Challenges to knowledge-making: the intricate interrelation of knowledge and resistance

1. Introduction

This special issue addresses the connections and crossroads between knowledge and resistance. In the current political landscape, such a research endeavour is both topical and needed. Social media platforms, like Facebook, and the development of new technologies have made it possible to spread disinformation through political channels, which has laid the foundation for new ways of governing. For example, The Washington Post fact-checker team counted 492 false or misleading claims made by the US president Donald Trump or his team during his first 100 days in power.¹ In Vietnam and Ethiopia, citizens were enlisted or hired to use their personal Facebook pages to post pro-government messages and influence social media conversations in the favour of the respective ruling party. The Guatemalan government, on the other hand, used hacked or stolen social media accounts to silence voices of dissent.²

Governing through disinformation is a new way of ruling that is distinct from the globally dominant (and neoliberal) governance as as we once knew it. Rather than claiming authority through rendering itself technical, such governance has the aim of appealing to emotions and capitalising on people’s uncertainties and fears. However, and somewhat paradoxically, there is also a trend in populist political discourse towards the questioning of the credibility and status (and even the existence) of academic disciplines that do not merely produce what is understood as ‘objective facts’. These disciplines are claimed to put forward value-based positions, which are thereby seen to be inherently political. Climate change, just to mention one example, has come to be understood as something one can choose to believe in, or not, depending on ideological perspectives. This example illustrates the increasingly personalised and subjective relationship with scientific knowledge that we are witnessing today.

The current political landscape, which is populated by manipulated information and the narration of facts – true, partial or false – that draw on a mixture of emotionality and rationality (European Union (EU) 2019), has made scholars, such as Anthony Burke (2001, p. 224), argue that we must recognise the ability of power to promote and entrench particular knowledge and worldviews. On the other hand, we must also acknowledge the ability of knowledge to enable, define, and limit the operations of power. Thus, knowledge can be operational to power and utilised for its reproduction, justification and execution. Producing knowledge would then be a way of exercising power – ‘knowledge as power’. However, knowledge production can also be a way of: speaking back to power; identifying the cracks and fissures in dominant epistemologies and narratives; producing knowledge from epistemological loci other than the ones embraced by power; and allowing ‘knowledge otherwise’ to imagine and forge ‘worlds otherwise’ (Escobar 2007). This would be ‘knowledge as resistance’. The latter of the list above could include, for example, indigenous views of land or perspectives from the subaltern side of colonial difference (Grosfoguel 2013). But also populist discourses – for example, left populisms – which could be understood as destructive and undesirable, are sometimes interpreted as emancipatory, social forces through which marginalised groups challenge dominant discourses of power (cf. Laclau 2005).

This special issue analyses different attempts to escape or challenge dominating worldviews and the modification of knowledge regimes. Through different empirical investigations of the crossroads between knowledge and resistance, the specific articles in this special issue also reflect on powerful hybridisations between resistance, power and knowledge. In addition, it discusses the specific kinds of knowledge that academic knowledge comprises. In this, we explore the very study of resistance and critically interrogate, and enhance, various approaches within resistance studies.

Between ‘knowledge as power’ and ‘knowledge as resistance’, there is an unsettled (and unsettling) field of tensions. This tension is the focus of the special issue, which, as stated above, deals with the resistance, knowledge and power nexus. Several guiding research questions can be put forward. How and under what circumstances can knowledge upset, deconstruct and resist structures of oppression, exploitation and discrimination? How and under what circumstances is knowledge power? What forms of knowledge are instrumental to power? What forms of power have the potential to generate resistance? And, as we study resisting subjects and thereby exercise power, how do we, as critical researchers, position ourselves and our knowledge generating practices in this field of tension between knowledge as power and knowledge as resistance? These are the directorial questions that are dealt with in this special issue.

2. Knowledge as power

The dilemmas associated with knowledge and power, and knowledge as power, frame the context in which we aim to establish the connection between knowledge and resistance. Williams (1996) stresses the strong relationship between knowledge and power whereby knowledge is conceived as being hardly ever value-neutral. Williams holds that knowledge frequently enters into the creation and reproduction of particular social orders that benefit some at the expense of others. The political scientist Emanuel Adler’s version of constructivism integrates knowledge and power as part of an explanation of where ‘interests’ come from (Adler 1997, p. 336).

