Mikael Baaz

Exploring ‘irrational resistance’

This article will examine irrationality in relation to the concept of resistance. Is there such a thing as an irrational resistance? While one tendency has been to irrationalise the ‘other’ and their resistance in order to construct a subaltern identity position, within the social sciences, an opposing tendency can also be identified; there is a trend to try to rationalise what seems to be people’s irrational behaviours. In this article, however, we will take a different stance by arguing that resistance is generally both irrational and rational depending on its relation to power.

Fighting with and Against the Time: The Japanese Environmental Movement's Queering of Time as Resistance

Abstract This article aims to add to the discussion on civil society, resistance, and environmental politics by departing from the concepts of affects, time, and temporality. In essence, the article suggests two things. Firstly, when theorizing civil society, we argue that we should depart from the idea that the present is not a singular, linear moment, but comprises affective relations to other times and people situated within these times. To support the argument, we will display how the ‘doing’ of various civil societies is performed in relation to people of the past as well as the future—that is, how already deceased people of the past or not-yet-born people of the future contribute to the creation of the present in various ways. Secondly, we will show how civil society actors are carrying out various forms of resistance against global warming by suggesting multiple temporalities that are operating simultaneously. By reviewing interviews with local representatives of the environmental movement in Tokyo, the promotion of another temporality prevails as a form of resistance, or as a means to resist, in order to negotiate current discourses and future prospects. To further understand this embracing of time, the article is inspired by affective theory and takes temporality in queer studies as a starting point to examine different strategies of resistance. Overall, the article highlights the importance of adding the affects/time nexus to the analysis of national and transnational civil societies.

Resistance, rupture and repetition: Civil society strategies against intimate partner violence in Cambodia.

This paper offers a new interpretation of the ‘resistance’ carried out by local civil society organisations in Cambodia against intimate partner violence (IPV). In this, the paper explores the nexus between ‘rupture’, ‘resistance’ and ‘repetition’ and concludes that different ‘repetitions’ can contribute to acts of violence while simultaneously creating possibilities for resisting IPV. In regard to the latter, the concept of ‘rupture’ is investigated as a performative politics through which organisations try to disrupt the ‘repetitions’ of violent masculinities. Furthermore, it is argued that the importance of ‘repetitions’ and the concept of time should be acknowledged. The French criminal defence lawyer Jacques Vergès’ understanding of ‘rupture’ and the French philosopher Gilles Deleuzes notions of ‘repetition’ inform the analysis. To exemplify our discussion and findings, the paper embraces stories of a number of civil society workers who facilitate various mens groups in Cambodia in order to negotiate the practice of IPV.

Theorising ‘Peace-building’ resistance: constructions of time and different temporalities at play in the Preah Vihear Temple conflict

ABSTRACTThis paper explores civil-society mobilisations around the Preah Vihear Temple, today a world heritage site located in Cambodia, on the border with Thailand. More specifically, the paper seeks to increase our understanding of the ‘peace-building’ resistance that is played out by different civil-society actors with regard to the Temple. This case displays how both the governments and civil societies in each of the two countries bend relationships between the ‘past’, the ‘present’, and the ‘future’ in general, and in relation to ‘identity’ in particular, in order to construct narratives of nation-building. The Temple has been used in discursive constructions of national collective identity in Cambodia and Thailand, respectively; constructions that, among other things, embrace shifting notions of time and temporality. Whereas much analysis of peace-building resistance concentrates on larger-scale actions, this paper adds to previous research by giving priority to more subtle forms of resistance and d...

Dissident Voices in International Criminal Law

Since the end of the Cold War, societies from the former Soviet Union and others throughout Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America have overthrown dictators and other authoritative rulers in the hope of allowing democracy, the rule of law, and human rights. In some cases, the change has been violent and drawn out, while in other cases the change has been quick and (more or less) non-violent. Regardless of whether the change has been violent or not, a crucial question during and after transition is: In what ways should post-authoritarian and/or post-conflict societies deal with their ‘evil’ past in order to ‘enable the state itself to [once again] function as a moral agent’? This question constitutes the very core of what is known as ‘transitional justice’ (TJ).

