The ABC of resistance: towards a new analytical framework

ABSTRACT

Two significant developments – (1) the rapidly changing world order, and (2) significant gaps in current social science scholarship – call for a further exploration of resistance theories. In this paper, we identify some of the gaps and inconsistencies within the current bulk of research, and seek to contribute to the understanding of resistance, its applications and complexity. In short, this paper discusses three interacting and supporting forms of resistance, including various overlaps and interlinkages between them, which together constitute what we would like to call the ABC of resistance; that is, avoidance resistance, breaking resistance, and constructive resistance.

KEYWORDS:

• Resistance Studies
• ABC (framework)
• Avoiding resistance
• Breaking resistance
• Constructive resistance

1. Introduction

Today, the traditional, dialectical struggle between capital and workers, as played out during the ‘Fordist era’, is being fundamentally challenged and, by consequence, increasingly replaced by globalization (and various reactions against this process or, perhaps to be more correct, processes) and, by extension, a ‘liquid modernity’ (see e.g., Bauman 2000, Mumby et al. 2017).

In this fluctuating situation, it becomes important to further develop our theoretical social science repertoire in order to better understand what is actually going on around us, on the ground. More concretely expressed, the ongoing transformation of society – in particular the movement from sovereign to biopolitical and, simultaneously, neoliberal governing – provides us with an enduring challenge to upgrade our theories in general and, we would like to argue, the theoretical toolbox of Resistance Studies in particular. Seeking to respond to this challenge, this paper focuses on theoretically understanding new forms of resistance as they are played out in the current post-Fordist era, which is characterized by, more than anything else, neoliberalism.

Previous research has sustained a focus on public and organized resistance that is predominantly directed towards sovereign power. As stated by Rosie McGee (2016):

[a]gency-based, coercive and wilful versions of power as ‘power over’ tend – with noteworthy exceptions – to be more accessible and tractable to power and resistance scholars and strategists alike than … versions of power as norms, culture and discourse, or processes of structuration.

This focus on ‘power over’ and ‘oppositional resistance’, is somewhat problematic – not least considering the fact that our theories have profound consequences for the knowledge that we (are able to) produce. By adding to McGee’s argument, we would like to propose that the rich production of social science literature on social mobilization could be described as divided into two, more or less, distinct subfields. An earlier focus on social movements has, since the 1980s, been accompanied by a latter focus on ‘everyday’ individual and hidden resistance. Unfortunately, as well as unnecessarily, this development has created two complementary and relatively isolated ridged academic fields – one field that focuses on social movements, mobilizations and open resistance, and another field that focuses on individual and hidden dissent (Baaz et al. 2021, Lilja 2021a).

In this paper, we discuss and elaborate on the previous research within these two fields; firstly, by identifying gaps and inconsistencies within the existing bulk of research, and, secondly, by constructing an analysis of the current state of knowledge and suggesting some reasonable steps that can be carried out in the line of research inquiry. In our view, neither contemporary Social Movement Studies, nor current studies of everyday individual and hidden resistance are capable of (fully) grasping, exploring, and understanding the entanglements of different forms of resistance played out today. Both (sub)fields, of what can be viewed as the broader field of Resistance Studies, focus on their own ‘favorite’ form of resistance (activities). Thus, despite the substantial research – which elaborates on different widespread and ongoing activities of resistance – more research that (re)visits the field in order to add new insights on resistance activities and strategies is much needed (Butz and Ripmeester 1999, Baaz et al. 2017, Courpasson 2017, Lilja et al. 2017, Mumby et al. 2017).

All in all, the changing world order and the lack of complexity in the current scholarship on resistance call for a further exploration of the concept of resistance. Considering this, the more explicit aim of this paper is to contribute to our understanding of resistance, and its applications and complexity by providing a new, but still preliminary, coherent analytical framework on different interacting and supporting forms of resistance. In doing this, we use and discuss three forms of resistance: (i) avoidance resistance, (ii) breaking resistance, and (iii) constructive resistance.¹ These three forms of resistance constitute an analytical framework and/or theoretical toolbox, which we would like to introduce as the ABC of resistance (cf. Galtung 1968).

Drawing on insights from various research perspectives – in particular organized resistance and, on the other hand, everyday resistance – in order to advance a new theoretical framework of analysis, the paper is ‘synthesizing’ in ambition; that is, it strives to combine existing perspective so as to form a new, more complex and sensitive toolbox to use when analyzing resistance activities. Considering its aim and the vast scope of the field in which we engage, the paper is best described as conceptual in character. Put simply, it is a ‘think piece’ that seeks to advance different analytical forms of political mobilizations and the connections between them.

Before moving on to the exploration of the different analytical categories, we would like to take a short detour and highlight some fundamental aspects of resistance.

2. The concept of resistance

The forms of resistance that emerge in different contexts depend upon why, and in what setting, the counter conduct is provoked. Baaz et al. (2017) have previously emphasized the strong relationship between the character of resistance and the form of power. The type of power (or repression), together with, among other things, local discourses, subject positions, and other types of resistance, inform how resistance is formulated and employed (Lilja et al. 2017, Lilja 2022). Thus, not only power, but also various contextual factors, such as specific knowledge regimes and subjectivities, impact upon how resistance is played out in concrete situations (cf. Coleman and Tucker 2015).

To some extent, then, power creates resistance. However, as argued by, for example Marco Checchi (2014), it is also plausible to imagine that resistance comes first. This somewhat counter intuitive line of thinking challenges the idea of power’s superiority over resistance. In fact, resistance can both challenge, reproduce, or even create relations of power, even in one single act of counter conduct (Mumby et al. 2017). The resistance literature is abundant with examples of this, such as the creation of Gramscian ‘counter-hegemonic blocs’ that oppose hegemony by creating new forms of powerful hegemonies, or, in a very different way, when anarchists or feminist radicals reject formal hierarchies and instead create informal cliques or elites that exercise less visible power within established resistance movements (see e.g., Freeman 1975). Or, as suggested by Michel Foucault (1990, p. 95), where a power relationship’s ‘existence depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations’.