Michel Foucault further stressed the link between power and knowledge by arguing that ‘power and knowledge directly imply one another; there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time, power relations’ (Foucault 1977, p. 27, Burke 2001, p. 224). By moving beyond a realist emphasis on reality as perception, the Foucauldian concept of power-knowledge suggests that we look for the way in which interests and practices intertwine with forms of knowledge, language and representation (Foucault 2007, p. 61). Foucault argues that:

we have an entirely interwoven network. Not only with elements of knowledge and power; but for knowledge to function as knowledge it must exercise a power. Within other discourses of knowledge in relation to discourses of possible knowledge, each statement considered true exerts a certain power and it creates, at the same time, a possibility. Inversely, all exercise of power, even if it is a question of putting someone to death, implies at least a savoir-faire. (Foucault 2007, p. 71)

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault (1990, p. 100) underlines that it is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together. Discourses are neither uniform nor stable, and each society is marked by a multiplicity of discursive elements. Still, according to Foucault, it is possible to locate ‘local centres’ of power-knowledge, such as the ‘watch-crew’ of parents, nurses, doctors and educators that together compose a ‘local centre’ of power-knowledge around a child.

Proceeding from the power-knowledge nexus outlined by Foucault, feminist and decolonial perspectives have displayed how different ways of knowing and our imaginations can be understood as hierarchical and binary constructions (Lugones 2010). Judith Butler, in this regard, displays how such constructions are involved in processes of materialisation, which shape the surfaces of bodies and worlds (Butler 1993).

The recent ‘material turn’ takes another stand, and adds to the above outline of discursive production by acknowledging that ‘the material’ is more than just a passive social construction. Rather, material bodies and artefacts should be embraced as agentic forces that interact with and change what we know (Alaimo and Hekman 2008, pp. 4–7, Frost 2011, p. 70). In a somewhat similar vein, scholars such as Martha Hardman (1986) and Anders Burman (2013) have discussed the notion of ‘experimental’ knowledge and how the interaction with the surrounding world produces personal knowledge that is acquired through a non-linguistic interaction with other knowledgeable subjects in the world. In addition, a number of researchers have displayed that it is not possible to separate interpretations from emotions (cf Bergman Blix 2015). Instead, emotions are integral to how we come to understand ‘the real’.

By being aware that there exist different epistemologies for knowledge that affect how we see its relation to power as well as how the concept of resistance is understood from the perspective of different knowledge traditions, this special issue neither bends toward realism, which prioritises a single form of knowledge as ‘true’, thus being insensitive to alternative forms of knowledge, nor embraces relativism, which tends to hamper action (Cornish and Gillespie 2009). Instead, we propose a pragmatic approach that investigates how knowledge relates to action and change in practice.

3. Knowledge as resistance

The above reveals different outlines of the relationship between power and knowledge, which exist side-by-side, in different (re)interpretations and with different ‘extras’. Still, we would like to argue that to further understand the crossroads between power and knowledge, we need to embark upon an investigation into the complex mess of power, knowledge and resistance, as well as detail the outline of the specific practices and procedures through which resistance works within the context of knowledge. This will be further discussed below together with an elaboration on the construction of knowledge within the field of resistance studies.

The collection of articles presented here provides a novel excursion towards an elaborated understanding of how knowledge and resistance are interweaved. In the next-coming two sections of this editorial introduction, we will outline three analytical observations or themes that have emerged from the attempts of the contributors to this volume in order to theoretically and empirically develop the crossroad between knowledge and resistance. These themes could, more generally, also serve as a point of departure for future research that aims to understand the complex relations between knowledge and resistance. The themes and theoretical considerations are as follows: First of all, several of the articles in this special issue elaborate on the complex relationship between power, resistance and knowledge. Previous research has pinpointed that resistance is sometimes parasitic on power, but that it can also nourish as well as undermine it. Likewise, power can produce, draw-on or co-opt resistance (Baaz et al. 2017a). Some of these complex junctures between power and resistance are displayed in Anders Burman’s article ‘Black hole indigeneity’ (this issue). Burman explores how epistemological and ontological ‘radical difference’ was used by indigenous movements that resisted the colonial Bolivian state and how, subsequently, this radical difference was co-opted by the state and used to legitimise state power and a political agenda that is quite remote from the one put forward by the indigenous movements. Hence, ‘indigenous knowledge’ is used to both resist and legitimise state power. Nevertheless, when institutionalised and instrumentalised within the state apparatus, something happens to ‘indigenous knowledge’; it goes from being an emancipatory device of radical difference, to imploding and its radical potential is lost in the black hole that is the colonial state. Political struggles, then, are struggles over knowledge, authenticity and legitimacy.

