Resistance

Sparke, 2013

• Distinguishes three responses to globalisation: reaction, resilience, and resistance.

• Reaction is typically nationalist and anti-globalist, while resilience adapts to neoliberal systems.

• Defines resistance as alter-globalisation, seeking to transform rather than reject global interdependence.

• Uses examples including the World Social Forum, Occupy, and environmental justice campaigns.

• Argues resistance aims to create more just and democratically accountable forms of globalisation.

• Analyses Occupy Wall Street as linking local spatial occupations with global inequality.

• Rejects rigid global/local binaries in favour of relational understandings.

• Identifies six problem spaces, including target, shared, teaching, affective, and utopian spaces.

• Shows Occupy connected local dispossession to transnational class power.

• Demonstrates resistance creates new democratic political spaces.

Cupples, 2009

• Defines resistance as organised or everyday actions seeking social or political change.

• Argues resistance is multiscalar, operating from everyday practices to global movements.

• Draws on de Certeau (tactics) and James Scott (infrapolitics) to highlight subtle forms of resistance.

• Rejects simple oppressor/oppressed binaries by treating power and resistance as mutually constitutive.

• Shows globalisation has enabled increasingly transnational resistance through networks of solidarity.

Wright, 2014

• Reimagines resistance as productive, relational, and world-making, rather than simply oppositional.

• Resistance creates new political spaces, social relations, and forms of knowledge.

• Uses MASIPAG (Philippines) to show resistance generates alternative agricultural systems.

• Discusses the Rhythm Workers Union as creating solidarity through music and performance.

• Extends resistance to more-than-human ontologies, drawing on Indigenous Yolngu understandings of Country.

Katz, 2001

• Develops topography and countertopography as methods for analysing and resisting globalisation.

• Argues globalisation is a long-standing feature of capitalism based on uneven development.

• Uses Howa (Sudan) to show local life is constituted through global capitalist and colonial processes.

• Countertopography connects geographically distant places experiencing similar effects of globalisation.

• Concludes effective resistance must be materially grounded and translocal.

Clifford et al., 2008

• Presents society, identity, power, and resistance as relational and socially constructed.

• Draws on Foucault, arguing power is diffuse and embedded within everyday practices.

• Distinguishes resistance from reworking and resilience.

• Defines resistance as requiring conscious attempts to transform exploitative power relations.

• Emphasises organised political struggle rather than simple survival.

Hughes et al., 2022

• Revisits Cindi Katz's framework of resistance, reworking, and resilience.

• Argues these concepts clarify the diverse political effects of everyday actions.

• Introduces minor theory, focusing on mundane, unsettled forms of politics.

• Uses Cameroon to illustrate humour, memory, and linguistic defiance as slow forms of decolonial resistance.

• Highlights refusal and everyday dissent as politically significant.

Katz, 2022

• Reflects critically on her earlier categories of resistance, resilience, and reworking.

• Argues these practices often coexist rather than forming a simple hierarchy.

• Suggests survival itself may constitute resistance in some Indigenous contexts.

• Questions rigid definitions of conscious political intent.

• Uses Sudanese shepherds grazing livestock on export cotton as an example of everyday defiance.

Hughes, 2023

• Examines competing definitions of resistance within political geography.

• Argues resistance is inseparable from broader theories of power.

• Warns defining all everyday practices as resistance risks diluting its political meaning.

• Suggests attention should shift from whether actions "count" as resistance to their political potential.

• Encourages moving beyond rigid power/resistance binaries.

Jones, 2012

• Studies resistance along the India–Bangladesh border.

• Argues sovereign power is incomplete and continually challenged in everyday life.

• Introduces spaces of refusal, where people evade state control through informal crossings, smuggling, and bribery.

• Distinguishes many border practices as resilience rather than conscious resistance.

• Demonstrates sovereignty is unevenly enacted across borderlands

Dhillon, 2022

• Examines Indigenous resistance to pipelines and extractive infrastructure.

• Critiques state designation of pipelines as critical infrastructure.

• Contrasts this with Indigenous understandings of living, relational infrastructures.

• Resistance includes blockades, encampments, and assertions of Indigenous jurisdiction.

• Frames resistance as a process of decolonisation, not simply protest.

Koopman, 2015

• Broadens political geography to include social movements, everyday politics, and informal collective action.

