The recent Arab uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East have attracted scholarly attention as popular movements with novel transnational and religious dimensions. What became known as the Arab Spring can be read as part of a broader politics of normative defiance of predominant political and economic orders. From religious militations, to Indigenous sovereign claims, to mobilizations of refugees and migrants in camps and urban settings, it may be possible to speak, more generally, of contemporary insurrectional politics as social movements that emanate from normative positions that pose significant challenges to systemic orders as we know them. Such movements may be radical but not necessarily progressive and therefore raise significant questions for ‘emancipatory’ and modernist frameworks for understanding popular social movements.
The purpose of this issue is (a) to identify the material shifts giving rise to insurrectional politics, (b) to reflect on key arenas of insurrection, (c) to map/chart the impact of insurrectional movements on institutions and relations of political governance at national and global levels, and (d) to explore analytics that will advance theorization of insurrectional politics. The issue aims to generate new knowledge on systemic institutional transformations spanning the national and global by bringing together scholars whose work combines theoretical inquiry with empirical analysis of contemporary insurrectional politics. The issue hopes to advance theorization of insurrectional politics by providing the opportunity for collaborative analytical and conceptual innovation amongst scholars whose work spans several disciplines and sub-fields of Political Theory, Global Politics and International Relations, Sociology as well as a variety of geographic and empirical foci.
The issue focuses empirical inquiry around the following key questions: What material shifts in the world are giving rise to insurrectional politics? What insurrectional politics are converging or diverging around the following arenas and corresponding loci of systemic authority: Religiosity, Secularism, Indigeneity, Colonialism, Postcolonialism, Migration, Citizenship, Art and Resistance? What concrete challenges are insurrectional politics posing for policy and governance and what is the scope of governmental reaction (repression, domestication, appropriation, solidarity)? How is policy and governance transforming in response to insurrectional politics?
The issue aims to advance theory on insurrection and systemic transformation by focusing on the following key questions: How do counter-hegemonic ontologies and epistemologies manifest in insurrectional politics? What are the spatial and temporal dimensions of insurrectional politics? How do these challenge conventional spatial registers and progressive/modernist teleologies? What kinds of political subjects are emerging in and through insurrectional politics? What is the relation between new modes of ethical subject formation and prevailing notions of agency, freedom, justice, emancipation, citizenship and human rights? What kind of analytics advance theorization of insurrectional politics?
The issue builds on the earlier social and political movements literature that has influenced political theory, international relations, and sociology in varied ways. Epistemologically diverse works are called forth to highlight the issue's substantively significant and theoretically innovative aims. Three central aims distinguish the issue from similar previous efforts. First, the issue hopes to move beyond the ‘carnivalesque’ as a key trope of insurrection prevailing in literature that theorizes a variety of counter-globalization movements from the ‘Battle of Seattle,’ to the more Occupy movements, to the Gezi movement in Turkey. We aim to question, though not dismiss, the ethos of discursivity and playfulness that is mobilized in such literature in terms of its traction with a radical critique of power. The issue brings organizing narratives born of common struggles back in to the political calculus without elevating such narratives to the status of doctrine or ideology. We therefore take seriously the potential for epistemic systematicity to anchor effective insurrectional movements.
Migratory movements, for example, generate common narratives of the migrant experience that link diverse political struggles of refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented workers despite their location in contexts with diverse geographic, cultural and economic dimensions. The insurrectional politics that migratory movements give rise to may not be centrally orchestrated nor ideologically articulated but they do collectively challenge citizenship and border regimes that are increasingly global and closely orchestrated. Existential struggles of displaced humans mirror each other in all but the names of the places they pass through or are stuck at such as Greece, Turkey, Indonesia, Australia, Mexico, the USA, Austria, Hungary, Germany, Mali, Senegal, Libya, Italy and many more. Ontological commonalities of their displacement cohere in into corporeal mobilizations that overcome the borders between countries on the one hand and the normative limits in their minds on the other hand. Seen from this perspective, as hundreds of thousands of migrants/refugees enter Europe nowadays, what Europe is casting as the greatest migrant crisis is in fact a crisis of the norms undergirding increasingly inadequate dominant political orders.
