The Infrapolitics of Global Resistance
Posted on : July 18, 2022Author : Aniruddha Mukhopadhyay
Abstract:
Resistance to globalization, especially among the subordinate groups of developing societies, operates through informal, decentralized and covert networks. This paper analyses these “infrapolitical” networks in an attempt to fill the gap in the existing literature on resistance which is dominated by the study of formal bargaining and declared political action. It enquires the role of global networks, local hierarchies and levels of democratic freedom in determining the choice of a group to resist a global institution either openly or with circumspection. The paper also argues that the reconceptualization of terrorism in the post-9/11 era, from an apparently secular use of political violence to a diffused cultural phenomenon, has bolstered the efforts of several ‘Security States’ in associating the informal networks of dissent with terrorism. It discusses the various modes of informal resistance in the market, State and civil society. With reference to the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, the paper explores the strategy of covert resilience and adaptation necessary for the survival and success of a resistance. Lastly, the paper argues that infrapolitics is a tool, not just of subordinates, but also dominant sections who use it to retain their hegemony against the inflow of western values and commodities.
Key Words:
Resistance, Infrapolitics, Globalization, Terrorism, Resilience
Introduction:
Infrapolitics is the product of dissident political subcultures that develop through informal networks. These networks are decentralized, non-hierarchical, and grassroots based. The dissident subcultures flowing through these networks are enmeshed in the everyday lifestyles of groups affected by the neoliberal global order. Unlike organized formal politics of resistance, the infrapolitical actions are unaccountable, fairly unidentifiable in public records, and don’t involve professional management. In fact, the diffused nature of infrapolitics makes it a more inclusive space of political action than organized declared resistances which function on basis of hierarchical relations. These subcultures may also construct the grammar of declared and organized political action. For example, the Gandhian methods of non-cooperation and civil disobedience incorporated everyday activities like spinning yarn, boycotting foreign commodities, attending prayer meetings, and so on. The advent of new information technologies has made it further difficult for the States to monitor and control these global networks of resistance that flow rapidly and freely across national borders.
Conventional focus in the study of global resistances has always been on formal and organised politics; be it either the modes of professional bargaining between the States, firms and unions, or the declared forms of political action like protests and movements. In this epistemological approach, informal-infrapolitical avenues of resistance situated beyond and between the State, market, and civil society are invisibilized.
Why resist with circumspection?
According to James C. Scott (1990), it is the subordinate groups that resist with circumspection i.e., infrapolitically. The objective here is to explain why this is so although I’d later contend this ascription of infrapolitics exclusively to the subordinates.
The capacity of a group to resist is a function of local institutions and the constraints that they place on global actors. Since the neoliberal institutions of governance try to generate hegemony through consent, the norms, rules, and cognitive apparatus of these local institutions define the boundaries of legitimate action. Resistance thus takes place whenever the foreign actors violate the established order of local institutions (Maguire, Lawrence, and Hardy, 2004).
However, local institutions are themselves hierarchically fragmented as its members hold different identities and interests. Consequently, the self-interests of different local groups with regard to global institutions and the relative capacity of the former to constrain the latter are unequally distributed.
Based on our argument that the behaviour of global institutions towards local actors is a function of the hierarchical relations within local institutions, we can infer that the choice of the type of resistance used by a group against a global institution is also structurally induced by the societal balance of power. If resistance is viewed as an obstacle to be overcome or marginal cost to be paid by the neoliberal agents of globalization, then the greatest net benefit of the latter lies in complying with those local stakeholders that possess a higher capacity to constrain them by means of a greater ownership of social, economic, and cultural capital. Thus, it’s neither necessary nor profitable for the firms to accommodate the self-interests of local subordinate groups. Hence, subordinate groups have little to gain in the sphere of formal bargaining and organized political action – instead, such modes of advancing their interests in an unguarded fashion often invites sanctions from dominant local stakeholders. The rational calculation of their social positions and their relative disadvantage in political bargaining, hence, pushes the subordinate groups to resist with circumspection.
The failure of democratic consolidation in the developing world in terms of a shrinking space for civil and political activism is another reason behind the existence of these surreptitious and ‘extra-legal’ networks of resistance. The States in most of these globalizing societies suffer from a democratic deficit in that they are more responsive to corporate interests and global economy than public opinion. From the removal of Allende in Chile, the arbitrary imposition of the shock therapy in the post-communist nations to the US-support for authoritarian oil-based monarchies in the Middle East, the history of neoliberalism has often been argued as a history of democratic retreat.
Just because local institutions are socially fragmented doesn’t mean that divisive politics always gets the better off a potential for intersectional resistance. Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) approach to resistance as an articulation process implies that groups with different identities, interests and orientations can articulate a common grammar of resistance against the same global institution if they find it difficult to do so individually. An example of this is the CokeWatch. This is a network of different members of the global civil society who expose the malpractices of the Coca Cola Company in different countries.