How resistance encourages resistance : Theorizing the nexus between power, ‘Organised Resistance’ and ‘Everyday Resistance’

ABSTRACT Lately, the concept of ‘resistance’ has gained considerable traction as a tool for critically exploring subaltern practices in relation to power. Few researchers, however, have elaborated on the inter-linkage of shifting forms of resistance; and above all, how acts of everyday resistance entangle with more organized and sometimes mass-based resistance activities. In this paper, these entanglements are analysed by taking into consideration the connections between articulations of resistance and technologies of power. Empirical observations from Cambodia are theorized in order to provide better theoretical tools for searching and investigating the inter-linkage between different resistance forms that contribute to social change. In addition, it is argued that modalities of power and its related resistance must be understood, or theorized, in relation to the concepts of ‘agency’, ‘self-reflexivity’ and ‘techniques of the self’.

Harold D. Lasswell and the Social Study of Personal Insecurity

The productivity of the American political scientist Harold D. Lasswell (1902–1978) was legendary. He has written, co-authored, edited, and co-edited about 60 books. He has also contributed to more than 300 articles on a diverse range of subjects and has written several hundred reviews and comments to a variety of different academic journals. In total, his scholarly writing, which spanned over some five decades, resulted in no less than four million published words. Already in his 20s, Lasswell planned and carried out an “interdisciplinary” research program that emphasized the significance of culture, social structures, and personality in order to understand various political phenomena. In a discipline, at the time still dominated by historical, legal, and philosophical methods, he was an innovator, who developed various methodologies during the course of his work, qualitative as well as quantitative ones, including traditional and non-experimental methods, such as content analysis and in-depth interviews, but also different experimental and clinical methods as well as various statistical techniques.

Defining and Analyzing “Resistance”: Possible Entrances to the Study of Subversive Practices

This article explores the meaning of “resistance” and suggests a new path for “resistance studies,” which is an emerging and interdisciplinary field of the social sciences that is still relatively fragmented and heterogeneous. Resistance has often been connected with antisocial attitudes, destructiveness, reactionary or revolutionary ideologies, unusual and sudden explosions of violence, and emotional outbursts. However, we wish to add to this conceptualization by arguing that resistance also has the potential to be productive, plural and fluid, and integrated into everyday social life. The first major part of the article is devoted to discuss existing understandings of resistance with the aim of seeking to capture distinctive features and boundaries of this social phenomenon. Among other things, we will explore resistance in relation to other key concepts and related research fields. We then, in the article’s second major part, propose a number of analytical categories and possible entrances aiming at inspire more in-depth studies of resistance.

Governing the Use-of-Force in International Relations: The Post-9/11 Challenge on International Law

In their new book, Governing the Use-of-Force in International Relations: The Post-9/11 Challenge on International Law, Aiden Warren (Senior Lecturer in the School Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University, Melbourne) and Ingvild Bode (Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Sustainability at the United Nations University in Tokyo) set out to examine the recourse to military force in the post-9/11 era by the United States in general. Specifically, they focus on the extent to which the Bush and Obama administrations viewed legitimising the greater use of force as a necessary solution in stopping new security threats, such as terrorist networks and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in particular. At the end of the Second World War, the major allied powers decided that they, in spite of the clear failure of the League of Nations, and the doctrine of ‘collective security’, should make one more effort to establish a universal organisation responsible for the maintenance of inter-state conflict. Following this conviction, delegates from 50 states gathered in San Francisco to draft the United Nations Charter, which ultimately declared that the foundational aim of the new organisation was to ‘strive to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’, as well as generally solving problems of an economic, social, cultural and humanitarian character and promoting human rights and freedoms. Besides establishing an organisation with specific tasks, the Charter was also a norm-creating document that set forth specific rules with the intension of regulating the behaviour of states especially regarding the use of force. The UN Charter came into force on 26 June 1945 and thanks to its (in principal) universal effect and the inclusion of a general prohibition on the use and threat of force, found in Article 2(4)—which reads: ‘All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the UN—every development of the jus ad bellum regime since then should be understood in close connection to the Charter. Departing from this basic assumption, and with the specific aim of providing a thorough evaluation of the Bush and the Obama doctrines in the post-9/11 era, the authors chose to divide their book into two parts: the first part, consisting of chapters 1–3, presents the UN Charter’s jus ad bellum regime as such; the second part, chapters 4–6, analyses the extent to which the Bush and the Obama doctrines, respectively, relate to international law established in the Charter era (3). Chapter 1 argues that while the prohibition contained in Article 2(4) is binding on all states, this is by no means ‘absolute’ in practice. By accepting individual or collective self-defence under specified circumstances, Article 51 of the Charter provides for a specific exception to this general prohibition.