Politics and Police: Rancière’s Political Thought

We deem the concepts of “politics” and “police” as developed in the political theory of Jacques Rancière crucial instruments for understanding the project of the PvdD. Rancière attempts to go beyond the Aristotelian notion of politics. According to Aristotle, “human beings are political because they own the power of speech that puts into common the issues of justice and injustice whereas animals only have voice to express pleasure or pain” (Rancière Reference Rancière2006, online). The Aristotelian notion of politics refers to institutional practices in which various social subjects or “parts” discuss matters of justice and distribute power. Although this understanding of politics resonates well with what is commonly associated with the term, Rancière proposes to call these types of governance practices “the police.”

In Rancière’s account, the police, thus, represents the governance of the status quo or the seemingly natural order of things in which everything has its “proper” place (Dikeç Reference Dikeç2005, 174). The “policed” social order does not necessarily refer to the state apparatus and certainly not (only) to the “petty police.” It is rather the disciplining body of power mechanisms through which the “aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution” (Rancière Reference Rancière1999, 28). Police should, therefore, not only be understood pejoratively but also as a “regime” or mode of governance aimed at social control of subjects who are being recognized as part of the social order.

This policed social order, where every “part” of society has its proper place, is described by Rancière as the “partition of the sensible” (la partage du sensible) and plays a central role in his account (Lievens Reference Lievens2014). Any society is, or can be, partitioned into various parts representing different social subjects—for example, peasants, workers, women, bourgeoisie, etc. Yet, no order of governance can fully account for all parts in society, simply because political institutions, social instruments, and even our language are not capable of fully recognizing each “part” of society. Thus, there will always be “parts that have no part” as they fall outside of the social order or are not recognized as such.

In contrast to “police,” Rancière redefines politics as a moment that is instantiated when those “parts that have no part” act under the assumption of being equal to the recognized parts and demand to be taken into account in the partitioning in which they previously had no part. Politics, then, is a rare moment that is regarded as an “extremely determined activity antagonistic to policing” because Rancière requires the subjects that engage in politics to act under the presumption of equality—that is as parts that do have a part. In later work, Rancière has summarized his account as follows: “Politics consist in reconfigurating (sic.) the partition of the sensible, in bringing on the stage new objects and subjects, in making visible that which was not visible, audible as speaking beings they who were merely heard as noisy animals” (Rancière Reference Rancière2006, online). Thus, prior to the discussion of matters of justice or who should be in power lies the question of who gets to decide what justice is. Politics in a Rancièrian sense concerns exactly the (re)configuration of subjects and objects that get to decide on matters of justice.

A textbook example of such a political moment with regard to race according to Rancière (Reference Rancière2005) was Rosa Parks’ staged refusal to sit in the back of a bus. In this case, a Black woman negated the “police order” by resisting the “proper place” of Black subjects and demanded to be treated similar to other “parts” in society—that is, white subjects. Other examples of the emancipation of racialized (and gendered) subjects are rather limited in Rancière’s work, but various scholars have used his theory to describe other “moments of politics.” Examples include U.S. Civil Rights activists who acted as ordinary customers in lunch corners that did not serve to African Americans (May Reference May2008) or Black mothers who refused to leave a meeting in Congress after they were denied speech (Sparks Reference Sparks2016).

In some instances, applying Rancière’s thoughts requires one to stretch his concepts. Gündoǧdu (Reference Gündoǧdu2017), for instance, criticized Rancière for his misrecognition of the 2005 violent uprisings of the Paris banlieues as a moment of politics. For Rancière, the use of violence affirms the identities already ascribed to subjects, whereas Gündoǧdu claims it is an important stage in the process of subjectivation. In that sense, she articulates a Rancièrian conception of politics that is less preoccupied with speech acts and focuses more on the process of subjectivation.

Because of Rancière’s ambiguity regarding the temporal horizon of politics, some critics point out that Rancière does not specify “what comes before, after, and alongside ‘politics’” (McDonnell Reference McDonnell2022, 197). According to Clarke (Reference Clarke and Davis2013), Rancière offers more “a politics of moments, rather than a politics of movements” (21). Resultingly, Rancière’s theory has, as Uitermark and Nicholls (Reference Uitermark and Nicholls2013) put it, “more limited use when addressing empirical questions about actual political mobilizations” (972). Uitermark and Nicholls, therefore, favor an approach that leaves more space for incrementalism and creating the conditions for small steps of politicization. Regarding the aforementioned example of Rosa Parks which, following Rancière, “negate[d] the police order and dramatically evoked the political,” Uitermark and Nichols (Reference Uitermark and Nicholls2013) remark that “she could only do so because she had cultivated her political dispositions through prolonged interactions in the budding civil rights movement” (973).

