The Hybridity of Political Space as a Concept

Abstract

In the traditional view, ’politics’ is a spatial concept. It is commonly associated with representative assemblies or political parties which operate in a certain sphere of politics. Increasingly, however, political activity can take shape in other spaces, too. For example, new forms of online politics have increased in the era of Facebook and Twitter. But the hybridity of political space is not only a new phenomenon. Political spaces can be constituted temporarily in discourse as well. What constitutes as ‘political space’, then, is a matter of perspective and interpretation. This panel aims at conceptualising political space in order to understand the variety of the phenomenon as well as to theorise the hybridity of the concept. Who sets the space for which kind of politics? How is it done in practice? And for what kinds of political purposes? The panel includes both theoretically and empirically oriented papers dealing with discursive, institutional, constitutional, civil society and populist aspects, to name a few.