Ethnocracy: Remodeling the People

This article introduces the concept of ethnocracy to describe a contemporary neototalitarian management of peoples. Ethnocracy is defined as the systematic reduction of the demos — the people understood as an open and indeterminate political community — to the ethnos, a community defined through presumed common descent. In this process, an ethnic core claims primacy over the rest of the population, while democracy is progressively emptied out and closed from within. The article argues that ethnocracy should be understood not as a simple return of nationalism or fascism, but as a specifically contemporary pathology of democracy, emerging within a broader political landscape marked by war, insecurity, xenophobia, and the transformation of the nation into an imagined protective family. In this sense, ethnocracy is also a form of oikocracy: the political community is reconfigured according to the model of the household, kinship, and belonging.