Resistance contains, among other aspects, a temporal dimension (Lilja 2018), and as our societal power-relations have changed over time, so has resistance. Fordist capitalism, as stated above, sparked another kind of disengagement and dissent than does neoliberal capitalism (Mumby et al. 2017). This implies that resistance needs to be understood contextually, since it shifts with the economic, political, and cultural topographies of power over time (Mumby et al. 2017). There is no form of resistance that takes place outside its discursive and political context and, indeed, as stated by Dennis Mumby et al. (2017, p. 1164): ‘the ability of “small wins” to translate into social change depends, in many respects, on the ability of these discursive contexts to be shaped in a way that favours the goals of the resisters’. Thus, new forms of resistance – which use socially shared symbols, concepts, and meanings, while simultaneously adding to these – have the ability to establish alternative narratives and be at the forefront of social change. However, for the resistance act(ivity) to make sense, and for there to be an awakening, there must be some discursive preparedness (cf. Carlsson 2009). Hence, whether or not resistance becomes intelligible within a particular setting depends on the discursive context. We now turn to some unfortunate gaps in current Resistance Studies.

3. Unfortunate gaps in the current resistance studies field

Since its inception in the 1980s, the study of ‘everyday resistance’ (Scott 1990) has flourished yet remained focused on individual, informal small-scale and dispersed forms of resistance such as ‘infrapolitics’ (which is James C. Scott’s alternative concept for everyday resistance). Meanwhile, the rapidly developing field of Social Movement Studies has maintained a focus on collective mobilizations, often by limiting studies to ‘movement organizations’, public ‘episodes’, and ‘campaigns’ of various kinds. This bias, to a great extent, relates to the fact that access to relevant data of everyday and hidden transcripts are rather limited. Even the collection of data on mass-mobilized civil resistance campaigns imposes various challenges to the researcher (see further e.g., Chenoweth and Lewis 2013).

Regarding more organized forms of resistance, the most ambitious and recognized attempt to create a unified framework between fields of political struggles is that of scholars who focus on ‘contentious politics’ (see e.g., McAdam et al. 2001). Still, this ‘unifying’ framework neither mentions ‘everyday resistance’, nor includes acts by individual or smaller groups. This weakness is additionally bolstered by the fact that the concept of ‘collective action’ is often used by scholars as an alternative to social movement(s) (Baaz et al. 2021, Lilja 2022)

The division into distinct research fields, as highlighted above, is not a problem per se. Every academic field focuses on certain issues and departs from specific research problems. However, we would like to argue that there actually exists a problem in Resistance Studies in this regard, since there is currently a relative silence in relation to the various forms of activities that fall in-between ‘individual’ and ‘collectively’ organized resistance activities. We think that to properly capture the large salmagundi of resistance, some new ‘ingredients’ should be added. For example, it would be beneficial to add individual resistance – which is not hidden or avoiding, and therefore does not fit neatly into what is conventionally seen as ‘everyday resistance’ – to the ‘recipe’ in order to provide the necessary flavor and color to the dish. It would also be valuable to include larger movements of dissent that tend to fly under the radar and avoid all attention. To the latter group, we, amongst others, count the ones that appear hidden on the internet and are not as easily captured by observers as they would be in spectacular mass-mobilized events.

Mumby et al. (2017) suggest a new framework of analysis that identifies four forms of resistance (at the workplace), namely: (1) individual infrapolitics and (2) collective infrapolitics, as well as (3) individual insurrection and (4) collective insurrection. This framework, which is labelled the ‘four I’s’ of resistance is an interesting contribution to the larger field of Resistance Studies. However, in our view, it is assumed that all forms of resistance follow the same logic and that the variation is just a matter of degrees of how much individual or collective, and hidden or public the resistance is. Taking this shortcoming into consideration, we would like to suggest an alternative framework or toolbox to use when seeking to understand resistance to of dominant power.

We want to emphasize that the composite, and often novel stories of resistance, which have flourished in the Social Sciences during the last decades, often approach resistance as mainly in opposition to, destructive against, or critical of the prevailing order. There has been a trend by scholars to embrace resistance as simply opposition and it has accordingly been primarily described in terms of: ‘“counter”, “contradict”, “social change”, “reject”, “challenge”, “opposition”, “subversive”, and “damage and/or disrupt”’ (Hollander and Einwohner 2004, p. 538, Lilja 2021a, 2021b). By this, not only most of the existing but also future research, is, as it stands today, not particularly well-equipped to deal with the richness of resistance, including its more productive and/or constructive modes (Lilja 2021a, 2021b).

Finally, we would like to suggest that the links between and scaling up and down of different forms of resistance should be further highlighted. We would like to propose a new categorization of resistance; one that will help us to analyze a broad range of resistance expressions, their interlinkages and open up the opportunity for an analysis of how they transform. We are very well aware of the fact that the framework or toolbox presented infra is tentative and in need of further elaboration and refinement in the future, as well as in need of adjustments according to different localities, as resistance is always contextually dependent. Still, at this point, it will be useful in order to catch the overlaps and complexity of, and linkages between, different forms of resistance.

4. The ABC of resistance

Here, we introduce our theoretical framework, which we think, as indicated above, could be seen as a conceptual contribution to some of the ongoing debates within the various fields that focus on resistance (acts). As we now know, there is a tendency by scholars to address either more large-scale and organized forms of collective resistance (civil society, social movements, revolutions, etc.), or embrace small-scale, informal, and individualized forms of resistance practices (everyday, local, and dispersed resistance, etc.). At the same time, scholars equate resistance so strongly with ‘opposition’ that most studies completely overlook how structures of domination are undermined by the less dramatic strategies or practices that build new and alternative social relations by applying means other than open opposition (Koefoed 2018, pp. 4–8).

Infra, we elaborate on counter conduct by asking the following question: What claims must be tethered together in order to provide a solid theoretical base for further research on resistance? In answering this question, we propose that to capture the complexity of resistance, we must not only make space for additional forms of resistance, but also seek to understand the various linkages between them. A resistance redux should also take into consideration the changing world order and resistance adaptation to the wider neoliberal, post-Fordist situation. Next, we introduce avoidance resistance, which is the first analytical component of our proposed ABC framework.

