Modern politics is increasingly organized around competition for power, management of scarcity, identity conflict, institutional control, market growth, and crisis response. Yet these dominant frames often fail to ask the prior question upon which all political legitimacy depends: whether the political order protects, repairs, and expands the conditions of life. This white paper develops the concept of life-coherent politics as a framework for re-grounding political thought and practice in the shared life-capacity of persons, communities, ecosystems, and future generations.
Drawing on Humberto Maturana’s biology of coexistence and world-bringing, John McMurtry’s life-value onto-axiology and civil commons, Johan Galtung’s analysis of direct, structural, and cultural violence, Elinor Ostrom’s commons governance, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach, and ecological frameworks such as the planetary boundaries and Doughnut models, this paper argues that politics becomes life-coherent when it conserves the conditions by which living beings can meet life necessities, develop capacities, participate meaningfully, transform conflict without domination, and remain within ecological limits (Maturana, 1988; McMurtry, 2011; Galtung, 1969, 1990; Ostrom, 1990; Sen, 1999; Nussbaum, 2011; Rockström et al., 2009; Raworth, 2012, 2017).
The central claim is that politics is not first the struggle to control society, but the collective practice of governing the conditions of shared viability. A life-coherent political order must therefore be judged not by partisan victory, ideological purity, economic growth, national power, or procedural formalism alone, but by whether it reduces life-capacity suppression, regenerates civil and ecological commons, preserves social and ecological margins, expands real options for participation, and corrects institutional patterns that normalize harm.
The paper proposes a diagnostic grammar of life-coherent politics organized around seven functional questions: What life-ground is being protected or degraded? Whose necessities are unmet? What forms of violence are being normalized? Which commons are being enclosed or regenerated? Who participates in shaping the worlds that shape them? Where are margins being exhausted? What forms of repair restore life-capacity without imposing new domination? The paper concludes that the future of democratic, ecological, legal, constitutional, and peace-oriented governance depends on a shift from life-blind politics to politics as the art of conserving and repairing the worlds in which life can continue.