Our account links up with these adapted, incrementalist perspectives but focuses more on what happens alongside politics—that is, the development of “the Muslim Question” in relation to the rise of the PvdD. We thereby think of policing as a multidimensional disciplinary mode of governance or, borrowing from Laclau (Reference Laclau1996), a “sedimented” practice that works through several axes of oppression and emancipation at once. As we will demonstrate in the next sections, a Rancièrian political moment may, thus, disrupt and reconfigure the policed order on one front but at the same time reproduce other aspects of the police order on another front. This results in simultaneous instances of politics and policing.

The Animal Politics of the Party for the Animals

The emergence of the animal party in the national political arena can be regarded as a Rancièrian “moment of politics” or a step toward politicization. The PvdD was founded by three animal advocacy activists in 2002 (Lucardie 2023). Two founders have become prominent representatives and are the main party ideologists: former party leader Marianne Thieme and senator Niko Koffeman. Esther Ouwehand joined the party in 2003 as the first party office coordinator, took seat in the Lower House in 2006 next to the party leader Marianne Thieme, and succeeded the latter as party leader in 2019.Footnote ² By then, Thieme had been leading the party for 17 years. In the first elections in which they participated, the party just fell short of winning a seat in parliament (which requires about .67% of the vote), but, in 2006, they became the first AAP to be elected in a national parliament by winning two seats that were taken up by Thieme and Ouwehand. In 2007, the party also won a seat in the Senate that was taken up by Koffeman, who in 2023 entered his fifth term as senator.

The election of the PvdD in parliament immediately sparked controversy. Many commentators were keen to dismiss and ridicule the party for being a single-issue party that represents mere petty issues. In defense of the dominant anthropocentrism, conservative critics stirred up the debate by claiming that the party represents a form of decadence, because it prioritizes animal interests over human concerns (De Groot Reference De Groot2006). Yet, a few other commentators appreciated the PvdD’s interventions in the Dutch political landscape. They signal that the PvdD is the first party since decades that has brought along a new political ideology and claim that the PvdD is the only party that challenged the status quo of that time (De Rek Reference De Rek2012).

Other parts of the controversy focused on the style and aims of the PvdD. Central to this discussion is the distinction between “expressive politics” aimed at moral expression and “instrumental politics” aimed at reaching compromise and implementing policy change (Parkin 1968, 34). One historian accused the PvdD in a national newspaper of engaging in “unnuanced and moralistic” expressive politics that would not amount to concrete change and, therefore, the PvdD should be dismissed as a serious political actor (Kluveld Reference Kluveld2006). In response, historian Janse (Reference Janse2007a; Reference Janse2007b) argued exactly the opposite: the PvdD’s expressive politics encompasses the core of the political in the party’s project—namely, as it disrupts the normalization of instrumental politics in the Netherlands.

Ever since this discussion between the two historians, the PvdD has proudly taken over the notion of “expressive politics” to describe its own political strategy—as seeking to influence political discourse rather than institutional power (Koffeman Reference Koffeman, Wielenga, Van Baalen and Wilp2018; Thieme 2009a).Footnote ³ Thieme is explicit about using the parliament as a stage to politicize moral grievances and raise awareness about the plight of animals. She frequently uses the Dutch proverb “a pacer in the marathon” to describe how she views the party’s role in the Dutch political landscape: as a pacemaker, ahead of other parties urging them to catch up. The PvdD aspires “to remind the incumbent parties of their promises in their election manifesto’s so they put their money where their mouth is” (Thieme Reference Thieme2004, 83).Footnote ⁴ Almost a decade after the party’s election in parliament, political scientist Otjes (Reference Otjes2016) has indeed found that attention to animal welfare and agriculture has vastly increased across the Dutch political landscape.