Similarly, the notion of indigeneity is conditioned by the interconnection of specific, local and national struggles of diverse indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples across the world understand that same logic of capital and predatory accumulation, form its incipient proto-capitalist form to contemporary hipper-globalist form, conditions their lives. Accordingly, they organize ever more extra-nationally, that, is transversally, around the world's vulnerable indigenous communities, beyond their immediate lives. They begin their work not from the territorial anchors of life but from extra-national resources and possibilities. In so doing, they undo the territorial limits of politics, reveal the world as their struggles’ common space, and inject new insurrectional energies into its milieu. The issue aims to theorize these common ontologies and ‘common spaces’ in terms of their significance for insurrection and systemic transformation in human landscapes around the word. We feel that even gesturing in that epistemic direction is an ethical act in these times, but we hope to go beyond gestures and begin the work.
Second, the issue challenges modernist framings for insurrectional politics that have dominated critical approaches, invested with ‘emancipatory’ and progressive content. Radical and potentially transformative movements are not always progressive in trajectory or emancipatory in intent. Islamist movements, for example, are not expressed in terms of emancipatory aims but are nevertheless fundamentally transformative in impact. In some ways, aspirations of what has come to be seen Political Islam, particularly, in its Jihadist variations, energize a sort of scandalous, if not monstrous, agency in the Islamic world and beyond. We need only to invoke the name of ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Sham) to appreciate the point. Yet, what we need to pay more attention to is the fact that Political Islam is driven by its own teleology, by it is own non-discursive narrative, that does not recognize either the nation-state form or the liberal-democratic norm as legitimate. It articulates its own normative trajectory transnationally through the Islamic Umma or the world. It is fearsome to some but attractive to others. It is insurrectional nevertheless.
Indigenous movements can similarly mobilize what some call ‘atavistic’ ontology that sits in tension with liberal political ordering principles such as multiculturalism. Such mobilizations are insurrectional precisely because of their discordance with prevailing political relations and institutions. Yet the counter-modernist and non-progressive nature of insurrection has not been adequately explored and theorized from mainstream perspectives. What to the citizens and states appear backward or out of touch with modernity, to indigenous peoples figures as a portal to new cosmopolitical orientations. Indigeneity not tamed by modernity is therefore not a scandalous agency, behind times, but insurrectional capacity that spells out new political horizons.
Third, the issue brings together diverse examples of insurrection across distinct arenas (such as, religiosity, migration, indigeneity, and art) that are usually considered in isolation from each other. Likewise, it encourages analysis of insurrection on macro and micro levels, from mass mobilizations to everyday acts of resistance and ethical-subject formation. The intention with this approach is to enable a more comprehensive account of insurrection without losing sight of the geographical and social specificity of diverse political struggles. The issue also engages with recent efforts to theorize insurrection through specific analytics such as acts of citizenship, autonomy, post-coloniality and anarchy. We engage such analytics while also questioning their utility across the range of arenas with which we are concerned as well as their relation to progressive and emancipatory frameworks. Finally, we engage with the spatial turn in social theory with specific regard to developments such as transversality, the critique of scalar thought and modes of de/re-territorialization for what they can reveal about the spatial dimensions of insurrectional politics.
This issue gathers together key contributors to these debates to work at the leading edge of theorization in the field and to push the boundaries of knowledge on systemic transformation.
In his analysis of insurrectional politics, Timothy Luke asks:
are civil uprisings by adaptable popular resistance groups of insurrectionists openly allowed in today's unstable world system? Does power legitimize its rule by constantly sparking revolts only to contain and suppress them in spectacles of control to evince the resilience of established regimes? Luke maintains that, perhaps, an emergent logic for maintaining order might mobilize disorder to generate new power and knowledge for renewing order.
Irina Veluci's examination of the ‘Save Rosia Montana’ campaign in Romania as ‘an emblematic socio-ecological movement in post-communist Romania’ and beyond creates a critical space for readers to think both about some of the questions raised by Luke on insurrectionality and its limits. A new distribution of what Ranciere calls the ‘the sensible’ with fresh political horizons might be in the offing in Romania and beyond.
In his article Sankaran Krishna takes on the pitfalls of obsession on economic growth metrics In India, especially when these metrics are used to steer and dominate discourse about the quality of life of people and by extrapolation about the stature of the country. Krishna argues that
India has been fixated on the annual growth rate of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), as if, the GDP [numbers, if high enough, will actualize or substantiate] the desperate desire on the part of many in India to be seen as having arrived into the first world. In a context marked by the paradox of electoral democracy alongside mass poverty and rising inequality, focusing on the GDP legitimizes an unjust social order.
