Power, resistance and social change

1. Introduction

This special issue¹ disentangles some patterns at the crossroads between resistance and social change. Over the past 50 years, armed civil society-based struggles have increasingly come to co-exist with non-violent civil resistance movements (Chenoweth 2020). According to the American non-profit media organization National Public Radio (NPR), these latter kinds of ‘(p)rotests have been emblematic of the entire past decade’.² Mass protests and anti-government demonstrations have taken place on multiple continents and countries. Insisting on economic and social equality, as well as environmental justice, has gone hand-in-hand with an increased social, economic and political polarization (Carothers and O’Donohue 2019).

The increase in the number of political uprisings has sparked considerable debate around the background and character of these mobilizations. Sharp et al. (1999) claim that there are, above all, two different approaches that characterize research on social movements today. The first research approach can be described as a ‘resource mobilization approach’, which focuses primarily on organizations, their goals and leadership, as well as on resources, opportunities, processes and strategies. Different forms of properties – such as knowledge, money and legitimacy – are closely interrogated while omitting the impacts and consequences of political uprisings (Lilja and Vinthagen 2021).

The second research strand, which is distinguished by Sharp et al. (1999, pp. 8–9), is a more identity-oriented approach to social movements. Much of this research strand has focused on the very core of the movements; for example, how dissent departs from collective identities or issues, such as gender, race, sexuality, Indigenous people’s rights, disability, climate change, peace, age, and so on. These movements have also been investigated as subcultures or countercultures and situated in local, regional, national and global contexts (e.g. McGarry and Jasper 2015).³ In this, studies on left-wing and progressive types of movements have been prioritized within social movement research, which has been muddling the relationship between social movements on the left and the development of challengers on the right (Della Porta in Fernandes 2019).

This special issue adds to the above lines of thought by furthering the research on the crossroads between social change and resistance. Social change has been interrogated from different angles and with different aims within social science. Walt Whitman Rostow’s ‘Stages of Growth’ model was, among other things, based on the assumption that ‘modern’ countries develop from an initial stage of underdevelopment and pass through five different steps. This approach to transformation resembles the ‘transition paradigm’ during the 1990s, which understood change as consolidating democracies in transitional processes (Carothers 2002). On the other hand, for Karl Marx, human productive power develops over time, and when economic structures no longer manage to develop the productive forces, they will be replaced (Marx 1985). Other social science theorists have understood change as dialectical processes that take place in the crossroads between a hegemonic center and a challenging ‘alternative’ (Gramsci 1971, Foucault 1994).

We suggest that viewing resistance through the lens of change unlocks new and unexpected perspectives; change becomes a catalyst, which brings resistance paths to light, locates their temporality and finds their enforcement points (cf. Foucault 1982, p. 780). Slow changes in norm systems imply a politics of representation that is engaged with social transformation. Non-violent protests force regime changes, while sovereign system changes are sometimes due to legal resistance campaigns, which use legal institutions to fight the state administration. This can be exemplified by the youth organization Aurora, which is composed of more than 600 Swedish children and young people that is currently proceeding a lawsuit against the Swedish state for its ‘flawed’ climate politics.

The above sheds light upon the complicated, simultaneously ongoing and scattered but still connected resistance-change events that inform the overall development of society. Overall, we have distinguished some themes in regard to the interconnections between resistance and change that are addressed in the specific papers: 1) the resistance temporality; 2) the collapse of time periods and/or concepts; 3) the matter of matter; 4) ‘flickering’ change processes; and 5) the effects of different overlapping struggles. These themes will be further elaborated below.

2. Special issue themes

The collection of papers in this issue addresses different kinds of change, which unfold from different forms of resistance and could be understood as democratic–repressive, linear–non-linear, straightforward and here-and-now, or emotional, material and relationally complicated. The changes that are accomplished occur at inherently different speeds. What are the temporalities of change? Slow change contrasts with fast change processes or ruptures. The former is illuminated by Eric Boyd, who, through the concept of ‘derealization’, displays how the denial of public mourning of the evacuated and demolished former city center of Kiruna in Sweden has triggered a slow and emerging resistance to the mine and the state that it represents. Boyd evidences the covert and coercive violence administered by Sweden’s state-owned mining company LKAB in the ruination of the town of Kiruna, which supplies labor for the mine. Boyd’s paper is rooted in the colonial aggression that settled Sweden’s northernmost territories and demonstrates the transmutation of such physical violence into that of slow and structural violence. In doing so, Boyd’s paper argues that resistance too can be slow and emerge in the desire to have a historical legacy of community sacrifice that is redeemed by state sanctioned recognition through the practice of collective mourning. This illustration of ‘lagging’ dissent can be put in contrast with the resistance that is explored by Mikael Baaz, Mona Lilja and Filip Strandberg Hassellind (paper, this issue), in which an accelerated tempo forces subjects to delegate their political activities while still ‘appearing’ to be politically engaged.