Through the party’s election in parliament, a new political subject (the animal) is manifested before the police order in which that subject had hitherto no part. In doing so, the PvdD even challenges the anthropocentric premises in Rancière’s conceptualization of politics. For Rancière (Reference Rancière2006), the animal is, following Aristotle, only capable of “producing noise and express pleasure or pain” and, therefore, incapable of becoming a political subject. The PvdD, by contrast, does introduce the animal as a political subject in taking the representation of animal interests as their main objective. Disrupting anthropocentrism, the party regards animals as beings with a rich lifeworld that have value in and for themselves, irrespective of their relationship with humans.

Concretely, the disruptive politics of the PvdD is expressed through several interventions both inside and outside parliament. For instance, Thieme has written six books in which she details the anti-anthropocentric ideological project and activist origins of the PvdD. Furthermore, the party has produced two award-winning documentaries questioning the normalization of industrial farming and the consumption of meat and fish. The party’s activism also continues from within parliament: MPs regularly disrupt business as usual during official events. The PvdD has, for instance, played loud animal sounds from stereos positioned in the party office’s window to disturb the annual meat-packed barbecue for MPs, organized and financed by the industrial agriculture lobby. Thieme and Ouwehand have, as party leaders, also donned extravagant and playful dresses at the otherwise rather stiff annual Budget Day, to draw attention to animal welfare and environmental causes.

The PvdD’s disruptive politics is, thus, carried out through a strategy of mixed tactics or what has also been termed “parliamentary metapolitics” (Huijzer Reference Huijzer2022). Meijer (Reference Meijer2022) states that the PvdD “changes the story of politics, by taking seriously the interests of nonhuman animals and defending these interests” (158) but also lists a significant number of policy achievements. These include a ban on the live cooking of lobsters, expediting a ban on mink breeding, and an amendment to a law with far-reaching impact on industrial farming which states that “animals can no longer be changed physically or genetically to adjust to their housing conditions, but instead that the housing conditions should change to accommodate the farmed animals’ species-specific needs and individual welfare” (Meijer Reference Meijer2022, 157). At the European level, they secured a ban on pesticides like thiacloprid (harmful for bees) and a ban on Mancozeb (as it might cause Parkinson). The PvdD, thus, disrupts the anthropocentric policing of animals with playful actions and at the same time strives to change policies. Together, these mixed tactics work toward reconfiguring the position of animals within the social order.

However, one important policy proposal that is not discussed in any of the above accounts, which Thieme (Reference Thieme2019) sees as “one of the party’s biggest successes” (93), is the proposed ban on religious slaughter without prior stunning. This oversight is remarkable because the proposal has drawn by far the most public attention since the PvdD’s election to parliament. We contend that both the relative political success of this proposal and the overwhelming public attention can only be properly understood in context of the emergence of race and religion structuring political conflict. Before discussing the proposed ban on unstunned religious slaughter in more detail, we, therefore, first introduce the contours and impact of those sociopolitical changes in the following section.

The Policing of Islam and “the Muslim Question”

The establishment of the PvdD in 2002 and its election in parliament in 2006 coincided with two seismic shifts in Dutch politics. Those years mark the success of two far-right parties that moved the critique on multiculturalism, immigration, and religion (Islam particularly) from the political margins right into the center. In 2002, the far-right party Lijst Pim Fortuyn (Pim Fortuyn List, LPF) was elected in parliament with a massive win—known as the Fortuyn Revolt—by obtaining 26 (out of 150) seats. However, its success was short lived due to the assassination of the party leader a couple of weeks before the election. The PVV led by Geert Wilders became the LPF’s ideological heir, and its electoral success since 2006 has given the far right a permanent foothold in the Netherlands (Oudenampsen Reference Oudenampsen2018).

The Fortuyn Revolt, thus, heralded a pivotal moment in the development of multiculturalism and Islam as issues saliently structuring political conflict. Yet, it should be acknowledged that this discourse was already in the making in liberal and social democratic circles (Oudenampsen Reference Oudenampsen2018). In this sense, the LPF and PVV mobilized a stronger articulation of that discourse and propelled it into the heart of Dutch politics. Fortuyn popularized the Dutch variant of the Islamization thesis via his 1997 book “The Islamization of our culture,” in which he argued that Dutch culture was at risk of being replaced by Muslims and Islamic norms. He also infamously claimed that Islam is “a backward culture.” Ever since, critique on immigration and Islam has become part of the discourse of the political mainstream too, from left to right (Prins Reference Prins2004). As one social-democratic senator sighed: “Sometimes it seems like the entire political discourse after the murder of Fortuyn has been picked up by an invisible hand, and brusquely put down again several meters to the right” (Witteveen quoted in Oudenampsen Reference Oudenampsen2018, 4).