• Distinguishes Big-P institutional politics from small-p everyday politics.

• Introduces connective action, enabled by digital communication technologies.

• Argues solidarity is actively produced across distance and difference.

• Demonstrates social movements establish new territorialities challenging state power.

Hubbard and Kitchin, 2010

• Draws on Michel de Certeau to argue ordinary people actively produce space.

• Distinguishes institutional strategies from everyday tactics.

• Places are relatively ordered, while space is continually produced through practice.

• Shows resistance often occurs through subtle everyday uses of space.

• Demonstrates space is dynamic rather than fixed.

Almeida, 2022

• Explores global waves of collective resistance to neoliberalism over the past 50 years.

• Resistance emerges through austerity, privatisation, Structural Adjustment Programmes, and perceived moral violations.

• Identifies organisational infrastructure (e.g. unions and communication networks) as essential.

• Traces protest waves from the 1970s through the post-2008 crisis and 2019–22 Global South uprisings.

• Shows resistance varies geographically according to political and economic contexts.

Occupy London, 2011

• Argues Occupy transformed public space into democratic political commons.

• Links economic crisis to increasing wealth concentration and political inequality.

• Critiques philanthropy and NGO approaches for leaving structural inequality intact.

• Calls for moving from anti-poverty to anti-wealth politics.

• Advocates sustained bottom-up collective action rather than temporary protest.

Routledge, 2009

• Examines transnational resistance through Global Justice Networks (GJNs).

• Argues movements remain rooted in place while building global solidarities.

• Introduces spaces of convergence, where diverse movements meet and collaborate.

• Highlights the role of imagineers who broker knowledge across movements.

• Develops militant particularism, linking local struggles to global justice.

Cumbers, 2015

• Argues building a global commons requires working in, against, and beyond the state.

• Critiques autonomous commons projects for lacking strategies to scale up.

• Treats the state as an important terrain of political struggle rather than simply an enemy.

• Uses Denmark's renewable energy transition as an example of strategic state engagement.

• Advocates combining grassroots democracy with institutional transformation.

Wainwright and Kim, 2008

• Analyses resistance to the Korea–US Free Trade Agreement (KUSFTA).

• Argues transnational resistance is produced through practice rather than existing automatically.

• Uses Korean farmers protesting in Seattle (2006) to illustrate transnational activism.

• Highlights diverse protest repertoires including Pungmul drumming and Sam-bo Il-bae.

• Shows border controls and state regulation continue to constrain transnational activism.

Featherstone, 2008

• Argues transnational political identities are actively constructed rather than naturally shared.

• Resistance networks emerge through ongoing practices of collaboration.

• Rejects assumptions that common identities automatically produce solidarity.

• Highlights the importance of political relationships across space.

• Demonstrates counter-global networks require continual work to sustain.

Scott, 1985

• Introduces everyday resistance through hidden, low-profile acts by peasants.

• Focuses on foot-dragging, sabotage, tax evasion, petty theft, and non-compliance.

• Argues resistance often occurs between revolts, not only during open rebellion.

• Everyday resistance avoids repression while achieving practical gains.

• Demonstrates seemingly minor actions can cumulatively undermine domination.

Dhaliwal, 2012

• Examines the Indignados (15-M) movement in Spain.

• Shows occupying Puerta del Sol and Plaça Catalunya transformed public space into democratic commons.

• Introduces prefigurative politics, where activists enact the society they seek to create.

• Occupation created spaces of deliberation, solidarity, and collective decision-making.

• Demonstrates resistance reshapes both space and social relations.

Doherty and Doyle, 2006

• Reviews the rise of transnational environmental movements.

• Shows environmental politics increasingly operates across borders while remaining shaped by territorial politics.

• Identifies diverse forms of environmentalism, including postmaterial, postcolonial, and governance approaches.

• Distinguishes emancipatory environmentalism from governance-based environmentalism.

• Demonstrates environmental resistance combines networked organisation with public protest.

Ramirez, 2020

• Explores Black and Indigenous urban resistance in Oakland.

• Uses Moms 4 Housing and the Sogorea Te' Land Trust as examples.

• Challenges dominant property regimes through occupation and Indigenous land stewardship.

• Reimagines land as responsibility and relationality rather than private ownership.

• Demonstrates resistance creates alternative urban futures rather than merely opposing existing systems.