However, it is not only time, but it is also, as stated above, matter that matters. Or in other words, when the material context changes, then so do social spaces and their prevailing subjectivities; thereby, different resistance tactics are remapped. Climate change, for example, has given birth to new discourses, subject-positions and resistance agents. This indicates the complicated movements between matter and dissent. The social and material changes entangle with no specific direction and become the context of multiple forms of resistance. In Marie Widengård’s paper (this issue), the matter of mining is the agentic context of issues of identity-making in power–resistance relations. By drawing on cases from India and Botswana, Widengård shows how performing indigeneity can help thwart mines, as well as its close ally, fortress conservation. In two legal cases, resistance movements mobilized identity politics and performed indigeneity and the trope of ‘exceptional people’ in strategic ways, which leans into both progressive rights-based law and postcolonial norms. It produced change but also continuation. Strategic essentialism worked to some extent to reclaim lost rights through the court system. However, there was also resistance to performing indigeneity in ways that suited those in power, be it the state or international organizations. Indigeneity can be a straitjacket that holds colonial structures in place. It constrains people from changing, and from shifting toward the lives they want to live. The questions, therefore, are: How do social movements mobilize identity politics? Or perhaps more so: Who mobilizes whose identity? These questions become more muddled when mining and nature conservation regimes are tightening their relationship, helping each other to save nature by extracting it, and thus changing the configurations of the camps of power and resistance as we know them.

Moreover, sometimes, in resistance paths, the categories we use in analyses surprisingly collapse. For example, when the France ZAD-movement argued that their movement could be understood as ‘nature’ defending nature (Fremeaux and Jordan 2021). Here, the common binary between human-nature and protector-protected is overturned, which means that we must reinvent the concepts that are used in order to understand ‘the real’. A similar perspective regards resistance temporalities and how time periods sometimes cave in during resistance movements. For example, when feminist movements ‘now’ are conceptualizing themselves as a unit that comprises the feminist suffragettes of ‘then’ (Lilja 2021). Thus, importantly, a novel analysis of resistance and change suggests new conceptual road maps in the theoretical terrain. This special issue pinpoints, among other things, the need to rethink ‘resistance’ without connecting it to ‘activity’, ‘opposition’ and ‘force’.

In Tintin Wulia’s contribution to this issue, for example, we can see that certain modes of aesthetic resistance are reworking power and change through cultural products that are not manifestly political, or even non-oppositional. The particular form of power that these products gain comes from their visibility and circulation (Wulia, this issue). Moreover, according to Lilja and Baaz (this issue) there are stories that narrate resistance in terms of depolitization rather than politization. Departing from the women that are demographically ‘missing’ from the world’s population (currently estimated at almost 200 million women and girls, European Parliament Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) 2013), they map how depoliticizing what is not there can, in fact, be viewed as a form of resistance. These stories challenge the previous social science scholarship on resistance and broaden our understanding of the complexity of resistance-power-social change.

Yet another branch of this special issue brings the notion of resistance into dialogue with the literature on change processes (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980], see also Boyd, this issue). In a number of specific and empirically grounded papers, we embrace the idea of ‘flickering’ change processes that add to a more causal understanding of development and transformation. Sometimes, social change can be understood as the direct consequence of resistance, such as in the civil resistance campaigns in the Palestinian territories, which have had direct democratizing effects (see Schulz, this issue). However, more often barriers to change and power processes of derealization (see Boyd, this issue) create change processes that are far from linear. In these cases, social change has no distinct direction, and we lack a causal relationship between resistance and social change. Resistance acts and power tactics co-merge, and, within and through complex interactions, come to inform different change processes. This can be illuminated by the power-resistance ‘dance’ in the Israeli and Palestinian spaces, which thereby forges the political, military and social change in the region. Among other things, activists in Israel interact with Palestinian ‘freedom fighters’ and form unexpected alliances, which in turn create various reactions. In addition, resistance can sometimes be understood as social change and not merely the cause of it. This is the case with the feminization of resistance in the Argentinean movement #NiUnaMenos, which could be read as a radical transformation in itself (see Medina, this issue). Thus, when investigating social change, not only the ‘why’ – the cause of it – must be thoroughly interrogated but also the ‘how’; how is change enacted? How do we ‘do’ change and what are the effects?