4.1. Avoidance resistance

Historically, studies of resistance have gone through similar stages as the studies of power. Although power was initially studied in its most explicit forms, during the 1970s more subtle, symbolic, and dispersed forms of power were increasingly acknowledged. Today, the earlier one-sided focus on the more obvious and dramatic forms of resistance have been firmly supplemented by a recognition of more subtle and diffuse articulations of resistance (see e.g. Scott 1989, 1990).

When discussing the common concept of ‘everyday resistance’, we suggest that the core characteristic of this form of dissent is ‘avoidance’ of power relations and, therefore, also from repression through disguise or hiding from detection as a form of ‘resistance’. When we identify such resistance as not necessarily ‘everyday’ but rather ‘avoiding’ we can also see how it is possible to be performed collectively. In this way we deviate somewhat from Scott’s understanding, which fundamentally emphasizes it as an individual or small-scale activity.

Although the study of ‘everyday resistance’ (Scott 1990), which was first conceived in the 1980s, has grown within many different disciplines, it has remained focused on individual, informal, small-scale and dispersed forms of resistance (as ‘infrapolitics’). Scott (1989, p. 51) has forcefully argued that those claiming that ‘“real resistance” is organized, principled, and has revolutionary implications … overlook entirely the vital role of power relations in constraining forms of resistance’. He further argues that if we only care for ‘real resistance’ then ‘all that is being measured may be the level of repression that structures the available options’.

The key feature of everyday resistance is thus the ‘pervasive use of disguise’, through either ‘the concealment of anonymity of the resister’, in which ‘the personal (not the class) identity of the protesters’ is kept secret, or the act itself is concealed (Scott 1989, p. 54). Scott continues,

[i]nstead of a clear message delivered by a disguised messenger, an ambiguous message is delivered by clearly identified messengers … A practical act of resistance is thus often accompanied by a public discursive affirmation of the very arrangements being resisted. (Scott 1989, pp. 54–56)

Thereby, everyday resistance is resistance that is quiet or otherwise seemingly invisible. Scott shows how certain common behaviors of subordinated groups (such as: foot-dragging, escape, sarcasm, passivity, laziness, misunderstanding, disloyalty, slander, avoidance and/or theft) are not always what they seem to be but are instead (conscious) resistance. He argues that these activities are tactics/strategies that exploited people use in order to both survive and undermine repressive domination; especially in contexts where rebellion is too risky.

Considering the above, it can be concluded that Scott has fundamentally transformed our understanding of ‘politics’ by making the ordinary life of subordinated subjects’ part of the ‘political’, widely defined. He has also directly played an inspirational role for the international establishment of Subaltern Studies as a distinct (sub)field that has reformulated a ‘history from below’ of India and South Asia (see e.g., Kelly and Scott 1992, p. 297, Ludden 2002, pp. 7–11). Scott still inspires numerous empirical studies on everyday resistance (see e.g., Sivaramakrishnan 2005), with general applications (see e.g., Smith and Grijns 1997) on how covert resistance transforms into overt forms (see e.g., Adnan 2007), or on effectiveness (see e.g., Korovkin 2000). Some scholars and studies inspired by Scott deal with specific social spaces, such as the workplace (see e.g., Huzell 2005), the family (e.g., studies of resistance among women in violent relationships; see e.g., Hollander and Einwohner 2004) or gay/queer spaces (see e.g., Myslik 1996, Campbell 2004). Yet other scholars motivated by him focus on everyday resistance and specific categories – often women, low-skilled workers, migrants, gay/queer people, Palestinians, minorities, peasants, but also sometimes ‘new agents’ such as white-power activists (see e.g., Simi and Futurell 2009, Darweish and Sellick 2017), or white, middle-class singles (see e.g., Zajicek and Koski 2003). Additionally, studies inspired by Scott also cover specific themes, such as resistance and stigma (see e.g., Buseh and Stevens 2006), or resistance and consumption/shopping (see e.g., Fiske 1989).

Resistance performed under the radar could superficially prevail as a mild form of avoidance. If you scratch the surface, however, other, more extreme forms of avoiding resistance emerge; for example, withdrawal from entire organizations or relations. In this case, avoidance could be seen as a form of departure, such as that outlined by Scott in the book, The Art of Not Being Governed (2010), where people, over generations, have fled into remote mountain areas and formed cultures of avoidance from state projects. Andrej Grubacic and Dennis O’Hearn (2016) elaborate on Scott’s observation and argue that such ‘exilic resistance’ is not just geographic, but also structural through, for example, communities that escape capitalist relations and practice a gift economy, or political prisoners that create forms of solidarity even under severe conditions (e.g., the IRA prisoners in the UK). This means that escaping domination is possible (at least temporarily and to a certain degree) in different contexts today, even in neoliberal societies with their complex and sophisticated technologies of power.

Although ‘everyday resistance’ is an illuminating concept, we would like to suggest that the concept is problematic due to its rather limited scope. As the concept is understood today, it de-emphasizes or even excludes more collective forms of hidden avoidance resistance. Studies of everyday resistance have unquestionably contributed to our overall understanding of resistance, but they have also, as just indicated above, limited our view to some extent – not least by showing very little interest in the theorizing of movements that use avoidance. In this paper we argue that ‘avoidance’ resistance does not necessarily have to be ‘informal’, ‘individual’ or ‘everyday’. It can also appear as an organized, collective practice, or even on a grand scale. One prominent historical example of this is the primary form of revolt against chattel slavery in the Americas – the multitude of Maroon communities that were formed by runaway slaves in South America and the Caribbean from the sixteenth century onwards until the end of slavery (Lockley 2015, Price 2018, Nevius 2020). Runaway slaves (‘Maroons’), simply put, created their own communities in secluded territories (jungles, swamps or mountains), ranging from tiny bands to autonomous towns and even states, where some survived only briefly before recapture, while others sustained themselves for generations (See further e.g., Price 1996, Bilby 2001). Although their resistance to enslavement began in dispersed and non-organized forms that were based on individuals and/or small groups, it amounted to a mass phenomenon. This opened up space for the building of self-governed and semi-free communities with their own justice systems, food production and set of rights, and formed a basis for collectively organized resistance against recapture and punishment (Bilby 2001, Lockley 2015). This is quite remarkable if we consider that this was done without a common language; in diverse groups that only shared a desperation for survival, situated in a foreign continent, where the slaves were relegated to the worst territories; and without resources or powerful protection anywhere. Yet, some communities became strong enough to constitute a threat to the surrounding slave society, which made treaties that recognized their autonomy possible (Bilby 2001, Nevius 2020). One of the biggest ‘quilombos’ (Maroon communities) in Brazil, Quilombo dos Palmares, had more than 10,000 inhabitants and survived for nearly 100 years before it was crushed by a series of Portuguese military invasions in 1694 (Price 2018). Similar communities played a key role in the revolution(s) in Haiti (1791–1804), which thus formed the first Maroon Nation State and the extraordinary resilience of Jamaican rebels who were never defeated, as well as other Black communities who carried out organized resistance against slavery in the Western Hemisphere (Bilby 2001, Lockley 2015). Remarkably, today there are even remaining autonomous Maroon towns in, for example, Jamaica and Surinam, as well as Brazil. In toto, there are more than 2,000 Maroon communities around the world today (Bilby 2001, Leite 2015).

