Lara Montesinos Coleman

Deconstructing Militant Manhood

In this article, we consider how privileged masculine performances within different spaces of (anti-)globalization politics discipline political praxis in ways that bolster, as much as contest, the order that these movements seek to subvert or overthrow. We draw on two case studies: a British ‘anti-imperialist’ organization working in solidarity with Latin America and the emerging British anarchist movement. On the basis of our own interpretive participation within these spaces, we consider how each was structured with reference to a privileged masculine identity – that of a patriarchal and authoritarian ‘Man with Analysis’ in the case of the former and what we call ‘Anarchist Action Man’ in the case of the latter. We reflect on how these dominant gendered scripts set restrictions around which bodies and voices could be included, and within what capacity; and how our own ‘off-script’ performances were reinterpreted with reference to available cultural texts within these activist subcultures.

Between discipline and dissent : situated resistance and global order.

In this article we contextualise the Disciplining Dissent project through a series of observations about the ways in which the papers collected here contribute to existing perspectives on global resistance, and make a broader argument in favour of situated approaches to studying the interplay between global discipline and dissent. After outlining the concerns that led us initially to formulate the project, we offer a series of reflections about the contribution of this special issue to existing debates about (i) the place of resistance in global order and (ii) the ways in which global discipline and dissent can be known. We suggest that the papers collected in this special issue, through their attention to concrete and specific practices of discipline and dissent, prompt reflection on the particular forms of visibility associated with different methodologies, and on the politically charged knowledges these methodologies engender. Attention to the interplay between context-specific practices of discipline and dissent opens up space, we argue, to examine whose and what knowledges count in the theory and practice of global ordering and resistance. It also invites consideration of the ways in which self-consciously situated approaches to researching and theorising might help open up and decolonise this terrain of enquiry. We conclude with some reflections on the interplay of discipline and dissent at work in our own immediate context of the British university. En este artículo contextualizamos el proyecto Disciplining Dissent, a través de una serie de observaciones sobre cómo los ensayos que lo componen contribuyen a las perspectivas existentes sobre la resistencia global. Asimismo, elaboramos un argumento en pro de los planteamientos situacionales en el estudio de las interacciones entre la disciplina (es decir, el control y la contención) global y la disidencia. Tras una breve introducción a los asuntos que, en un primer momento, nos llevaron a formular el proyecto, ofrecemos una serie de reflexiones acerca de la contribución de este volumen a los debates existentes sobre (i) el lugar que ocupa la resistencia en el orden global y (ii) las maneras de percibir la disciplina global y la disidencia. Sugerimos que, a través de la atención a prácticas concretas y específicas, tanto de disciplina, como de disidencia, los artículos de este volumen inducen a la reflexión sobre las formas de visibilidad específicas asociadas a diferentes metodologías, así como sobre los conocimientos, cargados políticamente, que éstas producen. Sostenemos que centrarse en la interacción entre prácticas de disciplina y de disidencia específicas de contextos concretos, abre un espacio para el estudio de qué conocimientos cuentan en la teoría y práctica del ordenamiento y la resistencia globales, y quiénes los poseen. Asimismo, invita a considerar los modos en que enfoques investigativos y teóricos conscientemente situacionales pueden ampliar y descolonizar esta área de estudio. Concluimos con algunas apreciaciones sobre las interacciones entre la disciplina y la disidencia en nuestro entorno inmediato de la Universidad Británica. 在本文中，通过对本期各篇论文如何为全球抵抗的现有视角作出了贡献这一系列观察，我们把“规训性异议”项目置于一定背景下来研究，同时对研究全球规训和异议之间互动的情境式路径进行了更广泛的论证。在概述最初促使我们确定这一研究项目的关切之后，我们提供了本专辑对围绕如下问题的当前争论所做贡献的一系列思考：（1）反抗全球秩序的区域；（2）认知全球规训和异议的方式。我们认为，汇集于本专辑的这些论文，通过它们对具体、特定规训和异议实践的关注，激发了对与不同方法论相关的特定形式可见性的思考，以及由这些方法论产生的政治上承受压力的知识的思考。我们认为，关注特定脉络下规训和异议实践的互动为考察谁的和何种知识在全球秩序和反抗的理论与实践中具有影响提供了空间。这也邀约人们考虑：以自觉情境式路径开展研究和理论化能帮助该领域开辟新的研究空间和卓然自立的方式是什么。我们以英国的大学即我们自己身边的语境中规训与异议互动的反思来结束本文。