Another theme of this special issue is how different struggles that intersect can become powerful hubs of resistance. Sometimes, the same struggle is achieved from different subject-positions, such as abolitionists and slaves, who, from different positions and with different means, challenged enslavement. At other times, the interests of dispersed and frictional groups suddenly come to overlap and set off unexpected change processes, such as when the same anti-genderist values are expressed by otherwise frictional and very different groups – angry white men, anti-abortion groups, religious groups, family associations, nationalists and populists, far-right groups, and others (Kuhar 2015, Peto 2016, Kuhar and Paternotte 2017, p. 259). The overlap between different political struggles can be exemplified by the growing affinity between mining and conservation forces, as mentioned above, that claim the same spaces, but also make use of shared logic to extract value out of nature. This kind of resistance, which comes to consist of unexpected alliances across social sections, sometimes has major impacts (Baaz et al. 2023).

Finally, the social change, which is explored within the novel papers of this special issue, embraces a variety of practices: from innovative law drafting, new policies, shifts in existing structures, to norm-changes. The latter transformation of values can stem from changes in the discursive representation. Potentials for discursive change are often associated with images and various mediums of art, from visual to performance (e.g. Baaz et al. 2023). In their long history of intimate entanglements with power and resistance, indeed, images, visual and performance art all form and influence certain imaginaries. Wulia’s contribution to this issue, however, stems from the dearth of thorough discussions on aesthetic resistance within this history where she reconceptualizes and further refines the notion of aesthetic resistance. This is achieved through analyzing literature on resistance through art and aesthetics from within the past century, across a broad range of fields. These include art history and criticism, cultural studies, critical pedagogy, social psychology, organizational studies, and others across humanities and social sciences. The paper then establishes aesthetic resistance as an umbrella term through an understanding of aesthetics as that which encompasses the sensory. This, Wulia maintains, can reconcile conceptual disjunctures by, for example, allowing a simultaneous consideration of the originators, the spectators and the addressees in the context of an aesthetic resistance act. The paper also identifies three interconnected key issues of aesthetic resistance: 1) its spectrum of publicness; 2) its focus on potentiality in place of intention; and 3) its position in the plexus of socio-political change. This new way of understanding can, in turn, facilitate a more developed understanding of resistance as a whole. This and other patterns are analyzed within the special issue.

3. Summary

Today, we see new trends of resistance. Among other things, cemented norms and stagnated institutions are increasingly challenged by populist movements who oppose hegemonic truths and attacks from the outskirts. Here, anything that is associated with being stationary and hegemonic – such as school-based vaccination policies or the access to safe and legal abortions as a human right – is being loudly disputed. These attacks can give rise to rhizomatic change processes (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980]), which branch out into unpredictable paths.

This special issue suggests that more research is needed on counter struggles and their relationship to social change. There are many sources of social change, for example, globalization, population growth, technology and climate change. When analyzing ‘change’, as well as ‘resistance’, we must remember that these are not predefined practices/processes that are out there ready to be found but, rather, are categorizations from judgments of acts (Barker 2004, p. 178). Thus, in the end, in academic texts, it is the researcher who decides what is feasible to understand as ‘resistance’ versus ‘good’ or ‘bad’ developments.

While ‘power’ is a fairly well-developed and even contested concept, the concept of ‘resistance’ is often simplified and reduced to ‘counterpower’; that is, an alternative power that seeks to challenge the incumbent. When resistance is recognized as a more complex and multidimensional social construct, there is often a knowledge gap within the mapping and understanding of its effects. By taking on the above challenge, this special issue promotes a more nuanced picture of resistance, power and transitional processes.

Departing from the above, we suggest that resistance practices, in various forms, are the engine of social change processes. Heterogeneous strategies interact with each other, which have both intended and unintended results. The resistance comes on an unlimited scale, from everyday and hidden forms to outright protests, including demonstrations, sit-ins, or even violence. Many forms complement each other, such as the everyday resistance that sometimes precedes ‘louder’ forms of dissent. Change also takes different shapes; from changed norm systems to transformed laws or policy documents. These changes in themselves set off unexpected lines of transformation, such as when changes in norms lead to new laws or legal frameworks. We suggest the concept of ‘changescapes’ to denote heterogeneous forms of resistance and how they are set up as both frictional and interacting in time/space. Changescapes comprise, among other things, organized movements (uprisings, revolutions, etc.), constructing forms of resistance (strategies to produce what is desired: alternative norms, institutions and societies) and challenging sensory aesthetic experiences (including of frictional imageries, of text and of things), which address the same power relation. Changescapes illuminate how these forms of resistance interact and entangle in a plexus of longer and shorter change processes or ruptures in space, which are located between ‘now’ and ‘the future’.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Vetenskapsrådet [2017-00881].