Indeed, vertical imbalances in the relative capacity of groups to constrain or resist a global actor is often solved through these ‘chains of equivalence’. One resistant faction may supplement the social capital of another to bridge the inequalities they have in terms of capacity to resist. For example, when domestic administration doesn’t resolve the issues of local labour rights groups, the latter often seek help from workers groups situated abroad which put external pressures on the host government. This enables them to overcome socio-economic inequalities and unify their resistance against a global institution despite each constituent resistance faction being situated in different contexts and having different interests. This might seem similar to the logic of balancing coalitions as conceptualized in the theory of Balance of Power.
From Terrorism to Infrapolitics – a Global Continuum:
Both infrapolitics and terrorism are forms of asymmetric conflict whereby one side creates strategies on basis of how to compensate for the economic, military and organizational superiority of the opponent. Thus, both practices rely on covert networks because they are always going to lose an open combat against the State – an institution with a vastly superior destructive capacity and a long, continuing history of mass casualties. Consequently, neither infrapolitics nor terrorism can engage in popular activism, though several insurrectionary movements derive strategies from both the practices. However, my argument herein is not to draw the similarities between infrapolitics and terrorism, but to point out how the similar political agency of resistance present within both the practices has been a basis for the States, security regimes, and dominant communities to blur their most essential difference – that terrorism implies an act of political violence to attain some specific political goals, whereas infrapolitics involves discrete and decentralized political subcultures that doesn’t pertain to mass destruction of public property, loss of civilian lives or targeted attacks. The concept of new or modern terrorism argues that terrorism in the globalized world has two fundamental differences from its older, more traditional versions– firstly, it has become organizationally more diffused, connected by covert cells and support networks (Sageman 2008); secondly, the once secular goals of organized terrorism like overthrowing the State or national self-determination, have been replaced by more religious motivations and character. Instead of analysing them as products of historical developments, acts of terrorism have been essentialized as functions of particular communities, as if there is something inherently anti-pluralistic or totalitarian about these cultures which causes militant expressions of religious fundamentalism. In this way the State invents a phobia of terrorism which is both immediate to us because of its diffused nature as well as visible to us in the forms of particular cultures, ‘otherised’ as not merely different but also intrinsically terrific and dreadful. Terrorism in this paradigm is no longer the commission of political violence but a culturally diffused phenomenon; it’s a label that’s no longer applied to an act on basis of its use of violence for political goals, but in terms of its association with diffused and informal subcultures that threaten the authority of the State or the dominant groups. As a result, groups that actually practice the politics of fear and violence are acquitted of this label if they are found to be culturally ‘appropriate’ in terms of sharing the dominant cultural values, while those voluntarily resisting the ruling dispensation or belonging to different sub-cultures are branded as terrorists even when there’s no verifiable commission or intent of violence. Hence, the entire argument of terrorism getting informalized in the age of globalization is actually a process of demonizing the informal political domain of the weak and the marginalized sections by portraying it as breeding ground of terrorist activities.
The climate of apprehension and terror associated with terror activities has more to do with the State’s response to them than the activities themselves. Consider for example the various activities of the State that are cloaked as efforts to counter terrorism – from the US’s ‘war on terror’ based on its geo-political interests in the Middle East to the legislation of security policies that repress human rights and civil liberties; from negotiating deals with organized terror outfits to the military repression of terrorist camps that have caused massive civilian casualties.
Modes of Informal Resistance:
Informal resistance in firms involve shirking of responsibilities, pilferage, absenteeism, and other kinds of organizational behaviour that disrupt the rhythms of a production system. Unlike formal resistance like unionism, collective bargaining, and general strikes, firms can neither control nor do they want to accommodate informal resistance. A growing source of informal resistance in firms is the practice of whistleblowing in which employees publicly expose the various corporate malpractices in the TNCs.
The participants in the informal resistance of the State against globalization are not members of the State institutions but comprise a non-bureaucratized political class that influences the State’s approach to global actors. They can neither access State resources nor do they want to. The most convenient example would be that of the Zapatistas in Mexico – a diffused yet militant network of indigenous people resisting privatization of land, displacement of manual labour and the numerous exploitations offset by the North American Free Trade Agreement (The Zapatistas, 2002). They exercise significant control over the Mexican government’s policies vis-à-vis neoliberalism despite not having joined electoral politics till date. Apart from reinforcing the argument that infrapolitics isn’t merely a substitute for “real” declared resistances, the case of the Zapatistas also highlights that the solutions to the problems of globalization doesn’t always lie in holding or rotating State power.
In the domain of civil society, informal resistance against globalization can be located in new social movements which lack a stable bureaucratized foundation but operate through a horizontal summation of many umbrella groups. Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, Anti-Globalization Movement, World Social Forum, and Dissent Network are some of the examples.