These Maroon communities show how avoidance on a mass scale is an effective form of resistance against the structural violence of slavery, and how this avoidance resistance formed the basis for other forms of resistance (both ‘breaking’ and ‘constructive’ resistance, which are forms that we elaborate on below).

Another example of resistance through avoidance is the mass emigration of one million professionals from Eastern Europe in 1989, which facilitated the fall of the Berlin Wall and became a drain of resources for these dictatorships, and as such played a role in the undermining of repressive domination (Larrabee 1992, Pfaff and Kim 2003). There is also the avoidance resistance against the direct violence of war-making (Lyall 2016), which can be exemplified by the individual, yet massive, desertion from the Confederate Army during the American Civil War (1861–1865), which, according to Scott, had a decisive impact on the war capacity of the southern states (Reid and White 1985, Scott 1989, pp. 42–43).

Another contemporary example of being hidden and a movement is the millions of youths who participate in the transnational movement of hidden and often illegal file sharing through the internet. With the help of P2P-technology (peer-to-peer), file-sharing and the exchange of programs directly between people have become efficient (Rheingold 2002). The downloading of music, films or games has grown into a common activity by the younger generations, scaring the entertainment industry into fighting these ‘thieves’ through political lobbying, surveillance, and litigation. Some aspects of this struggle are public, organized and highly contentious, as in Sweden between the Pirate Party, the Pirate Bay, and the Pirate Office (the ideological organizers of this cultural of ‘sharing’) and the Anti-Pirate Office (the industry) (Piratbyrån 2005). Still, ninety-nine per cent of the participating file-sharing users of the technology openly avoid challenging laws, corporations, or authorities. They just want to get hold of their entertainment products in an easy and cheap way. Despite the counter measures from the entertainment industry, these digital ‘activists’ have found new methods and avenues, and continue to file-share, despite the successful court judgements against Napster and the Pirate Bay. The (perceived) anonymity of internet use makes it possible to pose as someone else or to construct new identities at the same time as the advanced communication network makes the coordination of gigantic numbers of people possible (e.g., the multi-editing of texts through wiki-technology, see www.wikipedia.org).

To be hidden and still be a movement thus holds no contradiction even today. Avoidance resistance has, in fact, been facilitated by the post-Fordist developments and how it is intermeshed with contemporary technology. Communications within online communities and social media spaces are particularly well suited for spreading politically sensitive topics or launching covert illegal acts or hidden resistance. This is partly due to the fact that online communities are populated with individuals who prefer to conceal their off-line identities, and many utilize the anonymity that online forums offer (Costello et al. 2017).

With the above as a backdrop, we would like to argue that mass-based resistance also can be covert, and work to avoid power. Mumby et al. (2017) label this type of mass-based resistance: ‘collective infrapolitics’; that is, resistance that focuses ‘on those forms of collective, yet quiet, disguised, hidden or anonymous resistance that serve to challenge or unsettle the dominant discourse’. Together, this means that the line that is often drawn between individual and collective forms of resistance should be dissolved, and new forms of resistance explored. Avoidance as resistance, which is hidden and shuns different power expressions (and can therefore be understood as contaminated by power), can be performed individually and collectively. By taking this into consideration, we would like to suggest that the scope of ‘avoidance resistance’ should be broadened and embrace more forms of resistance than those that are covered by the concept of ‘everyday resistance’. This resistance warrants more research as there are few existing studies on hidden collective resistance when compared with the open forms that publicly challenge authority (Mumby et al. 2017, p. 1168). By this, let us now move on to our next category: breaking resistance.

4.2. Breaking resistance

The second main category of resistance that we suggest is ‘breaking’ resistance, as in breaking power relations (Vinthagen 2015, pp. 165–205) rather than avoiding them. This ‘breaking resistance’, which breaks power, operates according to a very different logic than avoidance resistance does and publicly challenges power directly by, for example, disobedience, non-cooperation and/or interventions. This type of resistance could be articulated in the form of protests, strikes, civil disobedience, objections to direct orders, road blockades, factory occupations, consumer boycotts or other (similar) actions. The ‘power breaking’ here indicates how a power relation is – temporarily or potentially – questioned through some kind of public refusal, by someone who is subordinated, to do what is expected or ordered (Vinthagen 2015, Ch. 5). Here, the normal obedience or acceptance of rules, laws or orders is challenged. Furthermore, this form of resistance gains force to the extent where there exists a dependence of resources (e.g., taxes, order, productivity, etc.) by a dominant organization (e.g., the state, an army, or a corporation); a dependence that is then threatened by (the risk of widespread) non-cooperation. This kind of resistance characterized the period of Fordism and industrial capitalism, in which,

work was largely characterized by antagonistic relationships between managers and workers, with the effort bargain over work at the center of this antagonism. Resistance in this context largely consisted of various forms of individual and collective behaviours – some surreptitious, some public – such as organized strike action, ‘working to rule,’ systematic soldiering, ‘goldbricking’ … machine breaking, pilfering, and so forth. Most of these practices of resistance point to workers’ individual and collective assertions of autonomy in an organizational context where boundaries – occupational, work-life, class, etc. – were relatively distinct. (Mumby et al. 2017)

The breaking form of resistance, which was so prevalent during the twentieth century, has mostly been discussed within the widespread field of ‘contentious politics’ or Social Movement Studies, but also within the emerging field of ‘Nonviolent Action Studies’ or studies of ‘Civil Resistance’ (Sharp 1973, Chenoweth and Stephan 2011, Vinthagen 2015, Chenoweth 2020), which are fields that have all maintained a focus on collective mobilizations. This focus is only a problem when there is a relative silence of individualized or dispersed forms of contentious resistance – resistance that is publicly challenging power and is not hidden, everyday, or trying to avoid the repressions of power in any other way.

