Current Issue
This 2023 issue of the USK Journal of Political Science & Epistemology shifts the analytic lens from empires and institutions to the microscopic theatres of power: families, churches, universities and courts. Building on the 2022 issue Scripts of Warfare, which demonstrated how writing systems, languages and canonical texts shape global hierarchies, this issue asks a disturbing but necessary question: how do those same logics inhabit our most intimate relationships?
The opening article extends earlier research on imperial psychology (The Dark Tetrad Traits of Empire, 2014) and colonial governance (From Mvemba Nzinga to Modern Puppets, 2016) to show how the micro-politics of narcissistic families prefigure authoritarian states. Subsequent contributions examine churches as laboratories of obedience, mothers-in-law and bridewealth as mechanisms of political economy, universities and seminaries as training grounds for the colonised mind, and constitutional law as a potential site for anti-narcissistic safeguards.
Throughout, the authors dialogue with Scripts of Warfare: they treat Pan-African federation not only as a geopolitical project but as a transformation of affective and cognitive patterns in households; they revisit Mandombe and Kikongo not merely as symbols of sovereignty but as tools for naming and resisting everyday domination. The issue closes by sketching a research programme on anti-narcissistic constitutionalism, where legal, educational and spiritual reforms converge.
The central wager of this issue is that no political liberation is sustainable if the micro-structures of power remain organised according to the same narcissistic grammar that underpins empire.
