by Felipe Bosch
From institutions to infrastructures of affect: what does Latin America bring as a method?
In some parts of the world, one of the defining revelations of today’s transformations is the gradual displacement of liberal institutions as the exclusive organizers of meaning and coordination. This does not mean that institutions have become irrelevant. Rather, it points to the coexistence—and often competition—with other systems of organization that are less visible but more immediately effective in structuring everyday life. These can be described as affective-symbolic infrastructures of subjectivation and futurity in their capacity to organize attention, identity, belonging, aspiration, and fear at scale, extending infrastructure theory beyond technical systems into relational and perceptual arrangements (Star and Bowker, 2006; Larkin, 2013; Simone, 2004).
Unlike “traditional” institutions, these infrastructures do not primarily operate through formal rules or legal authority, but through affective circulation and embodied attachment regimes that shape political subjectivity (Berlant, 2011; Ahmed, 2004; Massumi, 2002). The ones analyzed below operate through repetition, emotional resonance, aesthetic codes, and narrative (in)coherences. They are embedded in platforms, cultural ecosystems, religious movements, transnational networks, and informal/illegal economies.
Geopolitical competition today is increasingly infrastructural, and only through that layer does older geopolitics—resources, territory, influence—still get played out. What is really at stake is attention, what becomes visible and what disappears from view; belonging, who is recognized as part of a legitimate world; identity, how subjects locate themselves inside symbolic orders; and desire, what is experienced as worth pursuing at all.
If these infrastructures are becoming globally relevant, Latin America can be read as a methodological vantage point. Following García Canclini (1990), the region is less a hybrid or mestizo space in the cultural studies sense than a long-term condition of ensamblaje: heterogeneous systems of modernity coexisting without ever fully converging into a single institutional order. Not diversity in the usual sense, but a structured incompleteness that persists over time. This aligns with broader assemblage approaches in anthropology and political theory that emphasize heterogeneous coexistence of logics without systemic convergence (Collier and Ong, 2005).
Latin America does not experience modernity as a unified temporal sequence. Multiple temporalities coexist—industrial modernity (welfare institutions, unions, public systems), neoliberal acceleration (financialization, privatization, platform economies), informal survival economies (precarity as structure, not exception), digital hypermodernity (platform governance, attention economies). Alongside these, other regimes of time persist: what is often called “pre-modern”, though that label is already misleading—indigenous cosmologies, spiritual and ritual orders, forms of magical realism that do not sit outside modernity but inside it, as part of how reality is organized and experienced. These are not layers that align. They are simultaneous, uneven, and often incompatible logics of lived experience.
Taken together, these dynamics point to specific institutional forms. The state does not operate as a unified source of legality, but as a fragmented infrastructure where legal and extra-legal orders are not external to one another but co-constitutive (Mitchell, 1991; Scott, 1998). Authority is not concentrated in a single center but distributed across overlapping regimes of normativity that include formal institutions, informal arrangements, and hybrid forms of governance. What appears as institutional fragmentation is, in practice, a (re)configuration of how legitimacy and order are produced and sustained.
This condition becomes visible in concrete infrastructures that organize everyday life across borders, outside and alongside formal institutional logics. What follows is a mapping of four such transnational systems: evangelical networks, criminal governance structures, global sport infrastructures centered on FIFA, and digital ecosystems associated with new right politics. Each of them operates as an autonomous but interdependent field of coordination, where belonging, protection, identity, and desire are produced and stabilized in practice.
Empirical grounding: four transnational networks as operating systems
What emerges from the empirical work is not a set of isolated cases, but a deeper structural pattern: the gradual formation and/or adaptation of transnational networks that operate as infrastructures for organizing everyday life where liberal-democratic institutions no longer exhaust (if they ever did) the production of meaning, belonging, and coordination.
These networks should not be interpreted as deviations from institutional order, nor as informal substitutes for it. They are partially interdependent infrastructures of coordination, each one stabilizing fragments of life under conditions of uncertainty, fragmentation, and infrastructural incompleteness. Their importance lies in what they do: they organize desire, structure belonging, and produce forms of order that are experienced as immediately real, way more so than formal institutional mediation.