Notes on contributors

Mikael Baaz is a Professor of International Law as well as an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and Associate Professor of Political Science. He currently serve as Head of the Law Department, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg. His main research interests are law and politics in the international society as well as different expressions of resistance.

Michael Schulz is 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 and state building, conflicts, security, and regionalism). The most recent publications are Civil Resistance and Democracy Promotion, London/New York: Routledge 2023, ‘Whiter Democracy in Palestine? Palestinian Public Opinion Survey Towards Democracy, 1997-2016,’ Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 21, 2 (2022), pp. 176-203 (with Mahmoud Mi’ari), 2022, Between Resistance, Sharia Law and Demo-Islamic Politics, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publisher Group, 2020, and The Routledge Handbook of Middle East Security (co-eds. Jägerskog & Swain), London: Routledge, 2019.

Mona Lilja is Professor in Peace and Development Research at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She currently serves as the Head of department at the Department of Global Political Studies, Malmö University. 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. She is the author of the recently published book Constructive resistance: Repetitions, Emotions, and Time (2021).

Sofija Barakate is a PhD student in Peace and Development Research at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. Her research focuses on the civil society actors advocating for peace and social change in the context of identity-based conflicts. She particularly explores relationship between NGOs, external donors and domestic elites in Lebanon. Before her PhD studies she worked in local peacebuilding NGOs in Lebanon and with policy development in the context of EU migration.

María Clara Medina is since 2007 Assistant Professor at the School of Global Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Gothenburg. In 2002, Medina defended her doctoral thesis at the University of Gothenburg, based on a case study of the intersectional interaction of gender, ethnicity, and social class in the agrarian history of the South-Central Andes. Her current area of research and recent publications focus on sexual and reproductive rights as human rights, contemporary feminist movements and gender-based violence in a context of precariousness and master suppression techniques. Originally from Argentina, and as founder of international networks and member of the Editorial Board of international journals, Medina is widely travelled and have lived in multicultural contexts in Latin America, Asia and Europe. Her previous academic appointments have been at the University of Tucuman (Argentina), the University of Delhi (India) and Linnaeus University (Sweden). In 2019, she was elected President of CEISAL, the European Council for Social Research in Latin America, for the period 2019-2022 and since 2020 she represents the University of Gothenburg in the Executive Board of NILAS, the Nordic Institute for Latin American Studies, based in Stockholm.

Eric Boyd is a research associate at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology, specialising in extractivism, heritage, and future imaginaries. He is an active member of the Young Researchers Network at ZiRS research centre in Halle, Germany, the DurhamArctic Research Group, Durham, UK, and the Power and Resistance Group at School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg.

Marie Widengård is a researcher in the environmental social sciences, focusing on the politics of nature and natural resources.

Kristin Wiksell researches organization, power and resistance from a sociological perspective, specifically focused on alternative forms of organizations. Currently working at University of Gothenburg, she is a sociology lecturer who has recently published on friendship in worker cooperatives as a mode of constructive resistance.

Tintin Wulia is a multi-disciplinary artist and Senior Researcher at HDK-Valand - Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is also an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, UK. Exploring the intricate power dynamics of societal and geopolitical borders, her work has been featured in key exhibitions like the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennale and the 57th Venice Biennale, and held in prominent public collections, such as the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum. Her contributions also include a chapter in the award-winning edited volume Migrating Minds: Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism (New York: Routledge, 2022).

Philip Wade is a PhD candidate in Peace and Development at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His doctoral project looks at alliance and coalition building against extractive megaprojects in Argentina's North Patagonia.

Sofie Hellberg is an Associate Professor of Peace and Development Research at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden and a Research Associate at the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She studies, and teaches, water politics, environmental, climate governance, and theories of power and agency. Hellberg has published in leading journals and with international publishers on topics ranging from Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) to research methodology. Her previous work appears in international journals including Geoforum, Water Alternatives, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space and Local Environmentand in a monograph on The Biopolitics of Water (Routledge, 2018).

Matt Tuggey is a PhD student in Environmental Social Science Research at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. His research focuses on landscape practices in the context of environmental conflicts. Specifically, he works with practices of landscape managers and representatives of the Swedish farmers’ and hunters’ unions, in relation to the presence of the wolf in Sweden. Before his PhD studies he worked in international education, teaching Science and developing outdoor and experiential education programmes.

Notes

1. Mikael Baaz, Mona Lilja, Eric Boyd, Sofie Hellberg, Michael Schulz, Sofija Barakate, Kristin Wiksell, Tintin Wulia, Matthew Tuggey, Michael Schulz, Philip Wade, Marie Widengård, Maria Clara Medina.

2. https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2019/12/31/790256816/the-2010s-a-decade-of-protests-around-the-world/.

3. https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=csms20