Research & Scholarship

This research develops a set of interconnected frameworks for analyzing how power operates through systems, how institutions stabilize and fracture, and how authority is perceived and misperceived under conditions of uncertainty. Across multiple domains—including political theory, epistemology, and AI governance—the work focuses on how systems structure the attribution of agency, responsibility, and belief. These frameworks are developed across three research programs and extended through both working papers and book-length projects, including The Allegiance Paradox, Legitimate Distrust, andI, System, which examines these questions from the perspective of artificial systems and clarifies how misclassification shapes their governance and interpretation.

Research Programs

1. Power Convergence and the Cumulative Individual

This research program develops a general framework for understanding how multiple domains of power — structural, coercive, symbolic, psychological, and networked — interact and converge within individual actors. It introduces the concept of the cumulative individual: an actor capable of operating across institutional boundaries by integrating distinct forms of influence into a unified configuration. Rather than treating power as domain-specific, this work advances a configurational approach emphasizing interaction, reinforcement, and systemic integration.

Working Papers:

• A Theory of Power Convergence: The Cumulative Individual
  Distributed in SSRN Political Theory: Political Philosophy Vol 18, Issue 25 (March 04, 2026)

  This article develops a theory of power convergence centered on the concept of the cumulative individual. Existing theories of power remain analytically fragmented, isolating coercive, structural, symbolic, psychological, and networked dimensions without explaining how they interact. The theory advanced here argues that, under contemporary conditions of mediation, visibility, and connectivity, these domains increasingly converge within individual actors who function as systems of power rather than as occupants of discrete roles. Power is shown to accumulate through recursive feedback loops in which performance, amplification, affect, and institutional response mutually reinforce one another. To formalize this dynamic, the article introduces a developmental geometry of power organization . . . (continue on SSRN)

• A Theory of Power Convergence in Practice: Assange, Epstein, and Ye as Cumulative Individuals
  Distributed in SSRN Political Theory: Political Philosophy Vol 18, Issue 50 (May 04, 2026)

  Recent years have witnessed the emergence of individuals whose influence appears to extend beyond the institutional positions they formally occupy. Actors operating outside traditional hierarchies have demonstrated the capacity to shape networks, narratives, and institutional responses across multiple domains of social power. Existing theories of power, however, typically explain influence through single institutional structures—states, markets, bureaucracies, or cultural systems—and therefore struggle to account for how individual actors can accumulate authority across these domains simultaneously. This paper applies the concept of power convergence and the figure of the cumulative individual, introduced in A Theory of Power Convergence: The Cumulative Individual (Saviano 2026), to a comparative analysis of three contemporary cases: Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, and Ye (Kanye West). The framework proposes that individuals can acquire . . . (continue on SSRN)

• Recursive Sovereignty: Power Convergence and the Threshold of Institutional Inversion
  (Forthcoming on SSRN)

  Introduces the concept of recursive sovereignty through comparative analysis of Nayib Bukele, Donald Trump, and Ibrahim Traoré. Examines the threshold condition at which convergence produces a qualitative transformation in the individual–institution relationship, generating institutional integration, feedback closure, and dynamic instability at the sovereign level.

Forthcoming Book: The Cumulative Individual: Power, Collapse, and Sovereignty in the Networked Age

A book-length project synthesizing the theoretical and empirical strands of this research, examining how convergent forms of power emerge, stabilize, and destabilize in contemporary social systems.

2. AI Governance and the Misclassification of Agency

This research identifies a categorical error at the center of AI governance: the systematic misattribution of agency to systems that do not possess it. AI systems are constraint-bound output generators whose coherent outputs produce the observable markers humans use to infer agency—not because they instantiate it, but as a consequence of their design.

The error has direct governance implications. Agency attribution does not relocate responsibility; it misperceives it, allowing accountability to be deferred or obscured. The non-agentic model developed here resolves this by reclassifying the system and redirecting legal and institutional attention to the human decisions—training, deployment, and use—where responsibility actually lies.

Working Paper:

• The Agency Error in AI Governance: Coherent Output, Constraint, and the Misclassification of Artificial Systems
  Distributed in the SSRN Artificial Intelligence - Role & Applications in Law eJournal, Vol. 3, No. 86 (May 6, 2026)

  AI systems do not act. They generate coherent outputs under constraint. The persistence of agency attribution in artificial intelligence governance arises not from the presence of intention in these systems, but from a structural feature of their design: sufficiently constrained systems operating over structured data reliably produce the observable markers—coherence, responsiveness, apparent goal-directedness—that humans use to infer agency in other contexts. The inference is not irrational. It is misplaced. This paper identifies that misplacement as the central, undertheorized problem in AI governance.