In evangelical networks (Carbonelli, 2020; Goldstein, 2020; Mallimaci and Judd, 2013; Paz González, 2020; Sarrazin and Arango, 2017; Semán and Viotti, 2019), this takes the form of a dense cognitive-affective architecture where redemption is not a metaphor but a practical technology of life. The world becomes narratively legible through continuous cycles of fall and transformation, while daily behavior is stabilized through repetition, discipline, and collective reinforcement across class. What appears as religious expansion is, in infrastructural terms, a system for managing uncertainty at the level of the body, the household, and the community.
In criminal governance systems (Chabat, 2010; Dammert and Sampó, 2025; Dewey, 2020; Koonings and Kruijt, 2023; Sullivan, 2023; Uribe et al., 2025) a different form of order emerges—one that cannot be reduced to violence alone. These networks function as territorial infrastructures of protection and circulation, organizing economic life, dispute resolution, and access to consumption under conditions where formal institutions are unevenly present. Their authority is both coercive and distributive: they allocate security, opportunity, and status within fragmented environments. They embed aspiration into material circuits of survival and consumption, often blending precarity with forms of accelerated social mobility.
Global sport ecosystems, and particularly the institutional architecture surrounding FIFA (Alabarces, 2002; Dunning and Elias, 1986; Giulianotti, 2002; Santos and Hela, 2019; Susa Sánchez, 2015; Robertson and Giulianotti, 2006; Ortiz, 2025; Yallop, 1999), operate as one of the most refined infrastructures of ritualized belonging at planetary scale. In Latin America this function becomes especially visible, where football has long been central to the formation of national identity and collective imagination. These systems do not resolve conflict but stabilize it into cyclical forms of collective intensity. Multiple affective regimes coexist without contradiction: local anchoring, national identity, global spectatorship, commercial spectacle, bodily emotion and intergenerational transmission. What is produced is not consensus but repetition—an infrastructure that allows antagonism to be experienced without escalation, and belonging without ideological uniformity.
Finally, digital and new right ecosystems (Garner, 2025; Peytibi and Pérez-Diañez, 2020; Stefanoni, 2025; Vecino 2025a, 2025b) operate as infrastructures of visibility and identity formation in which political life is reorganized through attention, amplification, and algorithmic circulation. Here, legitimacy is not derived from institutional authorization but from exposure. Identity is continuously reconstructed through symbolic fragmentation, where political belonging becomes inseparable from aesthetic positioning and emotional resonance. The distinction between politics, entertainment, and identity dissolves into a continuous field of affective production.
Seen together, these four systems are not anomalies at the margins of Latin-American democratic order. They are increasingly central to how contemporary societies function. They organize everyday life where institutions no longer fully stabilize experience. They govern through affect, recognition, and repetition rather than through formal authority alone. And they do so transnationally, cutting across territorial boundaries while remaining deeply embedded in local conditions.
What matters, therefore, is not their difference, but their shared function: they are infrastructures of desire. They structure what is felt as possible, legitimate, aspirational, or meaningful in everyday life. In doing so, they reveal a displacement that is no longer possible to ignore: governance today is not monopolized by the old world’s democratic institutions, but distributed across heterogeneous systems that operate at the level of affective coordination.
Democracy re-read: from procedure to infrastructure of desire
If this is the landscape, then democracy is a contested regime of futurity: one among multiple infrastructures that compete to define what kinds of collective futures can be imagined, felt, and made livable.
This shift signals that institutions need more than ever to understand that they are embedded within a wider ecology of affective-symbolic systems that structure attention, belonging, and aspiration at scale. What is changing is not democracy’s existence but the revelation of its position within the broader field of social coordination.
This reframing also requires a correction to how two dominant traditions have interpreted contemporary politics in the region. Liberal democratic theory assumed that legitimacy is produced through procedural inclusion, institutional trust, and rational deliberation. Populist theory—particularly in the tradition of Laclau (2005)—reoriented attention toward affective identification and the construction of “the people” as a political subject formed through chains of equivalence and antagonism. Laclau’s intervention was crucial in showing that political subjectivity is never purely institutional; it is articulated through symbolic and affective logics that exceed procedural form.
However, both traditions still share a key limitation: they assume that institutions remain the primary surface on which political life is organized, even if they are supplemented by affect. What emerges today is more radical: institutions are no longer the primary surface of political organization; they are one layer within a multi-infrastructural ecology in which attention, desire, and belonging are continuously redistributed across heterogeneous systems.