In this paper, we concentrate the discussion on those scholars who try to form a bridge between different fields; that is, the ones who work with ‘contentious politics’. The leading researchers in this regard are Charles Tilly, Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow. Interesting to note, these scholars have largely rejected their earlier approaches to studying social movements, claiming that there were basic flaws in them and other researchers’ previous attempts (McAdam et al. 2001, Tilly and Tarrow 2006). Today Tilly, McAdam and Tarrow claim, put simply, that there is far too narrow a focus on the movement per se and its internal life, which underplays the importance of the movement’s dynamic interaction with other actors in society. They argue that movements are but one form of possible contention, and that it is rather the key components, or ‘mechanisms’ and ‘processes’ within dynamic interactions of contention that – more than anything else – decide which forms develop. Their research approach, which was introduced in 2001 and further developed in 2006, in the volume Contentious Politics (Tilly and Tarrow 2006), has spurred a lot of debate since its publication.

Scholars working within the contentious politics framework claim that most forms of politics are routinely applied conventional acts (reading newspapers, registering, filing documents, etc.), while some other forms of politics are contentious (involving movements, but also war, revolutions, or terrorism). Such contentious politics comes in two versions. The first version is ‘contained contention’, which happens when struggles are structured by the given rules of the existing system (e.g., courts of law, political debates, or contesting elections). The second version is labelled ‘transgressive’ contentious politics. This version arises when new actors, claims, or methods are used rather than conventional ones (i.e., forms of politics that challenge conventional routines, norms, and discourses). Such contention happens in a dynamic interaction between pluralities of actors in specific contexts, which evolves from the combinations of contingent factors to the actual strategies of the actors who are involved. This is not possible to capture in statistical or mono-causal models with few variables. Contention involves the state as one of the actors, but most often as a target of claims (on territory, government, or issue policies). The actual forms of contention are a result of certain general mechanisms and processes that occur within various contexts and episodes of contentious politics. Instead of focusing on understanding war or movements as such, scholars who work within this perspective emphasize that we need to understand the variations of possible combinations of mechanisms and processes from which regularities or patterns within an otherwise non-predictable dynamic interaction between actors can be detected.

Ten years after its launch, the framework was evaluated and strongly criticized in a thematic issue of the journal Mobilization in 2011, basically for not really rejecting the previous structuralist approach of Tilly, et. al., but just reformulating it, and for being unclear on what exactly constitutes a ‘mechanism’, which is the core concept of the framework. Even though we think that the critique that has been voiced against the framework make sense, we still consider the perspective to be the most ambitious attempt to create a framework that captures different forms of resistance or dissent. A bigger concern for us, however, is that the framework continues to ignore various significant forms of resistance. ‘Contentious politics’ excludes acts by small groups of individuals from what they count as ‘events’ and explicitly limits the scope to forms of contention that display ‘public, collective interaction’ (McAdam et al. 2001, p. 4), while still regularly discussing how individuals relate to collective struggles. It seems clear to us that the resistance of individuals only makes sense within ‘contentious politics’ when they are organized within collectives, either as leaders, organizers, or participants in collectively organized events.

In contrast to this, we suggest that ‘contentious politics’ can be both individual and collective, which is something that the field on nonviolent action and civil resistance has convincingly shown (e.g., Sharp 1973, Vinthagen 2015). If ‘contentious politics’ is understood as being in opposition, in a public and non-cooperative style, then individual or small-scale resistance can also be regarded as contentious politics. Individual resistance can sometimes also be extraordinary, and not necessarily always ‘everyday’ or avoiding in its expression. Since glaring kinds of resistance call for attention to the actors and their actions, they do not fall under the Scottian category of subtle, everyday resistance. One example of individual, dispersed, yet dramatically contentious resistance is Buddhist monks burning themselves to death in Tibet as a protest against the Chinese occupation. These self-immolations have made the Chinese government accuse the Dalai Lama of ‘terrorism in disguise’ after he led prayers for those who set fire to themselves (Lilja and Vinthagen 2018).

Performance artists are another category of individuals or small groups that should fit into ‘contentious politics’; but as understood traditionally, they do not. These socially and politically engaged artists might not always get the attention that they seek, but their performances, interventions and/or stunts are typically designed to create reactions, to disrupt and to create debates. Some artists do indeed achieve worldwide recognition, also from one-off small performances; as for example when the five members punk rock band Pussy Riot made their provocative music performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow on 21 February 2012. This kind of resistance does not fall under the umbrella of the conventional understandings of ‘everyday resistance’ (as they are contentious) or ‘social movements’ (as they are small-scale or individual); this, in our view, is a mistake that emanates from narrow categorizations that exclude significant and creative forms of resistance. Still, they compose ‘forms of public but micro-levels of contestation that intervene in the material context of power relations and are confrontational and productive’ (Mumby et al. 2017, p. 1169).

It seems clear to us that the core concepts of ‘social movements’ as well as ‘contentious politics’ and ‘civil resistance’ do not capture the particular logic of this kind of public and order-challenging resistance – at least not in a way that makes sense within our categorization design. Therefore, we choose to call it ‘breaking resistance’, which is a category that includes both individualized and collectively organized forms of challenges to power. We would like to propose that it captures the logic of resistance, when (individuals, small groups, or movements of) activists engage in contentious politics; they publicly (attempt to) break a relation with a dominant power. That is how tactics that range from protests and disobedience, to strikes and boycotts, become resistance. Still, this broad category of power breaking as resistance does not capture all forms of resistance that we are interested in. Hence, let us turn to our last category of resistance: constructive resistance.

