Force as a Distinct Governance Regime: Boundary Imposition Beyond Ordering Transmission

Function in corpus

Completes the governance regime taxonomy. Each stage in the law→logistics→force sequence now has a dedicated structural account. Force is formalized in parallel with the prior formalization of logistics (Paper 51).

Details

Force has been present throughout the IO governance arc — the cascade from authority to logistics to force is established in the witnessing and handover papers — but it has never received a dedicated positive derivation. This paper fills that gap. The central claim: force is a governance regime in which coordination is stabilized by coercive boundary imposition once case-level justificatory answerability has failed and inherited salience-order transmission (logistics) can no longer absorb the relevant perturbation class. Force is not the same as coercion in general, not merely saturated logistics, and not governance collapse. It is a structurally distinct coordination mechanism with its own persistence criterion, priority source, binding locus, and agency configuration. Its binding mechanism — direct boundary imposition through physical containment, territorial exclusion, non-optional compliance — differs structurally from justification, legitimacy, and salience transmission. The paper derives force using only existing corpus machinery, distinguishing it from law (which requires case-level justificatory answerability), authority (which requires discretionary contestability), logistics (which transmits inherited constraint-priority without normative re-binding), and coercive regime in general. Connected papers: Witnessing Under Vulnerability; From Law to Logistics; Legitimacy as a Finite Structural Resource; Authority, Responsibility, and Force; Logistics as a Distinct Regime.

Availability

This paper is listed for orientation and dependency tracking. No public PDF or Zenodo record is linked yet.