This is why the liberalism–populism binary is now outdated. It describes different ways of legitimizing institutional authority, but not the deeper transformation: the infrastructural displacement of political coordination itself. From this perspective, democracy is increasingly experienced through three infrastructural conditions:
- The first is affective legitimacy: the capacity of a system to generate attachment, recognition, and emotional investment that are not reducible to coercion or compliance.
- The second is infrastructural presence: the degree to which democratic logics are embedded in the systems that structure everyday life—platforms, informal economies, cultural circuits, religious networks, and territorial arrangements.
- The third is everyday habitability: the extent to which political systems stabilize lived experience under conditions of uncertainty.
The future(s) as political subject: from epistemic plurality to infrastructural futurity
A similar transformation is taking place in relation to the future(s). Futures studies is best understood as a field structured by competing ontologies of futurity: some approaches treat the future as constructed meaning, others as structurally constrained emergence, and others as a capability distributed unevenly across subjects and institutions (Inayatullah, 1998, 2008; Miller, 2018; Slaughter and Hines, 2020; Dator, 2009; Boonmavichit & Boossabong, 2022). What is at stake is not methodological diversity alone, but competing ways of defining what the future is and how it becomes real in the present.
A useful but partial diagnosis of contemporary temporal experience can be found in Berardi’s (2017) account of the collapse of futurity under semiocapitalism. According to his work, the acceleration of cognitive, financial, and communicative regimes erodes the collective capacity to project shared futures, producing instead an extended present marked by anxiety, overload, and psychic exhaustion. Futurity, in this sense, does not disappear but becomes blocked: it ceases to operate as a stable attractor of collective desire and is replaced by affective states of saturation and withdrawal.
However, this captures a specific modulation of contemporary time. What is described as collapse is better understood as a particular configuration of temporal strain within certain socio-technical environments, but should not be understood as a universal condition of contemporaneity. Across other contexts, the same global processes that intensify cognitive overload might reorganize futurity, shifting to a distributed field of stabilization, maintained through infrastructures that compensate for institutional incompleteness by producing partial coordination in everyday life.
From this perspective, Latin America does not stand outside the crisis of futurity; rather, it exposes a different modality of it. Here, futurity is less a unified horizon under strain than a distributed field of infrastructural conditions, where everyday life is stabilized through overlapping transnational networks that produce safety, belonging, and partial order in the absence of adapted institutional systems.
This reopens the field in a different way. Futures knowledge systems can be read as situated responses to different dimensions of a single problem: how futurity is produced, stabilized, or interrupted. Each tradition intervenes at a different level—meaning, discourse, institutional design, capability, or structural constraint. What the infrastructural argument advanced here adds is a further layer. The future can be interpreted, anticipated, and governed in the present because it is produced through infrastructures that organize attention, desire, belonging, and coordination.
From this perspective, futurity is a cognitive and normative domain as an emergent effect of distributed infrastructures. Evangelical networks, criminal-territorial systems, global ritual infrastructures such as sport, and digital attention economies do not simply contain representations of the future; they actively structure the conditions under which certain futures become socially, materially, and emotionally plausible. This produces a final inversion. Futures emerge from structural competition over the infrastructures that render specific futures inhabitable in the present. The central question is therefore not what and how futures are imagined, but which infrastructures stabilize the conditions under which imagining itself becomes a possibility. In this sense, futurity becomes a contested field of infrastructural production.
Implications: futures practice as infrastructural positioning within competing regimes of futurity
If futurity is infrastructurally produced in the present through heterogeneous systems that organize desire, attention, belonging, and coordination, then futures practice cannot be understood as external to this field. It becomes a situated intervention within the same infrastructural ecology that produces the conditions of futurity itself.
This has immediate implications for how futures work is positioned across institutional, critical, and (extra)territorial spaces.
One dominant site of futures practice remains institutional foresight: multilateral agencies, ministries of planning, innovation units, citizen engagement, and corporate strategy environments. These spaces are important, but they tend to translate futures into strategic planning capacity or organizational/governance (more or less radical) transformation. In doing so, they often treat futures detached from the infrastructures of everyday life in which futurity is actually produced.