4.3. Constructive resistance

As we have seen, composite and fruitful stories about resistance against power have flourished in the studies of the ‘local’ and ‘global’ as well as the ‘collective’ and the ‘individual’, et cetera. In these studies, the tendency is primarily to understand resistance as some kind of reaction to power, which is addressed either as ‘contentious politics’ – which is played out in opposition to power and takes the form of protests, demonstrations, and revolutions – or as ‘hidden’ and ‘avoiding’ ways of escaping power relations altogether. We suggest that we should add to these dominating strands and narrative, and also include constructive modes of resistance (Vinthagen 2005). Resistance is not only protests or disobedience against institutions, practices, or actors, but sometimes it constructs new institutions, identities, discourses, communities, or practices, such as underground universities, alternative currencies, or judicial tribunals. Here, resistance is not mainly against something, but rather a matter of building new alternatives or nodes in society.

The closest things to ‘constructive resistance’ in the literature today are what some of the social movement literature has discussed as the (collective) activities of ‘prefigurative politics’. By acknowledging this, we recognize a similarity with at least the constructive part of ‘constructive resistance’ within Marianne Maeckelbergh’s definition of ‘prefigurative politics’, which is similar to what others also suggest (see e.g. Van de Sande 2013), where prefiguration appears as ‘the conflation of movement means and ends, [the] enactment of the ultimate values of an ideal society within the very means of struggle for that society’ (Maeckelbergh 2011a, p. 67, see also, 2011b). While the resistance part is somewhat implicit, it is not equally central to prefiguration (Koefoed 2018, pp. 102–105). For Simon Springer (2014, p. 408, 412) it is even emphasized that prefiguration is not a ‘grand gesture of defiance, but … instead the prefiguration of alternative worlds’. Additionally, we concur with Minoo Koefoed (2018, p. 103) that prefigurative politics does not clearly relate to either power, or the possible undermining of power, which is key to our understanding of resistance. What is special about our concept of ‘constructive resistance’, as opposed to ‘prefiguration’, is that it is not just about the creation of constructive alternatives but is something that can be viewed simultaneously as a way to resist power relations. As Koefoed suggests in the most elaborated study of constructive resistance so far – The Art of Enacting the Impossible (2018) – here, we are talking about a particular form of resistance that ‘undermine[s] power through enacted alternatives’ (p. 107).

Even though there has been an abundant production of critical literature on mobilizations within social science (see e.g., Bleiker 2000, Armstrong et al. 2004, Eschle and Maiguashca 2007, Death 2016, Malmvig 2016, Odysseos et al. 2016, Koefoed 2018), the issue of how resistance connects to the building of alternatives still needs further elaboration. We are interested in societies, discourses, institutions, or practices that materialize as a form of resistance. It is not necessarily explicit resistance against something (although always implicitly related to the undermining of power relations), but rather resistance that is productive of new lifestyles, institutions and so forth. Probing these constructed venues of resistance means that we should proceed similarly with resistance, as Michel Foucault did with power; that is, we should acknowledge how resistance produces discourses, subject positions, as well as institutions. We, therefore, would like to add to previous research by critically exploring and moving beyond the existing theoretical production of resistance. To the formulations of avoidance of power and power breaking as resistance, we thus want to add the category of ‘constructive resistance’ (cf. Vinthagen 2005, Sørensen 2016, Koefoed 2017, Sørensen and Wiksell 2019, Wiksell 2021, Lilja 2021a, 2021b).

Constructive resistance takes place as practices ‘that might undermine different modes and aspects of power in their enactments, performances and constructions of alternatives’ (Koefoed 2017, p. 5).² This can involve both the construction of unorthodox institutions, movements, ‘nowtopias’, or the enactments of non-capitalist alternative societies; it can also denote resistance that aims to produce discourses ‘otherwise’, and thereby negotiates subject positions and lifestyles (cf. Foucault 1990, 1997, Vinthagen 2005, Lilja 2008, 2021a, 2021b, Mignolo 2009, Grosfoguel 2013, Sørensen 2016, Koefoed 2017, Sørensen and Wiksell 2019, Wiksell 2020). In short, it is resistance practices that come to ‘produce and structure subjectivities, ways of life, desires and bodies, by destabilizing, displacing or replacing such production’ (Lilja and Vinthagen 2018).

Sometimes this type of resistance takes on digital articulations, such as when creative hackers construct public property, ‘digital commons’ and ‘open-source’. In a historically unique situation, more or less all production tools of the (social) media – software or programs – are made accessible today in free versions for movements to change, copy and develop for their own needs. This free and open-source software movement has created public software (e.g., GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, and Mozilla). After years of involvement of thousands of computer enthusiasts, anyone who wants to can run their computer exclusively on free software and/or open-source programs, making even nation states contribute to the digital commons, such as Brazil and Venezuela. Some even fight private property with the help of copyright laws by inscribing into their own programs that no-one is allowed to sell them for profit – not even as a program developer (www.gnu.org). ‘Copyleft’ or ‘Anti-copyright’ is thus – somewhat ironically – protected by copyright (Stallman 2004). Irrespective of whether regimes accept or reject such protection, private ownership of knowledge is undermined. This is quite a problematic situation for the guardians of (private) intellectual property rights.

Majken Jul Sørensen (2016, p. 57) writes, in an overview article on ‘constructive’ resistance, that ‘surprisingly little’ has been written about this type of resistance, which consists of,

initiatives which not only criticize, protest, object, and undermine what is considered undesirable and wrong, but simultaneously acquire, create, built, cultivate and experiment with what people need in the present moment, or what they would like to see replacing dominant structures or power relations.

In addition to this, Sørensen (2016, p. 57) also acknowledges the complex character of this type of resistance act, stating that this ‘resistance does not exclude conventional forms for protests, boycotts and civil disobedience, but focuses on creating, building, carrying out and experimenting with what is considered desirable’. As is displayed below, many practices of constructive resistance contain both constructive and non-constructive elements, and these might work together to undermine systems of domination (Lilja 2021a, 2021b). Sometimes, as Sørensen (2016) shows in her mapping of a whole range of different empirical examples, constructive resistance is relatively ‘more’ constructive, or oppositional, and at other times ‘less’ constructive, or oppositional; as such, it is a sliding scale in this world of resistance where the building of new social facts and relations challenges existing power relations and their materialized institutions (Lilja 2021a, 2021b).

