Theory of Encryption of Power
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organize themes, and suggest some shorter phrasing. All content was verified
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checked by me (and another editor I do not know). The prose was rewritten in my own voice. I am the author
of the underlying theory and some of the books cited, although the bibliography on the theory is now quite extense. Thanks. WisdomR (talk) 18:35, 6 October 2026 (UTC)
Theory of Encryption of Power
The theory of encryption of power (also called the encryption of power, or decryption of power) is a politico-philosophical framework that emerged from Latin American critical legal and decolonial thought but has since been taken up across political theory, epistemology, and the philosophy of law. The theory posits that modern power does not rule mainly by prohibition but by encryption: it constitutes itself as a code, installs that code as the only legitimate medium of political life, publishes it, and withholds the key — so that the many are formally invoked as sovereign and substantively suspended as a hidden people.[1]
The theory was first formulated in 2012 by Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo and Gabriel Méndez-Hincapié in "La constitución encriptada: Nuevas formas de emancipación del poder global," published in Redhes: Revista de Derechos Humanos y Estudios Sociales.[1]
It forms the conceptual basis for the Bloomsbury Academic book series Decrypting Power and Coloniality: Philosophical Perspectives from and through the Global South.[2] The framework has been extended and applied by scholars including Marinella Machado-Araujo, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Andityas Matos, James R. Martel, Nicolás Panotto, and Luisa Gabriela Morales-Vega.
Core concepts
The theory looks at how institutional, political, and legal structures encode authority — neutralizing popular agency while keeping the outward appearance of liberal democratic governance intact. Sanín-Restrepo has described the concepts as "deeply connected" — not a list of separate ideas, but a system that only comes alive when applied.[3]
Language, power, and encryption
The theory begins from a simple observation: where there is language, there is encryption. Encryption — hiding meaning in plain sight — is a feature of any symbolic system. It is what makes language elastic, poetic, mobile.[4]
But the encryption of power is different. It is a primordial prohibition — political, legal, racial — on access to the programming and uses of communication. It works through permanent qualifications and conditions for the exercise of power, and produces a rigid stratification for belonging to any possible world.[4]
Potestas vs. Potentia
Drawing on Spinoza and classical political thought, the framework distinguishes between potestas (centralized, institutionalized domination) and potentia (immanent, constituent power). Modern constitutionalism is theorized as an encryption machine — one that conditions human existence (beingness) to conform to pre-established, transcendent identity models.[4]
For the theory, being and power are not separate. To be is to exercise power. Power is not confined to the state or the economy — it resides in the vitality of every entity. A kiss, a law, a poem, a bomb: all express power. What potestas does is absorb this multiplicity into structures of uniformity, conditioning life and qualifying it.[3]
Simulacra and transcendent models
The forms of encryption are simulacra. The term comes from Deleuze's reading of Plato, but the theory gives it a different emphasis. A simulacrum is not simply a false copy. It is any transcendent model — a constitution, the free market, the nation — that determines and conditions beingness, imposing a model of identity in its place. To be, under the simulacrum, is to conform to the model.[3]
Sovereignty, as drawn out in modern constitutions, is a simulacrum: it encrypts the power of the people and imposes a transcendent authority over them.[5] Decryption is the practice of exposing and dismantling these simulacra.[3]
The hidden people
The central political and juridical totality of modernity is "the people." But it is a totality split at its core. The key to encryption is the conversion of the people into a synecdoche — a pars pro toto in which an arbitrary part (white people within a nation-state, property owners, the normative citizen) defines an unattainable infinity: the excluded, the marginalized, the forced migrant. This is what the theory calls "the hidden people."[4]
The hidden people must be falsely included in modern juridical orders to give consistency to the fantasy of the totality. The crucial point is that the people as a whole can only exist and exercise power if it keeps that other zone of the people hidden. The formula is the "all but one," or "all minus one": the totality minus what it must exclude to remain pure.[5]
But the hidden people are not only passive victims. They are also potential agents of resistance and transformation — those who have the primordial capacity to decrypt power by exposing the simulations that conceal it.[3]
Sovereignty
The theory argues that sovereignty — not the state, not the law — remains the core of power as domination. What defines sovereignty is the power to decide the exception from within the exception. And in coloniality, that decision depends on one thing: the creation of a hidden people as the exception.[4]
The coupling of coloniality and liberalism produces the most sophisticated machine of power in history. The formula is simple: the people must be both the exception and the (simulated) sovereign. Coloniality establishes the people as sovereign while immediately seizing their sovereignty as absolute power. All of this is done while maintaining the simulacrum of popular sovereignty as the political and legal axiom of the people.[4]
Biopolitics and the critique of Agamben
The theory extends and complements Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics. It argues that the encryption of legal beingness comes before biopolitical regulation.[4]
