Against ‘resistance’? Towards a conception of differential politics in international political sociology

Abstract

‘Resistance’ and related concepts like ‘counter-conduct’, ‘counter-politics’ and ‘revolution’ continue to gain an intense interest and use. At the same time, however, we observe an intensified questioning of the concept of resistance and in particular the logic of negativity that it inscribes into our understanding of difference and its politics. Engaging with contributions that have pushed the concept of resistance and its dialectic logic of negativity to its limits in order to explore what it yields for analysing different political practices, we look for new interventions into modes of thinking about critical politics. To that purpose, we introduce the concepts of ‘folds’ and ‘folding’. They allow for understanding how differences work not through opposition to something but through enveloping in dynamic structures of multiple connections that generate a specific social field. We speak loosely of ‘against resistance?’ not as a claim that the concept of resistance has or should be moved to the dustbin of history but rather to argue for experimenting in International Political Sociology with conceptions of non-dialectic critical politics that work in a perspective of co-existence in heterogeneity and multiplicity and the conditions for openness and social possibility that it creates.