As argued above, the repertoire of constructive resistance includes both the establishing of alternative institutions and societies, and the production of new knowledge. This latter kind of resistance has become increasingly important in the postcolonial and neoliberal world order of the twenty-first century, which is increasingly populated by fake news and dominant knowledge regimes. In addition, many people are tethered to low-status subject position, which are marked by discourses of gender, class, race, ethnicity, or a combination of these. With the changing political culture and the historical baggage of colonialism, there is an upswing for the establishing of alternative knowledge and the deployment of resistant subject positions, including strategies such as, decolonial knowledge-making, irony, and populist news. This type of resistance, wherein knowledge production comes from new epistemological loci, is used to identifying the cracks and fissures in dominant epistemologies. (Escobar 2007, PoReSo 2020). More research is also warranted.

5. Intersections

One aim of this paper is to point towards a new research agenda. Decades of rigorous and inspiring scholarship on dissent have left us with a solid base from where we can advance some reformulations of the ‘types’ of resistance. With our categorizations and various connections between them, we suggest that the conceptual line that is often drawn between individual and collective forms of resistance should be dissolved, and new forms of resistance should be explored in the collective/individual nexus as well as in the crossroads between constructive/destructive dissent. In order to create some basic orientation in a complex field with many different competing and complementary concepts and theoretical frameworks, we have created a probing and basic categorization (see Table 1), which obviously could be made differently and include a lot more concepts and authors. Still, we hope our suggestions will be useful, at least as a form of tentative orientation.

Table 1. A tentative categorization of different resistance practices and examples of some authors mentioned in this article who develop these practices³.

Resistance (infra or public)	Individual	Collective
(A) Avoidance	Everyday resistance, hidden transcripts (e.g., J.C. Scott)	Exilic resistance of communities (e.g., A. Grubacic and D. O’Hearn) Digital resistance (e.g., R.M. Stallman) Accumulated effects of ‘quiet encroachment’, and activations of ‘passive networks’ (e.g., A. Bayat)
(B) Breaking	Individual courage, as e.g., conscious objection of military conscription (e.g., G. Sharp)	Social movement activism (C. Tilly, S. Tarrow, D. McAdam) Mass participation of civil resistance (e.g., E. Chenoweth)
(C) Constructive	Discursive identity work (e.g., M. Lilja)	Nonviolent construction within social movements (e.g., S. Vinthagen)

There is a lot to gain in pinpointing how different forms of resistance intersect. Up to now relatively few scholars have elaborated on the overlapping and supporting roles of different forms and articulations of resistance. In order to facilitate a better understanding of resistance (acts), such entanglements need to be carefully analyzed by taking into consideration various connections between the many diverse expressions and practices of resistance. For example, Scott suggests, without developing it in his own research, that individual and hidden resistance might extend into more organized forms of resistance. Somewhat differently put, ‘Everyday resistance’ might precede other forms of more organized resistance. This means that, for example, ‘everyday resistance’, by time, might ‘scale up’ to riots or social organizations. In this process, there is often a ‘time-lag’ between single individuals who are resisting in private or in public, and the establishing of a collective struggle as people gradually join in (Hardy 2004, Baaz et al. 2017, Mumby et al. 2017, Lilja 2021a).

In addition, it should also be noted that different forms of hidden resistance sometimes overlap. As emphasized by Scott in relation to everyday resistance, it might be either the identity of the actor or the act of resistance that is hidden. Breaking acts of resistance can therefore be obvious but also hidden in the sense that the resister avoids revealing their identity. This appears in the form of secret sabotage acts – for example, in recent climate change action where activists have burnt down machines or destroyed train tracks in their dissent to fossil pipelines in North America.

Moreover, resistance might appear as both avoiding and constructive resistance at the same time. The subversive artist Banksy whose identity remains concealed was added to Time magazine’s 2010 list of the world’s most influential people. While Banksy’s identity is hidden, which indicates avoiding resistance, Banksy’s art could be understood as an influential form of constructive resistance. Her/his political messages – which were last expressed in November 2022 through a mural in the liberated Ukrainian town Borodianka, showing a female gymnast on a pile of rubble at the side of building that was destroyed by Russian air strikes – come across strongly through her/his art, while (s)he works undercover and, by this, is constructing as well as negotiating different established political truths.

It follows that the three categories of resistance suggested supra might sometimes interact productively. For example, as a sequence of escalation, or as supportive of each other. And it is of course also possible that they might, under certain circumstances, be counter-productive in relation to each other. For example, Asef Bayat (2010) has shown in his research how the urban poor in informal settlements in Cairo or Tehran oscillate between individualized ‘quiet encroachment’ and collective activation of ‘passive networks’ in mass resistance when these informal settlements are attacked by the riot police in raids of evictions. Therefore, the (sequential) combination of these forms of resistance is part of what we want to investigate more carefully.

One prominent example of how various forms of resistance are articulated in a sequence over time is the Zapatista movement and their articulations of dissent, which emerged from the indigenous communities of Chiapas, Mexico (Vergara-Camus 2014, Grubacic and O’Hearn 2016). The Maya communities practiced community-based and individualized forms of avoidance resistance during an initial period of forced internal migration from the 1950s and onwards. In the 1980s, they mobilized and prepared for an armed insurrection and in January 1994 they entered a period of ‘fire’ when their army, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Naciona (EZLN), occupied and took over all major towns in the region (Ramírez 2008). This armed form of breaking resistance quickly transformed into non-violent breaking expressions of dissent along with dialogues – the period of the ‘Word’ (negotiations with the Mexican government, protest marches, and alliance-building with the national and international civil society). Frustrated with the results of the Word, they withdrew in 2006 from such protests, outreaches, and negotiations, and turned more inwards by adopting a strategy of ‘autonomy’ and building up their self-governing capacities within their (relatively) liberated territories, thus employing a combination of avoidance and constructive resistance strategies (Grubacic and O’Hearn 2016). Through autonomy, they are not looking for isolation but, rather, are attempting to undermine their dependency on the Mexican state and, by extension, world capitalism, which is something that is, of course, only partly possible (Vinthagen 2015). Still, their long-term aim is to inspire other such ‘exilic communities’ to form international alliances with civil society groups against a ‘war of oblivion’ that is conducted by global neoliberal forces; alliances which might be able to create ‘a world that makes many worlds possible’ in the future.

