The Columbia Political Review’s

High School Essay Contest

It is CPR’s mission to cultivate the next generation of politically engaged writers. To that end, we began our annual high school essay contest in 2017, aiming to amplify the voices of talented high school students from all across the country and the world. In the wake of a global pandemic, war, and deep uncertainty, we hope that the Columbia Political Review can serve as a platform for bold and creative solutions to the world’s most pressing issues.

On Columbia’s campus and across the world, the year 2026 has been defined by the upheavals of norms that have governed the modern global system for almost a century, most urgently in our institutions’ commitment to democratic processes, freedom of speech, and civil liberties at large. This year students were asked the following question:

In many countries, especially liberal democracies, younger generations are growing increasingly dissatisfied with the dominant political systems. This trend has centered especially around the perceived ineffectiveness of voting as the primary democratic practice. What alternative means of political engagement could enable a push towards democratization? Drawing either on past political arrangements or your own imagination, describe a potential structure for political participation and speculate on its benefits or risks if it were to be implemented somewhere today.

Out of the 1,650 entries we received, we selected the following students’ works for their demonstrated excellence and argumentative strength.

Winner:

Kumail Hasan

Honorable Mentions:

Alice Debone

and

Neil Malpani

You can read Kumail’s article below:

Against Permanence

The disaffection that younger citizens across the liberal democracies feel toward their own political institutions is habitually diagnosed as a crisis of turnout, as though the malady would be cured if only more ballots were cast with greater regularity. This diagnosis, whatever its statistical comforts, mistakes the symptom for the disease. What is failing is not participation in the narrow electoral sense but a particular and rather exiguous conception of what participation is for. As Chantal Mouffe has argued, the aggregative model bequeathed to us by postwar democratic theory reduces the political to an accountancy exercise in preference summation, tallying private wants as though a society's disagreements were merely a matter of arithmetic rather than substance. This is not to dismiss that model's real achievements, its capacity to transfer power without bloodshed chief among them, achievements too readily disparaged by critics in search of something more dramatic. It is only to observe that the same model, whatever its procedural elegance, evacuates precisely the dimension, namely conflict honestly conducted, that gives democratic life its vitality. A more democratising alternative would not try to make the ballot box more frequent or more efficient. It would try to restore contestation as a continuous and legitimate feature of political life rather than an occasional and heavily supervised ritual.

One historically attested means of achieving this is to build participation around federated councils rooted in the associational fabric of workplaces and neighbourhoods, rather than in the rather bloodless abstraction of national citizenship. Peter Kropotkin's account of mutual aid supplies the ethical premise for such an arrangement, since it treats cooperation, not competition, as the primary organising instinct of social existence, locating political capacity in the same webs of reciprocal obligation that already bind communities together whether or not any state cares to notice. Antonio Gramsci gave this premise concrete institutional form during the biennio rosso in Turin, when factory workers elected recallable delegates to shop floor councils that federated upward into a citywide structure without ever hardening into a fixed party apparatus. What distinguished the Ordine Nuovo councils was not merely that they were participatory but that they treated disagreement, among delegates, between unions, across the wider socialist movement, as a productive feature of political life rather than an embarrassment to be smoothed over in committee, which is precisely the agonistic sensibility Mouffe would later theorise in more abstract terms.

A proposal resting on this precedent meets its sternest objection early. Robert Michels, examining the very socialist parties and unions from which this tradition draws its energy, argued that any organisation capable of coordinating collective action develops a professional leadership that grows steadily harder to dislodge, a tendency he termed the iron law of oligarchy. Later scholars have quibbled with how iron the law really is, pointing to episodes of real internal renewal within even thoroughly bureaucratic organisations, though the quibbling has done little to dislodge the basic insight. Councils enjoy no exemption. The unglamorous labour of federating hundreds of assemblies, keeping records, maintaining correspondence between delegates and adjudicating disputes creates precisely the kind of specialised, continuous role that calcifies into an unaccountable elite, however democratic the councils were at their founding. Michels evidently found his own diagnosis persuasive to the point of embarrassment. Having concluded that oligarchy was ineluctable, he spent his later career demonstrating the thesis empirically by accepting a chair from Mussolini's government in 1928, which is one way of resolving a theoretical dispute, if not the most edifying.

Taking Michels at his word requires designing against oligarchy rather than merely hoping to outrun it. David Graeber's notion of counter-power is instructive here, since he describes it not as an absence of organisation but as a set of deliberate structural mechanisms engineered to prevent power from crystallising in the first place. A federation of workplace and community councils might incorporate this insight quite literally, selecting its coordinating body by sortition rather than election and inscribing a fixed term of dissolution into its own constitution, such that every coordinating council is obliged to disband and be reconstituted by lot at regular intervals. Michels's iron law presumes that organisations persist indefinitely, thereby accumulating expertise and entrenchment as a matter of course. A structure engineered to interrupt its own continuity denies the iron law the one raw material, duration, without which it cannot operate.

This solution manufactures a different hazard, and candour about it is owed to any reader weighing whether such a model could function if implanted in a state today. Germany's workers' and soldiers' councils of 1918 and 1919 illustrate the danger in miniature. The Räte sprang up across German cities with startling speed in November 1918, only to find, within months, that their authority had either been surrendered to the new Weimar National Assembly or extinguished by the army and the Freikorps that the Social Democratic government summoned to crush the more radical among them. A federation designed to dissolve and reconstitute itself deliberately must therefore be calibrated with some delicacy. Excessive permanence risks the oligarchy Michels described, while excessive impermanence risks the fate that met the German councils, extinction at the hands of a hostile state before any durable claim to legitimacy could be established. Historians remain divided over whether a more resolute leadership might have secured the councils a lasting constitutional role, a dispute this essay does not presume to adjudicate, noting only that the risk was real whichever way that argument is ultimately settled.

The comparison points beyond itself. Max Weber, under whom Michels trained before their views diverged so calamitously, warned that formal rationalisation would eventually harden into an iron cage, a mechanised petrification in which specialists without spirit administer a world drained of the very meaning their administration was meant to serve. The nation state, with its permanent civil service and its self-perpetuating apparatus of rational-legal domination, is that cage in its most consequential form, and no council appended to its edges as a consultative afterthought will loosen the bars. The federation described above, sortition-based, agonistic, deliberately impermanent, need not remain a supplement to the state. Extended across production as well as neighbourhood, it describes something closer to what Rudolf Rocker called a federation of free communities bound not by sovereign command but by economic and social necessity, an arrangement in which the union local, understood broadly enough to encompass any workplace or communal body, performs the coordinating functions currently reserved for ministries and their permanent staff. Whether such internal unions could truly supplant the bureaucratic state rather than merely harass it from the margins remains, admittedly, an open question, and one this essay does not pretend to settle with any false serenity. What can be said with more confidence is that the dissatisfaction with which this essay began, the sense that voting offers no real purchase on how power is organised, will not be resolved by better turnout. It will be resolved, if it is resolved at all, by institutions willing to treat their own permanence as a hazard rather than an achievement, communities that organise, federate, disagree and, when the moment for it arrives, dissolve, leaving the iron cage to rust for want of a tenant.