To Exist is to Resist – The Resilience of Infrapolitics:
Infrapolitics is a means to provide more resilience to ongoing movements of resistance. An outright resistance needs to overcome many oppositional forces – from State-led repression to buying off of resistors to diminishing intensity and resources. Resilience is therefore required to ensure that while resistors do not submit their agency of resisting oppressive structures, they create certain strategies of adjusting to the changes instituted by external shocks. This ensures that a resistance survives through the series of temporal, yet strong repressive sanctions waged against it. Longer the time span of resistance, greater the need for resilience at grassroots. The process of resilient infrapolitics can be seen in the case of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement. Richter Devroe, in her research, found that the Palestinian women who travelled along the ever-changing settlement boundaries around the West Bank and East Jerusalem, saw their movements as an act of ‘defiance against Israeli control’, ‘their right to have fun and relax’, and not simply acquiescence to the Israeli occupation (Richter-Devroe, 2011:40). Similar challenges are faced through water shortages along the West Bank, women left to sustain lives when husbands are jailed as political prisoners, the requirement of permits for transit, and so on. While the occupation tries to break them, the resilience of the Palestinians to sustain their daily lives is a sheer act of resistance.
This complementary relation between resilience and resistance ensured through infrapolitics negates a crucial binary – that the absence of a visible, declared, and organized resistance doesn’t necessarily imply the presence of compliance. Groups that resist infrapolitically do so because they need to be resilient to the oppressive system, not because they are acquiescent. Overt resistance is met with coercive reactions that curb daily lives even more, thus requiring more resilience. Hence, infrapolitics is neither passive inaction nor an apolitical action.
No Good, Bad or Ugly:
We are at a stage where we have an idea that global resistance doesn’t simply mean oppressed people resisting the demerits of globalization. Instead, it’s much more nuanced than that.
In postcolonial societies dominated by traditional value systems, the prospect of global goods and values threaten many parochial institutions and identities.
Radical right-wing regimes use ethno-linguistic nationalism to resist the western influences of secularization, liberalization, individualism and so on, that are imported through globalization. Under the guise of resisting a western(ized) hegemony, traditionalists and nationalists belonging to the dominant sections of postcolonial societies are also trying to ‘decolonize’ the indigenous culture by justifying and reviving pre-colonial traditions. The proponents of this strategy consider these dominant traditions culturally superior to both western modernity and competing subcultures.
At other times, the reactions of the dominant groups need not be so cloaked by honest intentions. Consider the growing informal resistance within many States against the inflow of immigrants, illegal or otherwise. From the regular use of jargons like “infiltrators” and “outsiders” to the systematic exclusion of immigrants from socio-political participation, the anti-immigrant politics of resistance is highly diffused in our everyday lifestyles.
The arguments herein negate what James Scott claims – that a hidden transcript resistance is a strategy, typical of subordinate groups. Sticking to my earlier argument, local hierarchies do determine the behaviour of global institutions and the sites of resistance they precipitate. However, the type of resistance, infrapolitical or declared, doesn’t overlap the hierarchies so neatly as to say that [only] subordinates resist with circumspection. For example, the Indian caste hierarchy is what explains the agony of upper castes towards Dalit young men taking up globally imported status symbols that were earlier monopolized by the more privileged sections. But the consequent resistance expressed by the upper or dominant castes in the form of vigilantism, mob violence and honour killings targeted at minorities takes place in a domain of highly informalized and clandestine politics, albeit assisted by a majoritarian government at the Centre.
Considering that globalization aids infrapolitics through making commodities like the Internet and digital networking available to people, the State’s resistance to globalization often becomes threats to people’s private avenues of resistance. Take for example the recent Virtual Private Network (VPN) order given by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In). It requires the VPN service providers to perform information checks on its users and maintain usage logs of 5 years. Considering that VPNs sell privacy to its users, this is “a clever way of putting VPNs out of business in India without actually banning them”. (Kanjilal, Pratik. 2022, May 27. The Wire).
Conclusion:
From the above discussion, we can infer that the nature of a resistance is a socially constructed choice. Infrapolitics is thus, a strategic choice made by a group to tackle conditions that an overt resistance cannot, due to either the social position of the resistors or the nature of the problems they face. Apart from contributing certain methods of political action to formal and declared resistance, infrapolitics is crucial in one’s resilience to maintain the status quo at the face of abnormal changes. Without such resilience, no resistance can last the tide of time and opposition. However, informal resistances are a tool, not just of subordinates, but also dominant sections who use it to retain their hegemony against the inflow of western values and commodities.
References:
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and Against Neoliberalism, Seven Stories Press: Open Media Pamphlet Series
Scott, J. C. (1990) Domination and the Hidden Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, Yale
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Richter-Devroe S (2011) Palestinian women’s everyday resistance: Between normality and normalisation. Journal of International Women’s Studies 12(3): 32–46.
Kanjilal, Pratik. ‘With VPN Order, the Government Shows It’ll Leave Virtually Nothing Private’. The Wired. 2022, May 27
Heywood, Andrew. (2011) Global Politics, Palgrave Macmillan, pp 282 – 381
Aniruddha Mukhopadhyay
Former Intern, Asia in Global Affairs
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author, in her personal capacity. It does not reflect the policies and perspectives of Asia in Global Affairs.
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