Like the preceding chapter, Chapter 12 investigates the relationship between the center and the periphery in the waging of lawfare, with a particular emphasis on resistance to the gacaca project. Although some observers have come to speak of “Rwanda’s Leviathan,” the label causes one to overlook the few – but nonetheless really existing – spaces of everyday resistance to authoritarian rule. To render this resistance visible, the chapter assembles empirical vignettes from the field. These vignettes are about the “the art of not being governed,” as James Scott has memorably put it. To ward off the danger of mistaking enforced compliance with the gacaca project for genuine commitment to it, the chapter gives pride of place to “quiet agency.”

This chapter looks at the anthropological contributions to resistance as it manifests itself within people’s everyday lives. It sheds light on the multifaceted ways in which power, in the Foucauldian sense, is renegotiated in the context of everyday relationships and cultural activities. The material discussed in this chapter offers a reflection on how new forms of identities around gender and sexuality, religion, race, and ultimately agency are produced through political and cultural forms of resistance to sexism, patriarchy, Islamophobia, imperialism, and nationalism. In the first part, the chapter sets out the anthropological debates on resistance with a specific focus on Black feminist anthropology and anthropology of law and human rights. In a second part, the chapter examines different samples of feminist practice of resistance including political protest and social movements and everyday bodily performativity. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the methodological implications a feminist-queer anthropological gaze on resistance entails, stressing the need to take the voices and experiences of actors located at the margins as a starting point from where to understand the diverse, and to some extent paradoxical, forms of resistance to hegemonic forms of power.

The introduction presents an overview of the book’s argument and the theoretical framework that guides the project. It also lays out the contributions the book will make to the historical literature of slave resistance. The argument is that enslaved women resisted slavery with lethal force and when they did so, their own ideas about injustice were a central motivation. A new Black feminist theory is introduced and outlined: the Black feminist practice of justice. The core tenets of this philosophy includes the women prioritizing their perspective and how they defined justice, understanding the stark lack of justice in the judicial system, Black women’s rationality and prior planning, proportionality, a concept of “just deserts,” and their resignation to accept their fates for exercising lethal force.

In this chapter I develop my argument to explain variation in the processes and mechanisms that lead to distinct strategies of resistance to criminal extortion. I first define the core concepts that readers will encounter throughout the book. Next I explain the logic of the argument to show how the intersection between the time horizons of criminal actors, the nature of local political economies, and whether there is criminal capture of the police shapes the strategies of resistance that victims pursue. I then outline the parameters under which I expect the argument to hold, and discuss how my study builds on insights into existing research. I conclude by discussing the research design, case selection, and the methodologies that I used to collect and analyze data.

This chapter traces two pathways to everyday resistance to criminal victimization. The first pathway takes place when criminal actors have long time horizons. The first part of the chapter illustrates this pathway by comparing four empirical cases across El Salvador and Mexico where victims favored everyday resistance because the criminal actors enjoyed positions of strength in the absence of state crackdowns or criminal competition and they provided victims with some goods and services. The second pathway takes place when victims favor ending victimization but lack the organizational capacity to mobilize collectively and face police that are captured by criminals. I illustrate the second pathway using a within-case analysis of resistance by informal vendors in Medellín who faced these conditions and thus pursued everyday resistance to contest the strategies of domination that the criminal actor invoked to enforce extortion, but which could not end victimization.