I never like the word “politics.” It carries the association of a bunch of people just playing backstabbing games to further themselves.

While this does occur, in general what I see is that with any large-enough group of people, there will be strong differences of opinions on how to steer the project to success.

In fact, I don’t think I can remember a single “political battle” that didn’t stem from a legitimate concern in how some project was being run and what they had decided to focus on.