Description
This paper explores the problem of theorizing resistance and the international simultaneously and/or in the same place. The paper first explores the negative: because of disciplinary frames, resistance and the international are generally treated as mutually exclusive. How can practices which occur inside sovereign states now also exist outside them? The social quality of resistance is presumed to impossible in the spaces and temporalities provided by the international. Attempts to scale up local resistance to international resistances and/or explore novel forms of international resistance that express themselves locally appear misguided. Second, the paper explores the affirmative: the problem of theorizing resistance and the international also exists in their similarity. The concept of resistance owes its existence to Newtonian principles that appeal natural and therefore universal and such principles are foundational to universalist theories of the modern sovereign state project and, therefore, the international. Resistance and the international are indebted to the same modern epistemological and ontological commitments. If they are cut from the same modernist cloth, can resistance be positively thought outside this paradox without falling back into the negative problem of social? The paper concludes by arguing against both negative and positive propositions. Instead, it proposes theorizing resistance as a concept in need of release or suspension from its excising conceptual paternity. Resistance must, in other words, be treated in its own right – not as an effect of subjects and/or objects colliding in a predetermined theatre (of politics and/or power), nor as a force that emerges from the outside or beyond, but instead as a disposition that is indifferent to forms of politics, power and knowledge that claim it as a dependent variable. This disposition, in other words, resists the problem by theorizing resistance and the international simultaneously and/or in the same place as “resistance to the international.”