Security (studies) and the limits of critique: why we should think through struggle

This paper addresses the political and epistemological stakes of knowledge production in post-structuralist critical security studies (CSS). It opens a research agenda in which struggles against dominant regimes of power/knowledge are entry-points for analysis. Despite attempts to gain distance from the word ‘security’, through interrogation of wider practices and schemes of knowledge in which security practices are embedded, post-structuralist CSS too quickly reads security logics as determinative of modern/liberal forms of power and rule. At play is an unacknowledged ontological investment in ‘security’, structured by disciplinary commitments and policy discourse putatively critiqued. Through previous ethnographic research, we highlight how struggles over dispossession and oppression call the very frame of security into question, exposing violences inadmissible within that frame. Through the lens of security, the violence of wider strategies of containing and normalizing politics are rendered invisible, or a neutral backdrop against which security practices take place. Building on recent debates on critical security methods, we set out an agenda where struggle provokes an alternative mode of onto-political investment in critical examination of power and order.

Struggles, over rights: humanism, ethical dispossession and resistance

What should we make of appeals to human rights in the context of struggles against dispossession or armed repression? After the ‘death of man’ as transcendent ground of all right, critics have highlighted the disciplinary effects and absolutist tendencies of human rights discourse. However, attempts have been made to ‘rescue’ human rights – and wider forms of humanistic advocacy – as an immanent, self-grounding ethical practice. Drawing on analysis of struggles over natural resource extraction and indigenous rights in Latin America, this paper argues that such accounts mirror the assumptions of a predominant mode of international humanitarian activism. By reifying humanistic ideals, without sufficient attention to the effects of practices within which rights are invoked, both obscure entanglements between humanist interventions and logics of dispossession. This is particularly significant at the current juncture. Through these interventions rights have been absorbed into a neoliberal regime of truth in which the subjects of rights are interpellated as parties to private contract, such that rights themselves become tools of exception. Taking struggle as a starting point, by contrast, highlights not only the indeterminacy of rights but also the potential of human rights discourse to disrupt these logics. Through ethnographic engagement with ‘people’s hearings’ into ‘Multinational Corporations and Crimes against Humanity’ in Colombia, I revisit the questions of ‘the human’ and ‘rights’ and propose a more dialectical approach to the relation between normative principle and immanent critique.What should we make of appeals to human rights in the context of struggles against dispossession or armed repression? After the ‘death of man’ as transcendent ground of all right, critics have highlighted the disciplinary effects and absolutist tendencies of human rights discourse. However, attempts have been made to ‘rescue’ human rights – and wider forms of humanistic advocacy – as an immanent, self-grounding ethical practice. Drawing on analysis of struggles over natural resource extraction and indigenous rights in Latin America, this paper argues that such accounts mirror the assumptions of a predominant mode of international humanitarian activism. By reifying humanistic ideals, without sufficient attention to the effects of practices within which rights are invoked, both obscure entanglements between humanist interventions and logics of dispossession. This is particularly significant at the current juncture. Through these interventions rights have been absorbed into a neoliberal regime of truth in which the subjects of rights are interpellated as parties to private contract, such that rights themselves become tools of exception. Taking struggle as a starting point, by contrast, highlights not only the indeterminacy of rights but also the potential of human rights discourse to disrupt these logics. Through ethnographic engagement with ‘people’s hearings’ into ‘Multinational Corporations and Crimes against Humanity’ in Colombia, I revisit the questions of ‘the human’ and ‘rights’ and propose a more dialectical approach to the relation between normative principle and immanent critique.

Militant manhood revisited: a note on methods and madness

This discussion engages with Janet Conways and Sian Sullivans comments on our article, ‘Deconstructing Militant Manhood: Masculinities in the Disciplining of (Anti-)Globalization Politics’. First, we clarify our understanding of global capitalist forms of ordering and of the gendered scripts attendant to them as a response to Conways call for a more intersectional analysis and to her point about the relationship between the situated practices we explore and the global order within which we locate them. In doing so, we defend our methodology based on an ascending analysis of power and the usefulness of our particular ethnographical approach to carry out such analysis. Second, we address Sullivans concerns about our choice of an academic journal as the site for a discussion of the forms of gendered exclusion that we have experienced. While we have not been able to engender a space of active listening in the activist groups we analyse, developing our own tools of analysis of what had happened to us and finding this academic space to share them has been part of a process of making sense of our traumatic experiences both intellectually and emotionally.