Elizabeth Kath and Jorge Knijnik begin their article by recollecting how ‘Carnaval and futebol (football) have both been central to the construction of Brazil in the imagination of global audiences’. In recent years, however, along with rising political and economic discontent in the country, both football and Carnaval have taken on meanings that are at odds with popular imagination within and without Brazil. Particularly, in their manufactured forms that are visible to global audiences, neither Carnaval nor Football continues to command the critical popular influence they once enjoyed. Instead, argue Kath and Knijnik, both have ‘become what Bakhtin would call “mere spectacles”’.
Michael Shapiro's chapter is inspired by contrasting passages in two stories: Jamaica Kincaid's story, ‘The Embassy of Cambodia’, and Daniel Alarcon's story, ‘Collectors’. Working through the stories, Shapiro focuses on the concept of attention and ends with a reflection on our responsibility to heed the ‘ethical weight’ of other.
Alina Sajeed’s article focuses on the idea of ‘colonial modernity’ to pursue a dual theoretical purpose. First, she questions the claim on modernity in dominant epistemological imaginations that modernity was the a priori overarching epistemological framework in the periphery. Second, she shows how anti-colonial local movements were at work initiating and deepening a global infrastructure for anti-colonial connectivity. By examining a number of Islamic movements in the Dutch Indies and in British Malaya, her article ‘seeks to map out some of the translocal spaces created and occupied by these movements, which linked North Africa to Saudi Arabia and to South East Asia’.
Abraham reminds us insurrectional agencies were historically at work in the creation of ‘international’ or transnational space as ‘an unsettled zone’. His article returns to 1915 Mutiny of British Indian soldiers in Singapore as one constitutive event of international as unsettled zone and argues that the mutiny makes visible two kinds of insurgence: ‘international space as an unsettled zone of attraction and desire, and, a nascent political subjectivity that rejects the disciplines of imperial military labor’.
Samson Opondo and Lorenzo Rinelli examine ‘insurrectional asylum seeking and refugee practices’ that map the spatial relationship across landscapes of displacement as zones of capture spanning Africa and Europe. They interrogate the logic of the refugee camp at the nexus of law, technology, security and humanitarian discourses in order to highlight ‘practices emerging from the proliferation of camps, the urbanization and normalization of refugee camps and their virtualization and inscription on human bodies’.
Nicole Grove takes the readers back to the ‘time’ of the Arab Spring and its aftermath, particularly to the virtual occasions where Arab women's bodies, both in insurgency and subjugation, are represented and given meanings in the liberal feminist circles. She focuses on two Arab women activists: Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Sboui. Grove ‘presents a horizontal reading of their corporeal interventions [in the media] to consider how algorithmic and normative protocols related to content filtering on social media amplify certain forms of political communication while prohibiting others'.
Finally, Soguk examines the rise of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Northern Iraq as a quite insurrection in foreign policy as a field of policy and conduct. Constitutionally, ‘Kurdistan Region’ is not independent, but empirically the KRG behaves as if it is a sovereign entity. In his analysis, Soguk interrelates Robert Jackson's work on ‘quasi-states’, Doug McAdam's argument on ‘political opportunity structures’ and Giorgio Agamben's discussion on ‘indistinct zones of politics’. Ultimately, he contends that the KRG is increasingly insurgent in its political modalities.
Acknowledgements
I thank Anne McNevin for her contribution to and engagement with the early iterations of my ideas on Insurrectional Politics. I also thank all the anonymous referees for their service and insightful feedback to the authors.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Nevzat Soguk
Nevzat Soguk is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii Manoa and an Adjunct Professor of Global Politics at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.
Notes
† For a more expansive engagement with my work on theory and insurrectional politics, see Soguk (Citation2014a, Citation2014b). This article was originally published with errors. This version has been corrected. Please see Corrigendum (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2015.1123922).
References
- Soguk, N. (2014a). From international to insurrectional politics. In M. Steger, P. Battersby, & J. Siracusa (Eds.), The SAGE handbook on globalization (pp. 70–84). London: SAGE.
- Soguk. N. (2014b). Global citizenship in an insurrectional era. In E. Isin & P. Nyers (Eds.), Routledge handbook of global citizenship studies (pp. 49–61). London: Routledge.