STRUCTURE AND AGENCY IN CONTEMPORARY POLITICS

By expressing gratitude to the presence of Allah SWT, for the abundance of His grace and guidance, the writing of the book entitled Structure and Agency in Contemporary Politics can be completed. This book discusses politics between structure and agency, structure in politics: institutions and systems, the interaction of structure and agency, the state as an arena of structure and agency, political parties and power elites, globalization and the transformation of political structures as well as crises, conflicts, and political change.

During an election period, a woman from a coastal village decided to run as a legislative candidate. She knew the rules of the game by heart: the 30 percent quota for women’s representation had long been enshrined in law, political parties were obliged to include her name on the candidate list, and formally no door was closed to her. Yet the moment she stepped into the campaign arena, she confronted something far denser than the text of the law: a customary (adat) hierarchy that positioned men as public spokespersons, a party patronage network long dominated by male elites, and social norms that quietly judged women who were “too vocal” in the political sphere as anomalies. She won by the rules but lost at the level of structure — a sign that women remain a second class (Afdhal Afdhal 2024; Khan, Ahmad & Shahid 2024; Onamu, Matanga & Odhiambo 2024) within the political process.