Brand Governance

This article defines brand governance as a normative practice that regulates visibility and limits political recognition in promotional communication. In contrast to scholarship in business and strategic communication, the analysis examines how advocacy campaigns render grievances legible. Drawing on sociosemiotic analysis, the study identifies three strategies—visionary, sensitive, and reflexive—that establish thresholds of legibility and organize the affective registers through which campaigns become recognizable. Recognition here operates through ontological erasure, which names the structural condition in which subjects are excluded not through misrepresentation but through the denial of legitimacy itself. What emerges is a paradox in which recognition constrains the horizon of justice more effectively than exclusion, since empathy, once instrumentalized, disarticulates collective struggle and reconstitutes it as individualized affect and sanctioned emotion. The article concludes that the regulatory dynamics of brand governance reproduce moral hierarchies of recognition, privileging Northern perspectives and marginalizing grievances from the South.