Another point that worth making, is that hidden and public resistance practices often intermingle in the sense that one enables the other (Mumby et al. 2017). For example, interviews that we have made with Boeung Kak Lake activists in Cambodia reveal the connections between overt resistance and more hidden and disguised dissent. This latter form of resistance prevailed as a response to the surveillance of the authorities:

Often people from the authorities came around and tried to spy or scare them. (…) The top-secret things were not talked about at these occasions. Sometimes they planned for how to confuse the spies, by saying that next protest would take place on a Monday, and then they held the protests on the Tuesday. The authorities then had prepared for roadblocks and barriers on Monday, but since the protesters did not attend, they took them away again, and this opened up for protests the following day. (Interview with Boeung Kak Lake activist, April 2019, Phnom Penh)

According to this activist, governing authorities in Cambodia were monitoring, surveying and (aiming for) gathering information about the Boeung Kak Lake resistance by sending infiltrators to the area. Boeung Kak Lake activists, as a response to this, developed different strategies to hide information about upcoming political mobilizations. This made it possible to realize activities and make them hyper-visible during the next-coming day. Thus, resistance in the form of hiding and avoiding the governing agents, and spreading disinformation, have been a precondition for more visible political campaigns. Practices of avoidance resistance thereby developed as a result of repression. As public resistance creates power reactions, resistance – from the perspective of the Boeung Kak Lake activists – must be both hidden and visible. In this case, the former makes the latter possible. Or as expressed by Courpasson (2017), there is a ‘mutual reinforcement of quiet and often anonymous expressions and public assertions of dissent and critique’ (p. 1284).

In summing up, over and above discussing different ‘types’ of resistance, we suggest that there is a need to pinpoint how different forms of resistance intersect. In this regard our framework can be deployed to analyze how: (1) a practice can be understood as a combination of avoidance, breaking, or constructive; (2) different resistance strategies change/evolve over time; and (3) one resistance strategy enables another. By this, let us now move on to present some overall conclusions.

6. Conclusion

As displayed above, the ABC of civil resistance can be seen as an analytical framework or toolbox that can be applied when analyzing various resistance campaigns and/or acts. The ABC framework uses and moves beyond the more traditional, theorizing of dissent that is developed within, on the one hand, the field of Social Movement Studies (primarily what we label as ‘breaking resistance’) and, on the other hand, the field of everyday resistance (‘avoidance resistance’). In addition to this, the ABC framework does not only introduce and develop more recent research on counter conduct to the equation, but it also offers new and interesting interlinkages and combinations of different kinds of resistance practices and activities. Together, this generates a potent and useful toolbox for better understanding the complexity of the power resistance couplet and, by extension, politics and social change.

To not consider various forms of resistance, and the connections between these, when seeking to understand resistance and social change means a risk of overemphasizing and/or underestimating the importance of one practice, how various practices relate to another, as well as the complexity of social action. Since various resistance practices do take place simultaneously – as well as possibly developing sequentially and continuing to inspire and develop new forms of the ABC practices over time – we ought to, in a more systematic manner, analyze how these interactions take place. By applying the ABC of resistance in future research, we will be able to better understand how the interplay between various practices works and how these practices might, thereby, impact on social change. The application of the framework also equips us with an analytical tool that enables us to better understand why some resistance campaigns succeed, while others do not. By this, the opportunity for researchers to conduct more systematic and holistic comparative case study analysis of resistance movements is facilitated. This is the greatest strength of the ABC framework.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Baaz Mikael

Baaz Mikael is a Professor and a senior lecturer in international law at the School of Business, Economics and Law, the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His core research interest is various aspects of international society – in particular the tension between the politics of governance and the politics of resistance. His articles have appeared in, among others: Journal of International Relations and Development, International Studies Review, Global Public Health, Peace Review, Journal on the Use of Force and International Law, Asian Journal of International Law and Scandinavian Studies in Law, Leiden Journal of International Law.

Mona Lilja

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 Lilja’s articles have appeared in Signs, Global Public Health, Review of International Studies and International Feminist journal of Politics.

Michael Schulz

Michael Schulz is a Professor in Peace and Development Research at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He has published extensively on various issues in the Middle East (resistance, democracy, as well as state building, conflicts, security, and regionalism). The most recent publications are: Whiter Democracy in Palestine? Palestinian Public Opinion Survey Towards Democracy, 1997–2016. Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 21, (2), 176–203 (with Mahmoud Mi’ari, 2022); Between Resistance, Sharia Law and Demo-Islamic Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publisher Group, 2020); and The Routledge Handbook of Middle East Security (co-eds. Jägerskog and Swain, London: Routledge, 2019).

Stellan Vinthagen

Stellan Vinthagen is a Professor in Sociology and the Endowed Chair in the Study of Nonviolent Direct Action and Civil Resistance at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. He is the Director of the Resistance Studies Initiative at Amherst, and researcher at the Department of Sociology and Work Science at University of Gothenburg. Vinthagen researches the connections between resistance, power, social movements, nonviolent action and social change. He has written or edited twelve books, among them being A Theory of Nonviolent Action – How Civil Resistance Works (London: ZED Books, 2015).

Notes

1. It needs to be emphasized that these are merely theoretical constructions, which have been invented to display some patterns. It is often more complex to analyze situated resistance than theoretical concepts. For example, when discussing the concepts of overt and covert resistance ‘the extent to which practices are public or hidden needs to be understood as a matter of degrees rather than as an absolute value’ (Mumby et al. 2017, p. 1171).

2. From our perspective, the formulation of a ‘subaltern practice’ denotes a practice carried out by someone who is exposed to power. It is included in the definition of constructive resistance to exclude ‘power struggles’ between actors with equal strength (such as states). The formulation of a ‘subaltern practice’ is not to be read as the existence of ‘subalterns’ as a permanent position; rather, ‘subaltern’ or ‘subordinated’ are positions that one might embody and perform just for a short period of time and in one particular power relation or situation. Subjects materialize as ‘subordinated’ in the tension between different discourses, localities and materialities. It is also possible to be superior and subordinate simultaneously; i.e. to be involved in several power relations.

3. See also, Mumby et al., ‘Resistance Redux’, for an alternative categorization.