How do city managers respond to policy change demands that go against the city’s economic success? How do industry leaders respond to public outcry over the preventable deaths of essential workers? How do national leaders respond to the threat of insurrection or the threat of national enemies with greater military capabilities? And how do international legal adjudicators and survivors of genocide respond to demands for justice when there are so many people who are culpable for these atrocities?

These are some of the questions that animate this special issue of Journal of Political Power. In ‘Allusions, Illusions, and Delusions of Political Power’, we examine the lesser-recognized facets of power that exist beyond the visible and coercive displays of force that have captured so much attention in conflict studies. We present new conceptual frameworks for making sense of increasingly institutionalized political strategies that allude to imagined forms of authority through illusory engagements and delusional construals of potential and actual power.

In the social sciences, power has classically been defined as an actor’s ability to achieve their will, and various channels of coercion and influence that are mobilized towards these ends have been scrutinized across social fields. While much of this work has aimed at documenting and deciphering the diverse forms of dominance wielded by powerful actors and understanding the contexts and conditions in which such power is vulnerable to challenge and change, phenomenological approaches underscore the importance of paying closer attention to the iterative relationship between power-structures and the subjective experiences and actions that have evolved in distinct contexts (Dreher Citation2023).

The research contained in this special issue builds on this phenomenological approach to interrogate how coercive power is supported through more subtle and hidden attempts at social control and, relatedly, how these ‘softer’ forms of power and authority can utilize tactics of usurpation and cooptation to eliminate and demobilize resistance.