Kristin Wiksell’s paper ‘Worker Cooperatives for Social Change: Knowledge-Making through Constructive Resistance within the Capitalist Market Economy’ (this issue) similarly points to the challenges of practicing knowledge-making through constructive resistance within the very nexus of power-knowledge that is being opposed. By living their ideals in the present as a form of small-scaled grassroot resistance, which is understood as constructive resistance, worker co-ops contribute with subjugated knowledge production that challenges the dominant power-knowledge of capitalist logics in the sphere of economics and business management. However, the worker co-ops’ spreading of knowledge is being limited due to their dependence on economic markets where the notion of co-operatives does not sell, which causes the co-ops to be cautioned in the promoting of themselves as a co-op. Thus, the context wherein constructive resistance is being practiced may stifle the possibilities of also contributing to knowledge-making as resistance, which in turn may limit the prospect of engaging others and growing as a social movement.

As a second theme of this special issue, some of the papers elaborate on practices of producing knowledge (and subject positions) as resistance. If power produces regimes of truth/knowledge, specialised institutions of discipline and ultimately the very subject that makes resistance, then research on resistance must address formulations of resistance against these constructions. For example, hegemonic stories have provoked resistance, and concepts such as ‘The Third World’, the ‘Periphery’ and ‘Third World Women’ have been targeted and deconstructed (Mohanty 1988). Moreover, decolonial scholars such as Walter Mignolo (2009) and Ramón Grosfoguel (2013) employ the concept of ‘coloniality of knowledge’ in order to discuss the epistemic dimension of global asymmetric relations and to explore the prospects for ‘knowledges otherwise’ in order to transform or destabilise hegemonic institutions and colonially conditioned social relations.

As we will see below, resistance as the production of knowledge can appear as ruptures or memories. In addition, some political struggles and subversive acts occur as micro complexities – as words, practices and sentences – that spread themselves about as a network. This can be thought of as accumulated resistance. A single act of resistance, which to a great extent is interwoven with power discourses, might be hidden and negligible, but when accumulated – for example, when resistance inspires other acts of resistance – it might lead to social modifications and transformations (Lilja et al. 2017, Lilja 2018, Lilja and Wiksell 2018).

One of the articles in the special issue, which explores the practices of knowledge constructions against the backdrop of different connections between power and knowledge, is Mona Lilja’s paper ‘Theoretical suggestions for future research on constructive resistance: strategies of representation of the Japanese civil society’. Lilja displays how resistance has a productive character when it aims to establish new truths and how it operates through practices of representation. By disentangling different resistance struggles and studying them in their specificity, she shows how Japanese civil society organisations use specific strategies of narration in order to construct truths and make their recipients understand, embrace and act upon the issues surrounding poverty, pesticides and the climate change threat. Lilja concludes that representations that produce both emotional experiences and a ‘reality effect’ have the most impact on meaning-making processes.

Savina Sirik’s article (this issue) brings in the concept of memory in order to explore how individual narratives of Khmer Rouge (KR) survivors resist the official narratives of the KR period. The paper elaborates on two public exhibitions in order to explore the complexities and nuances within the identities and memories of survivors and former KR cadres. By this the paper identifies different forms of resistance through the representations of KR era atrocities. In doing so, the paper furthers our understandings of resistance through the relationship between complex memory, identity and power, which is produced during the processes of memorialisation.

Similarly, Mikael Baaz and Filip Strandberg Hassellind’s paper ‘Just Another Battleground: Resisting Courtroom Historiography in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia’ (this issue) examines how the trials in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) emerge as a space within which historical narratives are contested, and how Case 002/01 appears to support this claim. Against this background, the paper discusses and analyses the ‘strategy of rupture’ as coined by Jacques Vergès (1968/1981). In this, the paper shows how new knowledge can evolve in the aftermath of ruptures as a resistance strategy.

4. Critical research in-between power and resistance

A last theme of the special issue at hand addresses the problems and potential of critical research, in regard to resistance studies. Considering the multidimensional character of the study of resistance, the field is probably best understood as an academic pursuit that is located on the edge between multi- and inter-disciplinarity. Resistance is interrogated from different disciplines, fields and approaches (e.g. political science, law, sociology, anthropology, as well as other multi- and/or inter-disciplinary fields of inquiry, such as peace and conflict/development studies, revolutionary studies, social movement studies, political ecology, terrorism studies and subaltern studies). Therefore, the study of resistance is characterised by many different scientific and methodological approaches. Studies of revolution focus on historical case types, general social factors that contribute to system changes and the use of military means (Skocpol 1994, Baaz et al. 2017b). Resistance can be studied as a non-democratic phenomenon or as a practice that contributes to democratic processes, and it can be characterised as organised, serial or ‘everyday’.