It also offers a critique of Giorgio Agamben's concept of "inoperosity" — deactivation as resistance. The theory argues that Agamben's position leads to political paralysis. Where Agamben sees only entelecheia and concludes that all actualization is domination, the theory recovers energeia as a distinct modality of actuality — immanent, continuous, and liberating. Deactivation is not resistance; it is withdrawal. True decryption requires the active exercise of immanent power.[6]
Historical application in Latin America
In the Latin American context, the framework analyzes post-independence constitutional developments after emancipation from Spain. It argues that liberal constitutional adoption, along with paradigms like the Monroe Doctrine, moved regional governance from overt territorial colonialism to encrypted legal structures. Under these constitutions, universal declarations of sovereignty coexisted with structural exclusions of Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and peasant populations. This is what the theory calls "the hidden people."[1][5]
Ontological dimension
Ontologically, the theory contrasts two Aristotelian modalities of power: entelecheia (stratified, endpoint-driven actuality) and energeia (unconditioned, dynamic becoming).[7] Sanín-Restrepo argues that genuine democracy requires the absence of pre-qualifications for political communication, which positions democracy as an ontological condition of becoming.[8][9]
Origins and development
The theory was first formulated in the early 2010s, in the context of Latin American critical legal theory. Sanín-Restrepo and Méndez-Hincapié argued that modern constitutions don't just limit or regulate state power. They encode it. They set up a public legal language and then withhold from the polity the capacity to author meaning within it.[1]
Sanín-Restrepo then developed the idea across three books. Decolonizing Democracy: Power in a Solid State (2016) introduced the historical argument — the "fraudulent fusion" of the people and state sovereignty in modern constitutionalism, and the production of "the hidden people" as the structural exception required to keep the fiction of popular sovereignty going.[5]
Being and Contingency: Decrypting Heidegger's Terminology (2020) developed the ontological dimension. It rereads Aristotle's distinction between energeia and entelecheia and argues that Western metaphysics has consistently privileged static, endpoint-driven actuality over dynamic becoming — and that this privilege is what encrypts the contingency of being.[7]
Decrypting Time: Grounding Democracy in Becomingness (2027) completed the trilogy. It grounds radical democracy in the structure of temporal becoming, engages Quentin Meillassoux's concept of Hyper-Chaos, and argues that when contingency actualizes as irreversible time, entelecheia is inherently prohibited as a ground for authority.[9]
The framework was further developed in Decrypting Power (2018), an edited collection that applied the theory across a wide range of domains. Contributors included Angus McDonald, Enrique Prieto-Rios, Vito De Lucia, Kojo Koram, Marinella Machado-Araujo, Alejandro Rosillo, and Heiner Fechner. The volume also includes Sanín-Restrepo's essay "The People vs. Hegel," which develops the critique of time and immanence that later becomes central to the trilogy.[10]
The theory was the subject of an international seminar at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) in April 2019, organized around four thematic sessions on critical legal theory, postcolonial thought, constituent power, and constitutional decryption.[11] The seminar led to a special dossier in the Revista da Faculdade Mineira de Direito (PUC Minas, 2020), edited by Sanín-Restrepo and Machado-Araujo, which gathered essays applying the theory to constitutional law, human rights, and political resistance.[12] The dossier included an essay by Sanín-Restrepo and Machado-Araujo tracing the itinerary of the idea and clarifying its main categories.[4]
Since 2020 the framework has grown into a broader research program through the Bloomsbury Academic series Decrypting Power and Coloniality: Philosophical Perspectives from and through the Global South, edited by Sanín-Restrepo, Marinella Machado-Araujo, Angus MacDonald, and James R. Martel. The series has published volumes on sovereignty, political theology, secularism, and justice, and has announced forthcoming titles including Decrypting Cinema, Decrypting AI, and Decrypting Global Inequality.[2]
Scholarly applications
The framework has been applied across a number of disciplines in critical theory and political philosophy.[2]
James R. Martel and Sanín-Restrepo edited Decrypting Sovereignty as Archism: Moving Toward a New Democracy (2026), a collection that brought the theory to bear on the concept of sovereignty and its relation to constituent power. Contributors included Martel, Simón Royo Hernández, Vincent Møystad, Anthony Faramelli, Zack Tartuk Smith, Jonnie Eriksson, Kalle Jonasson, and María Bacilio.[13]
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni brought the concept into his work on epistemic hierarchies and internationalism, in Decoloniality in Southern Africa (2020) and Beyond the Coloniality of Internationalism (2024).[14][15] He is also building a trilogy on the theory, Writing at the End of an Era, with Bloomsbury.[2]
Andityas Matos applied the theory to political theology in Decrypting Political Theology: Genealogy, Tendencies, Antagonisms (2025). The book presents a genealogy of political theology through the theory of encryption of power, drawing on the ontological idea of an-archy — a practice of thought without foundations, centered on flow, potency, and contingency — to explore both classical authors (Schmitt, Benjamin, Taubes) and contemporary feminist, Black, and decolonial perspectives. It also examines phenomena such as Christofascism, prosperity theology, and neo-Pentecostalism in politics.[16]
