to control a chaotic world. It is vital that capable leaders build transparent, open communication and incentives to reward fair, equal, reciprocal, and resilient exchanges between peoples.
