Incumbents, Aspirational Challengers, and New Regimes of Power: Reconceptualizing Elites In Moments of Rupture

Resurgent authoritarianism is conventionally read as elites closing ranks against societies. This session proposes the opposite starting point: that authoritarian turns, democratic ruptures, and state capture are frequently produced within elites — through factional struggle, contested succession, and the collapse of the coalitions and dispositions that once held ruling groups together. At the heart of such ruptures lies a confrontation between incumbents and aspirational challengers: ascending fractions that move aggressively into the breach, delegitimizing the established order, attacking its principles of eliteness, and seeking not mere power but to rewrite its rules. These challengers rarely bring only new faces; they import new rationalities, new techniques of rule, and new claims to legitimacy. Rupture thus crystallizes into new regimes of power and new governmentalities through which elites govern populations and one another.

We invite papers that treat the incumbent–challenger struggle and the power regimes it generates as objects of global comparison. How do elite fault lines — between economic, political, military, and religious fractions; between entrenched incumbents and insurgent aspirants — produce authoritarian consolidation in some settings and democratic breakdown or renewal in others? How do global circuits (donor regimes, international organizations, transnational education, diaspora capital) empower challengers and restructure these struggles?

We welcome empirical contributions from postcolonial, post-conflict, and old-industrial settings — ethnographic, biographical, network-analytic, historical-comparative — alongside theoretical papers rethinking elite sociology (Bourdieu, Foucault, Pareto, Mosca, and beyond) from a relational, global perspective, built as readily from Phnom Penh, Accra, or Gwangju as from Paris or New York.