WCED Lecture. Decentralized Resistance

Both historically and today, most acts of resistance to systems of power, hierarchy, and exploitation do not take the form of social movements with names, official-holders, flags, rules of order, headquarters, and initials (e.g., NAACP, ACLU, BLM, AfD). There are at least two reasons, Scott proposes, that help explain this fact. First, historically open resistance for most of the world’s population, living in undemocratic settings, is dangerous, even fatal. When it occurs, it is an act of desperation. Second, even in relatively permissive political settings, the transaction costs of creating formal organizations are often so great that smaller, informal, and individual acts of resistance are simpler to pull off and often safer as well. The aggregation of thousands of such acts of resistance (e.g., desertion, squatting, poaching) may, over time, achieve more at a de facto level than open, publicly-declared resistance.

This talk will examine what might be called “everyday resistance.” Scott will assess whether the term “resistance” even makes sense in this context; will examine instances of it historically; will consider both its objectives and the likelihood that they can be achieved in this manner; and will ask what the consequences for political life and social organization such techniques imply.

James Scott is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, and is co-Director of Yale’s Agrarian Studies Program and a mediocre farmer. His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations, and anarchism. He is the author of six books, most recently Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest Agrarian States (Yale Press, 2017), Two Cheers for Anarchism (Princeton Press, 2013), and The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale Press, 2008).

This lecture will be presented in person in 1010 Weiser Hall and on Zoom. Webinar registration required at http://myumi.ch/zwnWd

Co-sponsored by the Conflict & Peace, Research & Development (CPRD) Group; Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS); and the Departments of Anthropology and Political Science.

If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us at weisercenter@umich.edu. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.