Political Theories of Resistance

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

From the US Civil Rights Movement and the Indian Salt March to Black Lives Matter and Hong Kong’s Refugee Occupy, resistance movements have played a key role in both historical and contemporary struggles for liberation and democracy. Given democratic institutions’ precarity and resistance movements’ continued relevance, the time is ripe to consider the proper role of resistance in democratic politics. What can historical resistance movements tell us about the appropriate means and ends of resistance, and about the often-fraught relationship between them? If resistance is a tool for promoting democracy, what are the bounds of the relevant demos? Is it only a state’s loyal citizens who are entitled to challenge its power in the name of democracy, or do others—like foreigners affected by the state’s policies—also have standing to resist? Is the standard model of “civil disobedience” adequate to address injustices and democratic deficits that cross national borders? And what is the proper role of resistance against the structure of the state system, rather than against any one state? This panel addresses these questions, drawing on historical and normative approaches, and incorporating discussion of cases from around the world, and offering rich and thought-provoking re-examinations of the ideals and strategies at the heart of both historical and contemporary resistance movements.

Chan and Mantena examine resistance movements from a historical perspective in ways that also produce lessons of contemporary relevance. Drawing on Fanon, Chan investigates the promise and peril of one resistance strategy—anticolonial appropriation, whereby colonized people appropriate the ideas and practices of their oppressors. Fanon laments colonial subjects’ inability to endorse “the good,” which colonizers invoke to justify colonialism, without reinforcing their own oppression. In this tragic situation, he argues, colonial subjects reject what is objectively good—e.g., gender equality, modern medicine, and new technology. To escape this tragedy, Fanon points to political resistance that utilizes these very ideas and practices against the colonizer. Anticolonial appropriation may help restore oppressed agents’ capacity to pursue the good. Thus, Chan explores anticolonial appropriation as a practice of remaking the self in situations of oppression and theorizes its relevance for a broader question facing anticolonial revolutionary movements: how to both (1) replace colonial institutions, and (2) transform oppressed colonial subjects into sovereign democratic citizens.

Mantena examines the means and ends of resistance, as theorized by Gandhi. Challenging conventional readings of Gandhi as a moral absolutist who demanded strict nonviolence at the expense of pragmatism, Mantena presents Gandhi’s commitment to nonviolence as a realist demand for heightened scrutiny of means. She explores the notion of “means” in Gandhi’s political thought via the 1920s debate on swaraj—drawing together Gandhi’s ideas on self-government and the ethics of resistance and teasing out his three distinct understandings of “means.” This yields a better understanding of Gandhi’s theory of nonviolent resistance, and sheds new light on several issues in the contemporary literature on the ethics of resistance—like the moral weight of means and ends, the permissibility of violence, and the proper roles of idealism and pragmatism.

Yim and Rafanelli examine how conventional ideas about the ethics of resistance must be changed to better guide action in a world where both injustice and resistance to it often cross state borders. Yim argues that many people’s autonomy is affected by the decisions of foreign states in which they have no say, creating a global democratic deficit. As civil disobedience is an appropriate response to domestic democratic deficits, Yim argues “global democratic disobedience” is an appropriate response to the global variety. Challenging theories of civil disobedience that assume loyal citizens are the only ones with standing to resist state injustice, Yim reimagines the idea of democratic disobedience for a more globalized world.

Rafanelli argues that injustice and democratic deficit are the results not only of individual states’ policies, but also of the overarching structure of the state system. She argues that the state system predictably (re)produces a class of stateless people who are denied basic justice and political enfranchisement. Moreover, the state system maintains itself by channeling political activity through statist institutions. Thus, we cannot achieve justice for stateless people without challenging the state system and the statist institutions that comprise it. Drawing on the example of Hong Kong’s asylum-seeker-led movement Refugee Occupy, she suggests anti-statist, transnational resistance movements as a promising alternate channel by which stateless people can secure for themselves what the state system denies them.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• The Specter of Statelessness - Lucia M. Rafanelli, George Washington University

• Resistance under Global Political Injustice - Elaine Yim, Princeton University

• Means Are After All Everything: Gandhi and the Paths to Swaraj - Karuna Mantena, Columbia University

• Resistance and the Moral Transformation of the Oppressed - Shuk Ying Chan, University College London

Chair

• Inés Valdez Johns Hopkins University

Discussant

• Burke Hendrix University of Oregon