Overall, resistance practices have been studied empirically, normatively and constructively. Empirical studies of resistance are directed towards describing various contestations and, often, attempt to explain or understand them. The chief study objectives of resistance studies are the resisters and their resistance activities or practices, and the field contains many empirical studies that outline and elaborate on the very practices of resistance (cf. Lundquist 1993, 1998, 2001).

Other studies that could be placed within resistance studies direct their interest towards different types of contestations that are preferable or most effective, as well as the desired outcome of the contestations. This research could be described as normative.

When resistance scholars are interested in what the future social order could look like and what role contestations can play in achieving this utopia, then the focus is constructive. An example of the latter is the project Climaginaries,³ which aims to explore ways of envisioning a fossil fuel free world; this project can thereby be regarded as a tool of resistance in terms of providing insights into how we can achieve as much as possible of what is desired, given the circumstances of the world, or, perhaps more correctly, how we think it is constructed (cf. Lundquist 1993, 1998, Baaz 2002, Baaz 2015, Baaz et al. 2017b, pp. 13–14).

While empirical studies of resistance tend to be descriptive, ‘mapping’ and aim for an understanding of specific resisting practices, the normative and constructive approaches mentioned above can be either problem-solving or critical in their methodology. However, here it is important to point out that the lines between problem-solving or critical research are blurred. For example, when providing new thinking on how to imagine futures and more just and sustainable societies, it can both be a way of relating to urgent global challenges as well as conducing critical scholarship.

Although resistance is a diverse research field and resistance can be studied from various points of departure, no matter what approach is embraced, the study of resistance needs to be reflective, ethical, honest, transparent and accumulative. The things that are being analysed (theories, statistics or empirical data) must be bent and reflected upon from different angles; all of the content of the research must be revealed and not hidden due to political considerations, and the researcher’s data and argumentations must be open and understandable. In addition, the research should be accumulative and build on and acknowledge previous research.

In this special issue, Stina Hansson and Sofie Hellberg elaborate on the role of the critical research in terms of what they find (and do not find) and what they can see and hear in their research material. The focus of critical research has long been to problematise the relationship between knowledge and power, and to criticise and allow scrutinising claims to authority that are based on what is often presented as neutral, objective measures that are anchored in ‘reality’. Critical research has also aimed to demonstrate the possibility of resistance and its relationship with dominant structures of power.

As indicated above, the questioning of regimes of knowledge in various fields of critical research has been blamed for contributing to the production of the conditions that enable post-truth politics. At the same time, critical research also contributes to the shaping of new patterns of power relations and claims to authority and status; claims that, as they have been institutionalised, have increasingly evoked resistance from people who find themselves threatened and even oppressed by what they term as ‘gender ideology’ or ‘cultural Marxism.’ These political developments make an already troubled relationship between critical research and claims to knowledge all the more intricate.

Yet, the critique of the anti-foundational perspectives on knowledge production is not new. Huysman and Aradau (2019) show in a recent article how, in the field of international relations and security studies, this critique has been met with attempts to produce rigorous standards of method in order to increase scientific credibility. However, they claim that the demands for rigorous standards limit the possibilities of experimentation within method, which is a necessary element in this type of research. In contrast, they want to open up the process of claiming truths in order to look at the assemblage of credibility in ways that provide grounds for accepting knowledge claims.

Similarly, Hansson and Hallberg (this issue) argue that rather than closing down the certain ways of doing critical research by subjecting it to the demands for standards of scientific credibility, there is a need for reflection and scrutiny that allows us to open up possibilities while simultaneously demystifying the research process and claims to authority. Hansson and Hallberg discuss the more critical strands of resistance studies by asking the following: How do we position ourselves in ways that shape how we read dynamics of power and resistance in our empirical material? How do our desires for social and political change form the ways that we portray resisting actors and imaginable worlds? What does our knowledge production imply for the possibilities of political imagination? And in what way does knowledge production contribute to the imagination and forging of other, less exploitative and less unequal worlds? In order to be able to answer these questions, Hansson and Hellberg conclude that critical resistance studies demands reflexivity of critical scholars in relation to the texts, narratives and knowledge that is produced.

