A Theory of Resistance Movements

• In Event: Political Movements, Politics on the Move: Justice, Resistance, and Activism

Abstract

With contemporary democracy threatened by rising authoritarians, autocratizing executives, and self-professed ‘populists’, a new global upsurge of resistance has emerged, spanning countries as diverse as the United States, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, the Philippines, India, and Brazil. This new cohort of resistance represents merely one of several major instances of what I identify as ‘resistance movements’ across world history, each with their own sets of movements. In the past hundred and fifty years alone, we have borne witness to the anti-colonial resistance movements at the turn of the 20th century, the anti-fascist resistance movements of the mid-20th century, and the anti-Soviet resistance movements of the later 20th century.
Despite the regularity of resistance movements throughout history, and their notable frequency over the recent century or so, there remains no concerted attempt to theorize these movements on their own terms. Instead, instances of what I call resistance movements have been variably studied through the lens of topics such as undirected discontent preceding other forms of contentious politics, specific strategies or tactics temporarily utilized by an array of subnational and international actors; fleeting coalitions of distinctive social movements and counter-movements contending for power; or otherwise as disconnected, spontaneous, but nonetheless widespread individual responses to the imposition of authority. While these various empirical endeavors have yielded useful case-specific findings, they have opted to consider such cases as fringe-elements of broader phenomena, rather than developing a specific, comparable and coherent object of study. This latter endeavor is precisely what I seek to initiate with this paper.

From the perspective developed herein, a resistance movement is a distinctive kind of movement that orients itself around the refusal and subversion of a regime’s sociopolitical order. Resistance movements do not seek to overthrow the state (as with revolutionary movements), nor do they seek to achieve a clearly stipulated political or social reform (as with conventional social movements). They are overwhelmingly and almost exclusively concerned with a quite different political program: the defense of a sociopolitical community (usually a society) against power-holders who threaten the existence of that community in its current or idealized future form.

In addition to being defined by their own particular programmatic agenda, resistance movements are also set-apart from other kinds of phenomena by their processual logics. Processually speaking, resistance movements arise in response to threats rather than opportunities and essay to maintain persistent efficacy rather than attain a discrete political end. As with other kinds of movements, these processual and programmatic dimensions also appear to be associated with certain structural tendencies. In particular, a triad of structural traits have consistently characterized resistance movements occurring across a wide variety of conditions during the past century and a half (which I term ‘resistance movements’): pervasiveness, irregularity, and volatility. These resistance movements are not confined to the field of civil society, nor to the space of contentious political activity. They are instead pervasive, stretching into – and indeed, through - the realm of institutional bureaucracies, media organizations, and even the very regimes they seek to challenge. Resistance movements are primarily neither cohesive sets of organizations, nor formalized social networks. They are instead irregular coalitions, principally sustained by connections which stretch far beyond formal ties into the realm of loose associations, mimesis, and cultural undercurrents. Resistance movements are not rigidly constituted or longitudinally stable. They are in fact highly volatile, liable to absorb or expel elements from or to other causes, and to mutate in response to contextual and structural pressures, be it to their benefit, or to their undoing.

This paper offers a first contribution to the theory and study of ‘resistance movements’, emphasizing their programmatic orientation around refusal and subversion, and detailing their processual dynamics, before showing how these movements – in the context of the past century and a half’s four cohorts– can be connected to three typical structural traits: pervasiveness, irregularity, and volatility. The paper first develops the overarching concept of a resistance movement, before introducing the reader to four major cohorts of resistance movements from across the past hundred and fifty years. Third, drawing on these empirical cases, it demonstrates how pervasiveness, irregularity and volatility characterize resistance movements. Finally, by means of a conclusion, the paper further discusses the conceptual promise of resistance movements, and potential directions for future research.

Author

• Benjamin Abrams, University College London