Resistance

Abstract

Resistance can be broadly understood as the political and cultural struggles carried out by social actors to challenge dominant workings of power. Resistance can be organized and highly visible or can be more subtle and take place as part of the practices of everyday life. The geographic scholarship on resistance draws on a wide range of theoretical perspectives including Marxism and Gramscian theory, feminism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism. Resistance sometimes defies easy theorization, because many resistant practices contain elements of compliance with dominant systems and the ubiquitousness of resistance brings into question its conceptualization as a distinctive practice. A focus of much development geography has been the resistance movements and new social movements which have developed in response to free market capitalism and predatory forms of global governance. Neoliberal economic policies have had devastating social and environmental costs in many places, leading to a number of resistant responses. While many resistance movements are place-based, they are also increasingly transnational in their scope and generate connections beyond the countries and regions in which they take place. These connections result in more unified forms of struggles and work to rearticulate the meanings of development in ways which enable alternative futures to be envisaged.