The book initiates a relational turn in policy making and governance by developing further relational political analysis and by taking relational thinking to bear on not just analytic/descriptive issues, but also to normative/prescriptive issues. The need for such a turn, this book argues, comes from the ever-increasing relevance of addressing the so-called wicked problems of governance like climate change, COVID-19 kinds of pandemics, global economic recessions and refugee crises. The boo...

This book introduces relational thinking to political analysis. Instead of merely providing an overview of possible trajectories for articulating a relational political analysis, Peeter Selg and Andreas Ventsel put forth a concrete relational theory of the political, which has implications for research methodology, culminating in a concrete method they call political form analysis. In addition, they sketch out several applications of this theory, methodology and method. They call their app...

The emergence of political identities and communities in (social) media is largely driven by affective responses to current events—a tendency facilitated by the dominance of emotionally and visually oriented communication. However, this mode of community formation leads, first, to the inherent instability and transience of these groups and, second, to the oversimplification of complex socio-political issues into binary, yes/no alternatives. Within this framework, deliberation and argumenta...