THE ARC OF INSTRUMENTARIAN POLITICS
THE ARC OF INSTRUMENTARIAN POLITICS By Rahul Ramya Date: 26 th November 2025 I. Introduction: A New Epoch of Political Control We are living through a moment that resembles a turning of history’s hinge—a profound shift in how political authority is exercised. The traditional pillars of governance—laws, elections, ideology, movements—are being overshadowed by a new architecture of power: behaviour-modification technologies born in surveillance capitalism . What began as a corporate strategy to predict consumer behaviour has now become the preferred instrument of political elites around the world. Instrumentarian Politics is this new system of rule—one that does not rely on overt repression but on modelling, predicting, and steering the behaviour of citizens through digital, biometric, and algorithmic infrastructures. Its most intense versions appear in China’s algorithmic totalitarianism , Russia’s predictive authoritarianism , and the Gulf monarchies’ digital absolutism , but...