Under the influence of this political shift, Dutch citizenship became increasingly “culturalized,” which is a process through which “more meaning is attached to cultural participation (in terms of norms, values, practices, and tradition), either as an alternative or addition to citizenship as rights and socioeconomic participation” (Duyvendak, Hurenkamp, and Tonkens Reference Duyvendak, Hurenkamp, Tonkens, Chebel D’Appollonia and Reich2010, 237). In accordance with the prominence of such culturalization discourse, a key societal and political debate in the Netherlands has centered on establishing the exact “norms and values” that characterize Dutch identity. Prominent in this debate was a “clash of civilizations” argument which held that “Islamic culture” was incompatible with supposedly quintessential Western and Dutch liberal values, such as women’s rights, gay rights, and political secularism (Akkerman Reference Akkerman2005; De Lange and Mügge Reference De Lange and Mügge2015; Mepschen, Duyvendak, and Tonkens Reference Mepschen, Duyvendak and Tonkens2010; Oudenampsen Reference Oudenampsen2018).Footnote ⁵ A femonationalist and homonationalist narrative, thus, underpinned the culturalization of Dutch citizenship that instrumentalized liberal rights and social accomplishments to evidence the superiority of Dutch culture (Bracke Reference Bracke2012; Farris Reference Farris2017; Wekker Reference Wekker2009).

Another noteworthy implication of the mainstreaming of far-right discourse is that issues of immigration, multiculturalism, and Islam have become “legitimate” topics of critique under the guise of “freedom of speech.” Far-right politicians and their allies had presented themselves as truth tellers that proudly broke with “political correctness,” a form of “political censorship” they perceived to be caused by the cultural relativism of the political left (Prins Reference Prins2004). This led to the normalization of “breaking the taboo” on publicly calling into question the desirability of Islam in the Netherlands. The articulation of Dutch identity in contradistinction with the supposed incommensurability of Islam became a dominant discourse in relation to which all political parties positioned themselves.

Consequently, a social group in the Netherlands commonsensically thought of as “just” religious is equally so a racialized group—its members are homogenized, essentialized, and inferiorized based on their supposed culture, whereby “culture” is imagined as static, all-encompassing, and determining an adherent’s entire being (Garner and Selod Reference Garner and Selod2015; Meer Reference Meer2013; Selod and Embrick Reference Selod and Embrick2013). Such representation negates the many differences among Muslims in terms of degree of religiosity, Islamic denomination, class, age, education, gender, language, or geographic location, to name but a few. In this way, culture performs a similar function to what race once did, when race was thought to be a biological and, therefore, immutable fact that fundamentally determined peoples’ being and social positioning (Grosfoguel and Mielants Reference Grosfoguel and Mielants2006; Meer and Modood Reference Meer and Modood2012). Furthermore, under the influence of this discourse, Islamic characteristics (e.g., veils) have become enmeshed with phenotypical characteristics of North African and Middle Eastern people (of which the majority of Dutch Muslims are descendants). Together, they form a mixture of signifiers on the basis of which people are (correctly or not) “profiled,” singled out, suspected, and policed in the eye of both the public and judicial institutions on the basis of their perceived Muslimness. In the process of their interpellation as Muslim, a racial formation of Islam, thus, occurs. Alternately called “cultural racism” (Al-Saji Reference Al-Saji2010; Modood Reference Modood, Werbner and Modood1997) or “neoracism” (Balibar Reference Balibar, Balibar and Wallerstein1991), this racialization of Muslims may too be captured with the term Islamophobia (Hafez Reference Hafez2018; Lauwers Reference Lauwers2019; Rana Reference Rana2007; Sunier Reference Sunier2016).Footnote ⁶ The production of the racialized Muslim through the policing of Islam illustrates how race and religion may form a constellation in Europe (Topolski Reference Topolski2018a).Footnote ⁷

