How resistance encourages resistance: theorizing the nexus between power, ‘Organised Resistance’ and ‘Everyday Resistance’

ABSTRACT

Lately, the concept of ‘resistance’ has gained considerable traction as a tool for critically exploring subaltern practices in relation to power. Few researchers, however, have elaborated on the inter-linkage of shifting forms of resistance; and above all, how acts of everyday resistance entangle with more organized and sometimes mass-based resistance activities. In this paper, these entanglements are analysed by taking into consideration the connections between articulations of resistance and technologies of power. Empirical observations from Cambodia are theorized in order to provide better theoretical tools for searching and investigating the inter-linkage between different resistance forms that contribute to social change. In addition, it is argued that modalities of power and its related resistance must be understood, or theorized, in relation to the concepts of ‘agency’, ‘self-reflexivity’ and ‘techniques of the self’.

KEYWORDS:

• Resistance
• power
• subordination
• self-reflexivity
• Cambodia

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Swedish Research Council, which has allowed us to undertake research in a programme titled ‘Globalization of Resistance: Influences on Democracy Advocators in Civil Society in the South’, from 2011 to 2015 (project no. 2010-2298). This article is an integral part of this wider research programme.