Dhammika Herath, Michael Schulz and Ezechiel Sentama’s paper ‘Academics’ Manufacturing of Counter-Narratives as Knowledge Resistance of Official Hegemonic Narratives in Identity Conflicts’ (this issue) discuss the production of critical research, but from another angle. In their paper, the authors emphasise the potential of academic knowledge in relation to peace-making. They argue that due to its relatively high status, academic knowledge production is a powerful tool; particularly when alternative conflict narratives challenge the mainstream discourse. The mere status of academia makes new research and knowledge problematic for existing conflict narratives and thereby serves as a resistance tool in broader society against the mainstream narrative. Similarly, repetitive new academic studies of these alternative narratives that become new ‘truths’ are seen as a dangerous resistance challenge by the dominant power. When the alternative narrative starts to spread in society, actors defending the dominant mainstream narrative find ways to discredit the new academic studies, and/or accuse the researchers of treason, and/or threaten them with prison and expulsion from academia.

Thus, by exploring the tension between knowledge as power and knowledge as resistance, this special issue analytically delves into a variety of unsettled and unsettling truth regimes and debates concerning being, knowing and resisting.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

PoReSo (The research group Power, Resistance and Social Change)  

Kristin Wiksell is affiliated to the Centre for Research on Sustainable Societal Transformation at Karlstad University. Her research primarily concerns organisation, power, and resistance from a sociological perspective, with a specific focus on cooperatives as a form of organizing for social change.

Mikael Baaz is a full Professor in International Law as well as an Associate Professor in Political Science and an Associate Professor in Peace and Conflict studies. He works at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Baaz’ core research interest is various aspects of the international society, in particular international law and international criminal law as well as resistance and social change. He has, together with Professors Mona Lilja and Stellan Vinthagen, written the book, Researching Resistance and Social Change: A Critical Approach to Theory and Practice (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017).

Anders Burman currently serves as an associate professor in Human Ecology at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Since the early 2000s, he has conducted ethnographic research in the Bolivian Andes, focusing on social movements and activist research, ritual practice, questions of indigeneity, knowledge production and decolonization, and, more recently, environmental conflicts and climate change.

Stina Hansson is a researcher at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. Her research focus is governance, local service provision and accessibility, especially in relation to processes of differentiation and community building.

Sofie Hellberg is a senior lecturer in Peace and Development Research at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. Her research interests center around environmental issues and (bio)politics, especially relating to water, climate change and education for sustainable development as well as research methodology.

Dhammika Herath is a holder of a PhD in Peace and Development Research. He is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. In his research and publications, Herath has a strong focus in the fields of development, urban regeneration, post-conflict reconciliation, religious conflicts, and issues of governance.

Mona Lilja currently serves as a professor in Peace and Development Research at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Lilja’s area of interest is the linkages between resistance and social change as well as the particularities–the character and emergence–of various forms of resistance. Some of the Lilja’s papers have appeared in Signs, Global Public Health, Nora and Journal of Political Power.

Michael Schulz PhD and Associate Professor in Peace and Development Research, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, has published more than 100 scientific articles, book chapters, debate articles and reports, and in particular extensively on issues in the Middle East and North Africa region, dealing with security, civil resistance, democracy and state building, conflicts, and regionalism. Since 2011 he is part of a research program together, with Mikael Baaz, Mona Lilja and Stellan Vinthagen, financed by the Swedish Research Council, that concerns resistance strategies among demo-advocators in civil society called Civil Resistance Impact on Democracy in Asia.

Ezechiel Sentama holds a PhD in Peace and Development Research from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Sentama is currently Assistant Professor (Research) and European Horizon 2020-Marie S. Curie Research Fellow at Coventry University in the United Kingdom. His research project is on peacebuilding in Algeria and Rwanda.

Savina Sirik is a doctoral student in Peace and Development Research in the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research interests include memory, memorialization, narrative construction, and resistance.

Filip Strandberg Hassellind is a doctoral candidate in international law at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. His primary research interest is genocide jurisprudence and international criminal law. His current research looks at the nexus between genocide, the concept of gendercide and resistance.

Kristin Wiksell is affiliated to the Centre for Research on Sustainable Societal Transformation at Karlstad University. Her research primarily concerns organisation, power, and resistance from a sociological perspective, with a specific focus on cooperatives as a form of organizing for social change.

Notes

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims/?utm_term=.9719ba1e555c.

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/technology/government-disinformation-cyber-troops.html.

3. see https://www.climaginaries.org.