Departures from Everyday Resistance and Flexible Strategies of Domination: The Making and Unmaking of a Poor Peasant Mobilization in Bangladesh

Abstract

James Scott's influential work has popularized the notion that everyday resistance among the peasantry takes covert and backstage forms, termed ‘weapons of the weak’. This paper, however, provides a case study involving transformation of covert resistance and outward compliance of the poor into open dissent and confrontation with power‐holders, though falling well short of the limiting conditions of rebellion or revolution. Such instances serve to dispel the notion that poor and weak groups adopt only covert forms of resistance in their everyday existence. The paper takes up the questions of why, and under what circumstances, such transformation of covert resistance into overt forms can come about. These issues are explored using evidence from a poor peasant mobilization in rural Bangladesh during the parliamentary election of 1986. The analysis shows that there were sequential shifts in the respective strategies of domination and resistance of the rich and the poor, which shaped each other interactively over a dynamic trajectory. Such adaptive and variable responses require an approach that can accommodate flexibility and substitution in the strategies adopted by the weak and the powerful. These also call for further exploration and analysis of the middle ground between everyday and exceptional forms of resistance.