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera used it to analyze state secrecy and financial regulation in A Hopeful Political Imagination (2025).[17] Nicolás Panotto applied it to secular political institutions in Latin America in Decrypting Secular Power (2026).[18] And Luisa Gabriela Morales-Vega used it to analyze asylum and immigration law in Decrypting Asylum Legal Regimes (forthcoming).[19]
The theory has been taken up beyond Latin America. Munyaradzi Mushonga, a professor at the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies at the University of the Free State and Global Academic Director of the Decolonial International Network, applied the theory to post-apartheid South Africa in a March 2026 column in the Sowetan. He argued that human rights, democracy, the constitution, and the rule of law "are encryptors of power and a grand simulacrum presenting domination as liberation," and that "the constitution is the master encryptor." For Mushonga, South Africa's 1996 constitution is "on paper... a monument to human rights," but "in practice, a monument to their encryption." He cited the Grootboom judgment of 2001 and the Treatment Action Campaign judgment of 2002 as examples of rights vindicated while the people who litigated them remained dispossessed.[20]
Reception
Work associated with the theory has been discussed in critical journals and academic reviews. Drucilla Cornell endorsed Decrypting Power for its analysis of leftist political theory.[10] Reviews of Decolonizing Democracy appeared in Law, Culture & Humanities, looking at its critique of state capitalism and legal ontology.[21]
Alain Brossat, Antonio de Cabo de la Vega, and Carlo Galli have also written on individual volumes in the series.[5][16][9] Brossat described Decrypting Time as "a vital, gripping intervention for late democracy." De Cabo characterized it as "a genuine and serious philosophical contribution to the literature on political ontology and radical democratic theory."[9]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Sanín-Restrepo, Ricardo; Méndez-Hincapié, Gabriel (31 December 2012). "La constitución encriptada: Nuevas formas de emancipación del poder global". Redhes: Revista de Derechos Humanos y Estudios Sociales. Retrieved 2 October 2026.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 "Decrypting Power and Coloniality: Philosophical Perspectives from and through the Global South". Bloomsbury Academic. Retrieved 2 October 2026.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Sanín-Restrepo, Ricardo; Machado-Araujo, Marinella; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J., eds. (2025). Decrypting Justice: From Epistemic Violence to Immanent Democracy. Lexington Books / Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-1-66696-116-4.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 Sanín-Restrepo, Ricardo; Machado-Araujo, Marinella (2020). "The Theory of Encryption of Power: Itinerary of an Idea". Revista da Faculdade Mineira de Direito. 23 (45): 222–245. ISSN 1808-9429.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 Sanín-Restrepo, Ricardo (2016). Decolonizing Democracy: Power in a Solid State. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-1-78348-705-9.
- ↑ Sanín-Restrepo, Ricardo (30 September 2019). "The Case Against Agamben's Impotence". Critical Legal Thinking. Retrieved 2 October 2026.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Sanín-Restrepo, Ricardo (2020). Being and Contingency: Decrypting Heidegger's Terminology. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-1-5381-4767-2.
- ↑ Sanín-Restrepo, Ricardo (17 March 2025). "Ontology and Politics of Liberation: Two Paths to Decrypt Power". Critical Legal Thinking. Retrieved 2 October 2026.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 Sanín-Restrepo, Ricardo (2027). Decrypting Time: Grounding Democracy in Becomingness. Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 9798216485698.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 Sanín-Restrepo, Ricardo, ed. (2018). Decrypting Power. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-1-78660-927-4.
- ↑ "Seminario internacional Teoría Crítica Constitucional: la teoría de la encriptación del poder". Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México. April 2019. Retrieved 2 October 2026.
- ↑ Sanín-Restrepo, Ricardo; Machado-Araujo, Marinella, eds. (2020). "Direito Constitucional Crítico: a Teoria da Encriptação do Poder". Revista da Faculdade Mineira de Direito. 23 (45). PUC Minas.
- ↑ Martel, James R.; Sanín-Restrepo, Ricardo, eds. (2026). Decrypting Sovereignty as Archism. Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-1-66697-871-1.
- ↑ Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. (2020). Decoloniality in Southern Africa: History, Epistemology, and Politics. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-367-43890-6.
- ↑ Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. (2024). Beyond the Coloniality of Internationalism: Reworlding the World from the Global South. CODESRIA. ISBN 978-2-86978-983-8.
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 Matos, Andityas (2025). Decrypting Political Theology: Genealogy, Tendencies, Antagonisms. Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-1-66697-865-0.
- ↑ Guardiola-Rivera, Oscar (2025). A Hopeful Political Imagination: Courage and Fantastic Critique in the Age of Meltdown. Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-1-978760-28-8.
- ↑ Panotto, Nicolás (2026). Decrypting Secular Power: Theological and Colonial Codes in Latin American Politics. Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-1-66697-127-9.
- ↑ Morales-Vega, Luisa Gabriela (forthcoming). Decrypting Asylum Legal Regimes. Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 979-8-21656-364-8.
- ↑ Mushonga, Munyaradzi (20 March 2026). "Human and constitutional rights destroy life in the name of life". Sowetan. Retrieved 6 October 2026.
- ↑ Martel, James (2017). "Book Review: Decolonizing Democracy: Power in a Solid State". Law, Culture and the Humanities. 13 (2). SAGE Publications: 580–584. doi:10.1177/1743872117693344b.
Category:Critical theory
Category:Political philosophy
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