Description
The paper explores how exemplarity operates in global resistance. Attempts to transform the international order through revolutions, social movements or other types of resistance inspire, through example, new processes of contestation across time and space. Reconsidering exemplarity as an analytical framework allows to deepen into the long-term international legacies of activism. The framework builds upon revolutionary theories, as well as feminist, postcolonial and poststructuralist approaches on resistance. It considers the direct and material aspects of exemplarity (e.g. support to other sites of resistance, alternative transnational infrastructures), as well as the indirect and immaterial (e.g. the symbolism of the collective action or the ideas and cultures of resistance), from a critical perspective. Indeed, the potential of the collective action to challenge the international order, the alternative nature of the ideas involved, and the structural conditions of intersecting inequalities that shape and constrain its scope, account for the exemplary effects of an episode of contention. Still, the politics of resistance too are infused with power, and (non)exemplarity also exposes exclusionary alternatives and practices in collective action and romantic gendered understandings of resistance.
