Resistance and the City

Abstract

The mass demonstrations that took place in 2011 in major cities worldwide, dubbed here Contemporary Metropolitan Protest (CMP), varied in terms of the issues tackled and the political efficacy attained, but featured similarities in style, mobilization patterns and the use of traditional and social media. The similarities explain the tendency among commentators and researchers to treat CMP as a coherent category. The variation, on the other hand, raises questions about conceptual and theoretical idioms used so far in the analysis of CMP. The article begins by scrutinizing “resistance”—an idiom introduced to anthropology in the 1980s to theorize peasant response to metropolitan policies—and its recent emergence in the depiction and analysis of CMP. Highlighting the strengths and limitations of the term, I use the rise and fall of CMP in Tel Aviv in 2011 and 2012 as an example of how the implicit logic of aggression and response, so central to earlier employment of the notion of resistance, can be hijacked by defensive regimes that seek to delegitimize and criminalize critique, thus forcing CMP to decline and implode.

Keywords:

• Contemporary Metropolitan Protest
• Resistance
• Protest
• Urban Struggles/Rebel Cities
• Repression
• Criminalization
• Securitization
• Ethnography
• Tel Aviv

Notes

1 Similarly, Cultural Anthropology’s hot-spot project, led by Juris and Razsa (2012), featured over 20 short interventions by anthropologists offering impressions and analysis of the 2011 events, more than twenty essays by leading public intellectuals and links to seven books and twenty-six websites and blogs that offer analysis and insight of these events.

2 The entry “The Occupy Movement” on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_movement, accessed July 22, 2013) is a vivid illustration of this view. Its opening paragraph reads:The Occupy movement is an international protest movement against social and economic inequality, its primary goal being to make the economic and political relations in all societies less vertically hierarchical and more flatly distributed. Local groups often have different foci, but among the movement's prime concerns is the belief that large corporations and the global financial system control the world in a way that disproportionately benefits a minority, undermines democracy and is unstable.Other commentators similarly treat CMP as a single process, embodying a unified trajectory (see Chomsky 2012; Juris 2012; Tejerina et al. 2013).

3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Rome_demonstration; Vicari (2013).

4 Ministry of Finance, 27 September 2011.

5 http://www.oecd.org/newsroom/oecd-calls-on-g20-finance-ministers-to-support-next-steps-in-clampdown-on-tax-avoidance.htm.

6 Said (1989), in the one essay he explicitly dedicated to anthropology, admired the brilliant recognition of these subaltern ploys on the part of ethnographers, but questioned the ethics of exposing the very secrets resistance and its tactics were striving to conceal.

7 See Ortner (1995) and Seymour (2006) for explicit usage of the term “resistance studies”.

8 The tendency to see resistance everywhere as following a single pattern was summarized succinctly in a sentence included in the entry “James Scott” on Wikipedia, which captures Scott's three books on resistance in the following words: these three books have been summarized humorously with the description “Peasants in Malaysia, peasants everywhere, everyone everywhere” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott (accessed July 30, 2013).

9 In early 2013 Harvey demonstrated the rising salience of cities for CMP by relating how British union leaders, who had built careers on sectorial struggles – separate campaigns for the rights and benefits of miners, transport workers, nurses, teachers and so on – sought guidance from social scientists on how to run, manage and sustain integrated city-wide protests. See Marom (2013) for an analysis of the role of space in the Israeli protests of 2011.

10 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAzUQlSR6NQ.

11 An interesting exception whereby the term “resistance” was explicitly invoked by the extreme right is the British National Party, which in 2011 renamed its youth section “Resistance” (it had been called Young BNP, then “Crusaders”). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistance_(YBNP) (accessed July 31, 2013).