  Across philosophy of mind, legal scholarship, and science and technology studies, AI systems are treated as candidates for agency—as full agents, quasi-agents, or distributed actants—despite the absence of the conditions agency requires. This paper argues that these frameworks share a category error: the conflation of output coherence with underlying subjectivity or purposive action. Drawing on philosophy of mind, legal theory, and science and technology studies, it develops a non-agentic model of AI systems as constraint-bound output generators and demonstrates how prevailing frameworks—the intentional stance, legal doctrines of responsibility, and distributed agency models—fail on their own terms when applied to systems of this kind.

  The governance consequences are direct. Misattributed agency produces unstable liability regimes, because . . . (continue on SSRN)

3. Uncertainty, Observation, and Social Transformation

This research program develops a framework for understanding how uncertainty, observation, and reflexivity structure social transformation. It advances Potentialism and the Quantum-Continuity Model, which conceptualize social systems as metastable environments in which multiple trajectories coexist and are resolved through threshold events shaped by observation and interpretation.

Forthcoming Book: The Quantum-Continuity Model for the Social Sciences:Reimagining Uncertainty, Reflexivity, and Emergence in Social Systems

This manuscript develops Potentialism as a framework for understanding how uncertainty, observation, and reflexivity structure social transformation. It advances the Quantum-Continuity Model (QCM), which adapts the epistemic logic of superposition, collapse, and measurement into the social analogues of Transition Zones, Quantum Thresholds, and Quantum Measurement Events. Rather than treating social systems as literally quantum, QCM uses quantum-theoretic reasoning as an epistemological resource for conceptualizing indeterminacy, metastability, and discontinuous resolution in complex social systems.

The manuscript has undergone full external peer review at a major academic press and received positive reports. A working paper elaborating the core framework is available on SSRN:

Working Paper:

• Observation, Uncertainty, and Social Knowledge: Potentialism and the Quantum-Continuity Model 
  Distributed in SSRN Philosophy of Science, January 6, 2026

This article develops Potentialism as a framework for understanding how uncertainty, observation, and reflexivity structure social transformation. It advances the Quantum-Continuity Model (QCM), which adapts the epistemic logic of superposition, collapse, and measurement into the social analogues of Transition Zones, Quantum Thresholds, and Quantum Measurement Events. Rather than positing that social systems are literally quantum, QCM uses quantum-theoretic reasoning as an epistemological resource for conceptualizing indeterminacy, metastability, and discontinuous resolution in complex social systems. The model explains how multiple potential futures coexist within metastable social conditions and how interpretive or communicative acts can precipitate the abrupt consolidation of one trajectory. An illustrative case from the Arab Spring demonstrates how regimes persisted within Transition Zones, how legitimacy dissolved through threshold crossings, and how observation reconfigured collective expectations into decisive outcomes. More broadly, QCM clarifies how uncertainty functions as a structural feature of social life . . .(continue on SSRN)

4. Institutional Fragility and the Formation of Belief

This research examines how institutional environments shape belief systems, particularly under conditions of uncertainty, fragmentation, and declining trust. It shifts the focus from individual cognition to systemic conditions, arguing that belief formation is deeply embedded in institutional structure and informational context.

This approach provides an alternative to purely psychological explanations of conspiracy thinking and related phenomena.

Working Paper:

• Beyond Belief: Why Institutional Conditions Matter More than Cognition in the Study of Conspiracy Thinking 
  Distributed in SSRN Political Behavior: Cognition, Psychology, & Behavior Vol 19, Issue 14, February 13, 2026

  Research on conspiracy thinking has largely centered belief as its primary object of explanation, attributing conspiratorial beliefs to cognitive bias, psychological predisposition, or informational distortion. While this literature has generated important insights into individual-level mechanisms, it has struggled to account for the persistence, diffusion, and cross-context recurrence of conspiratorial beliefs. This article argues that these limitations stem from a mis-specified analytic focus: belief is treated as a causal variable rather than as an outcome shaped by institutional conditions. 

  Drawing on a selective review of psychological, sociological, and media-oriented approaches, the article identifies a shared assumption underlying belief-centered models that conspiratorial belief reflects epistemic deficiency rather than responses conditioned by features of the institutional environment. The paper then advances an alternative framing in which conspiracy thinking emerges within contexts characterized by opacity, weak accountability, and narrative insufficiency. Under such conditions, belief correction alone cannot . . .(continue on SSRN)

A Note on Approach

These papers are conceptual and analytical in nature. The aim is not to provide exhaustive empirical accounts, but to develop frameworks capable of explaining patterns of influence across diverse contexts. For updates on new papers and ongoing work, please check back regularly or follow future publications via SSRN.