The sociopolitical context in which Muslims are problematized because they are Muslim on the basis of a homogenizing, essentializing, and inferiorizing representation of what Islamic culture supposedly entails has been dubbed “the Muslim Question” (Bracke and Aguilar Reference Bracke and Aguilar2020; Farris Reference Farris2014). In this discursive context, a social hierarchy has been established that renders suspect and polices anyone and anything related to Islam (Sayyid Reference Sayyid2014). Illustrative is the ever-growing list of policy interventions regarding Islamic practices—for example, veiling, the construction of mosques, halal slaughter, and (de)radicalization (Jung Reference Jung2022; De Koning Reference De Koning2020; Fadil, Ragazzi, and De Koning Reference Fadil, Ragazzi and De Koning2019; Anna Korteweg and Yurdakul Reference Korteweg and Yurdakul2009; Lettinga and Saharso Reference Lettinga and Saharso2014; Maussen Reference Maussen2004). Instead, it produces an image of Muslims through which they are monolithically addressed and considered to be an alien and a threat to the nation (Bracke and Aguilar Reference Bracke and Aguilar2022).

Islamophobia is further normalized through the discursive distinction made by pundits and politicians across the political spectrum between what is often called “moderate” and “radical” Islam (Mondon and Winter Reference Mondon and Winter2017; Topolski Reference Topolski2018b). Both categories “are part of the same exclusionary paradigm” (Mondon and Winter Reference Mondon and Winter2017, 7) because each of the different imagined interpretations of “Islamic culture” is placed in a subordinate relation to the unquestioned superiority of an equally mythical representation of quintessential Dutch culture. Moderate Islam would be carried by assimilated, progressive, and, therefore, “redeemable” Muslims, whereas radical Islam would consist of a group of undesirable, fundamentalist, or even extremist Muslims. This distinction between “good” and “bad” Muslims (Mamdani Reference Mamdani2002) is constitutive of what Mondon and Winter (Reference Mondon and Winter2017) call “liberal” and “illiberal Islamophobia.” Whereas the latter excludes Muslims, regardless of how they behave or what they believe and is, therefore, more easily identified as racist, the former allows certain currents of Islam or groups of Muslims as long as they are consistent with a supposed “Western” cultural norms and values. Yet also in “liberal Islamophobia,” Muslims are only accepted as they pass a “loyalty test” of sorts, by adhering to “acceptable” interpretations of Islam. Liberal Islamophobia still delineates what Islam can and cannot be and like illiberal Islamophobia is, thereby, used as a vector of exclusion.

In public discussions, however, liberal and even illiberal Islamophobic interventions are rarely identified as racist, which is by and large the consequence of the conception of race after World War II in Europe. The Netherlands had, similar to other leading organizations like UNESCO, in an antiracist effort replaced the term “race” with “ethnicity” in policies, politics, and public debate (Lentin Reference Lentin2004; Reference Lentin2008). It was generally considered that with the defeat of Nazi-Germany, racism was defeated too (Goldberg Reference Goldberg2006). As culture and ethnicity became stand-ins for race to discuss and manage social difference, any racial implications, thereof, got masked (Weiner Reference Weiner2014). At the same time, what remained generally recognized as racist was reduced to a very narrow conception of “biological racism.” Yet, as Lentin (2015, 1281) states, “culturalization is merely a continuation of racialization because […] both are imbricated in the […] disciplining of non-normative bodies.” The consequence of the culturalization discourse is, therefore, the loss of a vocabulary to identify and address racism. Such a post-racial approach disables the recognition of racism that continues to structure the sociopolitical and enables its denial. This leads to a situation where there is “racism without racism” (Goldberg Reference Goldberg2008). Hence, Muslims can be homogenized, essentialized, and inferiorized based on their supposed culture; all the while, any charges of racism are being denied.

The Party for the Animals’ Troubled Relation with Race and Religion

Existing political science accounts of the PvdD and of AAPs, in general, have yet to explore the possible relevance of the context of “the Muslim Question” for the characteristics and development of animal advocacy politics. We seek to address this lacuna by analyzing the aspirations and political discourse of the PvdD since the party’s establishment in 2002 until 2022. We apply a critical race theoretical lens to thematically analyze (Braun and Clarke Reference Braun and Clarke2006) books written by party leaders (Thieme Reference Thieme2004, Reference Thieme2009a; 2019; Siebelink and Thieme Reference Siebelink and Thieme2022), statements of prominent party members in national newspapers and periodicals, contributions by MPs to parliamentary debates, and party platforms. We identify four thematic instances through which the troubled relationship of the PvdD with race and religion becomes manifest, which we analytically distinguish but which occur simultaneously:

1. 1. The party’s sequential emancipation and post-race narrative

2. 2. The party’s proposal to ban religious slaughter without prior stunning

3. 3. Party members’ willful white ignorance when confronted with concerns of racism

4. 4. The absence of a critical assessment of Islamophobia despite the party’s recent public positions against the insidiousness of racism as a legacy of Dutch colonialism and slavery.

