6 - Resistance as Practice

Summary

This chapter heeds recent calls for a theoretical broadening in practice-oriented approaches to world politics by bringing Foucault into a conversation with practice-oriented approaches to power. In particular, it explores Foucault’s contribution to the study of resistance as practice. Foucault has typically been read in IR as a theorist of social order, less often as a theorist of resistance. Yet in his writing on ‘counter-conduct’ it is precisely forms of resistance that Foucault engages. The chapter argues that counter-conduct can be a useful tool for a practice-based account of resistance but that it also needs to be modified when used in the present. This is because Foucault developed the idea of counter-conduct by studying dissidence and refusal among religious movements in Europe in the Middle Ages, a time very different from our own. Largely missing from Foucault’s account is a sense of how counter-conducts are mediated; that is, how they attract (or fail to attract) a public. To address this gap the chapter proposes a notion of the scene. It demonstrates the value of a concern with scenes by means of a case: practices of migrant solidarity in Europe, the criminalization of those practices, and resistance to such criminalization.