A second site is critical futures practice, which interrogates dominant imaginaries, exposes epistemic bias, and deconstructs and reconstructs the power embedded in visions of the future. Yet on its own, it risks remaining external to the material and affective infrastructures through which futurity is today enacted and stabilized.
A third, increasingly relevant site is infrastructural or situated futures practice: work embedded in civic, cultural, and transnational systems that already produce coordination, belonging, and everyday habitability. Here, futures practice participates directly in building infrastructures through which certain futures become livable, often within international, networked communities that are only partially territorial and largely mediated through institutional, philanthropic, or platform circuits.
These three positions are not mutually exclusive, but they are asymmetrically related to the actual production of futurity. The key shift is that none of them can be understood as external to the infrastructural competition over desire, attention, and legitimacy that now structures collective life.
The central question for futures practitioners is therefore no longer only what methods to use, but from where intervention takes place: where are we intervening in the infrastructures that produce futurity? This leads to a necessary recognition: futures work participates—whether explicitly or not—in the competition between infrastructures that organize desire, attention, and belonging.
What emerges is not a typology but a condition: futures practice is always already infrastructural positioning within a contested field of futurity production. This clarifies its political function. Futures practitioners increasingly operate as connectors across fragmented infrastructures of knowledge, affect, and governance—sites where futurity is already being produced in uneven ways. The task is not only to support capacities toward anticipatory governance or alternative futures, but to make visible how present infrastructures condition what can become thinkable, desirable, and collectively livable, and intervene at their level.
In this sense, futures practice converges with the broader argument of this work: political life is increasingly structured by the infrastructures that organize desire, belonging, and coordination in everyday life. Only within that terrain does futures work regain its relevance: as an engagement with the infrastructures through which the future is continuously made present.
Closing: operational claim
The future of democracy in Latin America should have never been understood as a question of institutional strengthening in isolation, but as a question of how democratic life remains operative within an infrastructural field where legitimacy, coordination, and futurity are already distributed across heterogeneous systems.
This does not imply the disappearance of institutions, but the recognition that they have never exhausted the architecture of political order. Democratic life persists only insofar as it is able to engage, translate, and contest the infrastructures through which everyday coordination and collective intelligibility are produced.
The relevance of this shift extends beyond the region. Latin America is not an exception, but a space where the co-presence of incomplete and overlapping systems makes visible a more general condition: modernity without convergence, governance without centrality, and futurity as infrastructural competition.
From this perspective, the contribution of this work is to offer Latin America as a methodological displacement. It invites a reorientation of how democracy, geopolitics, and futures are studied: away from frameworks that privilege ontological fixity or institutional form, and toward the infrastructures through which political life is materially and affectively organized.
What follows from this is a broader implication for the field itself. If the symposium begins from the question of imperial narratives and pluriversal futures across the hemisphere, then the task is to recognize that these imaginaries are now embedded in distributed infrastructural systems that cut across hemispheres.
The question that remains open is therefore not how democracy, as we colonially know it, adapts to change, but how research, theory, and practice reposition themselves within the same infrastructural terrain that now conditions both democratic life and futurity. In that sense, the future of the field depends less on refining its categories than on acknowledging the systems in which those categories are already operational.
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Acknowledgements
This work draws on and is partially informed by research conducted within the project “Effective and Efficient Transnational Networks: What They Tell Us About Democracies Without Results?”, funded by the Avina Foundation’s Futures Directorate.
The project was developed through collaborative work with Carlos March and Bernardo Toro (Fundación Avina), Verónica del Carril, and Agustina Jacobo, whose contributions to the broader research process on civic infrastructures, systems change, and transnational networks informed the conceptual background of this article.
Fundación Avina’s work at the intersection of systems change, civic innovation, and sustainable development provided an enabling institutional context for exploring questions of democratic coordination and infrastructural transformation across Latin America.
The author is solely responsible for all interpretations, analyses, and conclusions expressed in this article.
Disclaimer
The author used AI-assisted language technologies (ChatGPT) solely for language editing, stylistic refinement, and proofreading. All conceptual development, theoretical framing, analysis, and conclusions are the sole responsibility of the author. The author reviewed, revised, and validated all outputs to ensure accuracy, coherence, and intellectual integrity.