After discussing each of these themes in more detail, we argue that together they manifest a distinct pattern which expresses what we call a color-evasive animal politics.

Conclusion: A Color-Evasive Animal Politics?

Despite its troubled relation with matters of race and religion, the star of the PvdD is ever rising, evidenced by the increasing electoral support from the local to the European level since its inception two decades ago. New sister parties continue to be established and win seats in Europe and beyond. The PvdD did experience an electoral setback during the 2023 general election, for which the highly mediatized outburst of a long-lasting interpersonal conflict between the party leader and the party board is the most plausible explanation.Footnote ¹⁰ The bigger picture remains, however, that animal advocacy politics is far from having reached its peak. Moreover, the fact that the PVV won the 2023 election makes the study of animal advocacy politics in a sociopolitical context that polices Muslims all the more pressing.

To date, the PvdD has mostly been studied following conventional typologies in political science that do little justice to the disruptive aspirations of the party. The novelty of our approach resides in the fact that it is grounded in political theory, thus advancing beyond the established categories by which political parties are regularly studied. We apply an incrementalist understanding of Rancière’s political thought, which enables us to demonstrate that the political project of the PvdD unfolds along multiple dimensions. The party enacts a Rancièrian form of “politics” by disrupting the existing anthropocentric order through which the PvdD gives voice to the animal as a political subject. To some degree, this even challenges the anthropocentrism in Rancière, which relies on a dichotomy between “loathing animals” and “speaking human beings.” Moreover, our account advances Rancièrian approaches by evidencing that there can be simultaneous instances of “politics” and “policing” instantiated by the very same actor. Drawing from insights generated by critical race theory, we show that the PvdD introduces the animal as a political subject but, at the same time, joins in on dominant discourses that police Muslims, thereby contributing to the further racialization of this group.

The complex role race plays in the PvdD’s politics, we find, is best captured by identifying the party’s political project as a colorblind or, in non-ableist terms, color-evasive animal politics. We are inspired by Bonilla-Silva’s (Reference Bonilla-Silva2003) notion of “colorblind racism,” by which he analyzes the dominant racial ideology in the USA that has led to the denial of the importance of racism in the persistence of racial inequality. However, the term “color blindness” has been rightfully critiqued by Annamma et al. (Reference Annamma, Jackson and Morrison2017) for being an ableist expression, confusing lack of vision with lack of knowledge and equating difference with deficit. In lieu of color blindness, these authors propose the term “color evasiveness.”

We find the term color evasive helpful to spotlight the PvdD’s ignorance about the historical and contemporaneous workings of race and its intersection with religion in a European context. As we hope to have shown, the PvdD has subscribed to a post-race sequential emancipation narrative and demonstrated a false understanding of anthropocentrism as devoid of racialism. The party has also manifested willful white ignorance about the racialization of Muslims, despite having become more aware of the racist legacies of Dutch colonialism in recent years. Together, these moments show a clear pattern in which the PvdD fails to recognize the ways in which its aspirations and political discourse are steeped in the logic of race–religion constellations.

We wish to stress that the PvdD is not alone in being implicated by “the Muslim Question” because the law proposals discussed in this article have been supported by virtually all left-wing and right-wing parties. While disrupting the anthropocentric police order is quite unique to the PvdD, the policing of Muslims is quite common in the Netherlands. Therefore, we may conclude that the PvdD has arrived at a crossroads: as they will continue to challenge anthropocentrism, it remains to be seen whether they will do so in a disruptive way or repeat earlier strides and persist in contributing to the racialization and policing of Muslims.

In terms of scholarly approaches, we are aware that our Rancièrian account of the PvdD has mainly examined animal advocacy politics through a Critical Race Theory lens, whereas future research could turn this around and explore the extent to which anthropocentric assumptions are embroiled in (anti)racist politics (but see Kim Reference Kim2015). We hope our account contributes to the development of a more comprehensive research agenda, one that addresses both race and anthropocentrism, to study political parties in general and AAPs in particular. Such agenda would align well with a wider project of reconnecting the conceptual forests of political theory with the plow fields of empirical political science.