# District Attorney

> District Attorney is mapped as the near state: it governs the immediate infrastructures where policy becomes lived reality.

| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Stable ID | `node:kiduna:political-change:local-state-power:district-attorney` |
| Family | Local & State Power |
| Domain | Governance |
| Kind | institution |
| Archetypal function | The Near State |
| Epistemic status | synthesis; supported |

## Concrete anchor

District Attorney belongs to the **Local & State Power** family. It is treated as a specific political object, role, institution, tactic, event, ideology, or mechanism before any symbolic transfer is made.

## What it does

District Attorney governs the immediate infrastructures where policy becomes lived reality, changing who can act, what becomes visible, and which costs are distributed to others.

## Who gains and who loses power

The mechanism can increase the capacity of actors able to use District Attorney, while shifting cost, delay, risk, exclusion, or dependence toward actors with less authority, information, organization, money, or safe access. The distribution is conditional, not an essence of the node.

## Archetypal function

**The Near State.** District Attorney is mapped as the near state: it governs the immediate infrastructures where policy becomes lived reality.

## Gift

makes power accessible, plural, and experimentally close; through District Attorney, that capacity becomes available for deliberate use.

## Wound / Shadow

enables local exclusion, uneven capacity, and hidden low-turnout capture; District Attorney can then reproduce the very arrangement it claims to change.

## Conditions

- scale and jurisdiction are explicit
- affected people and absent stakeholders are named
- time horizon and countermoves are considered

## Strategic meaning

Use District Attorney to identify the operative target, resource, dependency, decision forum, and likely countermove. Ask what would make the mechanism stronger, weaker, more legitimate, or less necessary.

## Divinatory meaning

The Near State enters through District Attorney. Read for the capacity seeking expression, the cost displaced from view, and the relationship that changes if the frame moves.

**Question:** What changes when District Attorney becomes the unit of analysis rather than background?

## Game function

**constraint.** Reveal one hidden dependency connected to District Attorney; another player names a countermove. Initiative 2.

## Relationships

- **mobilizes — Sheriff:** Sheriff mobilizes District Attorney by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(synthesis; supported)_
- **distributes costs to — Attorney General:** District Attorney distributes costs to Attorney General by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(synthesis; supported)_
- **legitimizes — Disruption:** District Attorney legitimizes Disruption by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_
- **mobilizes — Anarcho-Syndicalism:** Anarcho-Syndicalism mobilizes District Attorney by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_

## Countermaps and polarity prompts

- Read District Attorney from the viewpoint of the actor who bears its cost.
- Reverse cause and symptom: what if District Attorney is an effect of the system it appears to drive?
- Change the clock: what looks different over a day, an election cycle, a generation, and a century?
- Ask when the Gift becomes the Wound through scale, secrecy, intensity, latency, or unequal reciprocity.

## Epistemic and Sentinel note

Claim layers: synthesis, interpretive, symbolic_divinatory. Scope, jurisdiction, period, and source perspective may change the claim.
No node-specific Sentinel factors were recorded; ordinary source, audience, and context checks still apply.

## Visual direction

A text-free enamel expression of District Attorney: one dominant mechanism, one counterforce, raised warm-metal linework, midnight field, restrained civic red, teal, ivory, and amber. No party logo, national flag, sacred symbol, or recognizable person.

## Research / provenance

- [Redistricting Law 2020](https://www.ncsl.org/redistricting-and-census/redistricting-law-2020) — National Conference of State Legislatures, 2020. U.S. redistricting institutions, rules, and litigation.
- [Introduction to Political Science](https://openstax.org/details/books/introduction-political-science) — OpenStax, 2022. Comparative institutions, political behavior, and public policy foundations.

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Engine Output version 1.0.0; generated 2026-08-24T00:00:00Z. Sentinel annotations are stored separately in `sentinel/handoffs.json`.
