Administrative Violence (II)

On Non-Learning Systems and the Politics of Legibility

In a previous note, I argued that systems should become easier to navigate for successive cohorts, an expectation that is both modest and fundamental because it assumes that institutions learn, that friction reduces, and that access improves over time; yet the question that follows, and the one that matters more, is what it means when this does not happen. When systems do not reduce friction over time, the issue is not only inefficiency, it is administrative violence in its most banal form, not the violence of rupture or spectacle, but the quieter violence of repetition, where the same forms, the same requirements, and the same delays are encountered again and again by people who have no reason to believe that the next interaction will be any easier than the last.

A system that serves one cohort and then asks the next to begin from the same point of difficulty is not neutral, because it is redistributing the cost of its own non-learning onto its users, and that cost is neither abstract nor trivial, even if it is often treated as such; it is time spent traveling and waiting, income lost in the process, documents chased and re-chased, verifications repeated, uncertainty endured, and, frequently, a quiet but cumulative erosion of dignity. These costs may appear minor in isolation, but in accumulation they become significant, and their repetition without reduction is precisely what marks the transition from inefficiency to harm. The absence of cohort ease, then, is not a technical oversight but a signal, one that reveals that friction is not being treated as a problem to be solved, that user experience is not considered a core measure of performance, and that institutions are not designed to accumulate learning in ways that reduce the burden of access over time.

What this signal points to, and what is less comfortable to acknowledge, is that administrative violence persists not because institutions are unaware of it, but because they are accountable to other things, and those accountabilities are real, binding, and often non-negotiable. Formally, both development actors and public systems will assert accountability to citizens, communities, and beneficiaries, yet in practice accountability is structured upward and inward, oriented toward fiduciary standards, audit requirements, boards, risk functions, and compliance frameworks that are designed, correctly and necessarily, to prevent misuse, leakage, and institutional failure. These obligations cannot simply be dismissed, particularly in contexts where fiduciary noncompliance carries existential consequences, and yet they produce a particular asymmetry that is rarely named. Financial risk is measured, tracked, and escalated, it is designed against with rigor, and it has clear thresholds, triggers, and consequences, while user burden is experienced, absorbed, and normalized, appearing only intermittently, if at all, in formal systems of measurement, rarely audited, and almost never triggering escalation.

This asymmetry is not incidental, it is structural, and administrative violence sits precisely within it, because each additional layer of verification, each documentation requirement, and each compliance step may be rational in isolation, but collectively they transfer cost onto the user, and because those costs are not systematically measured, they are not systematically reduced. What emerges is a non-learning system, one in which outputs may increase, coverage may expand, and funding may scale, yet the cost of access remains stubbornly high, often unchanged, so that the system becomes more practiced in its operation without becoming more accessible to those it is meant to serve.

This dynamic is reinforced by a second tension that sits in how institutions relate to time, particularly within development, where systems are structurally oriented toward the new, toward new pilots, new geographies, new models, and new partnerships, not by accident but because funding cycles, visibility incentives, and institutional identity reward novelty; yet the lives of those who engage these systems are not episodic, they are continuous, and so the question of what happens to those who entered earlier cohorts becomes unavoidable. What happens to commitments that extend beyond the life of a pilot, and what happens when systems move on but participants cannot, is not a peripheral concern but a central one, because it is here that administrative violence takes on a quieter and more ambiguous form, not through outright denial or explicit exclusion, but through discontinuity, through systems that progress while individuals are left to absorb the consequences of that movement.

There is a moral tension embedded here between the right to innovate and the duty to sustain, and it is rarely made explicit; instead, it is often resolved through forward motion, with the system advancing and the individual adjusting if they can, or falling away if they cannot, which produces a pattern that is difficult to classify as failure yet difficult to defend as equitable. Beneath both of these dynamics lies a third layer, which is the mechanism through which much of this sorting and burden distribution takes place, and that is the politics of legibility, because administrative systems require individuals to be legible in order to be served, to be documented, categorized, and verifiable in ways that align with the system’s internal logic.

Yet many of the people these systems are designed to reach exist only partially within those terms, with irregular incomes, informal enterprises, incomplete or inconsistent documentation, and social and economic realities that do not map neatly onto standardized categories, so that access becomes conditional on the ability to render oneself legible within a specific frame. This requirement is not neutral, because those who are able to make themselves legible move through the system with relative ease, while those who cannot are not necessarily rejected outright but are instead delayed, deferred, or asked to return with additional proof, to try again, to complete one more step, which over time produces a sorting effect that is subtle but consequential. Administrative systems, in this sense, do not only serve, they select, and they do so through friction rather than explicit exclusion, through the accumulation of small barriers that, taken together, make participation increasingly costly to sustain.

What makes administrative violence particularly difficult to confront is precisely this quality, that it is distributed, procedural, and often justified within the logic of the system that produces it, operating within institutions that may simultaneously be delivering real value and expanding access in other respects, which allows the harm to remain both present and deniable. This returns us to the question of measurement, because if cohort ease were treated as a serious metric of performance, many systems would fail immediately, not because they fail to deliver outputs, but because they fail to reduce the cost of access over time, and if that cost does not fall, then whatever is being built cannot be said to be becoming more inclusive.

It is, instead, becoming more practiced at managing exclusion.