Everyday Politics and Resistance

Why do monetary unions fail? Structural approaches that focus on shifts in the distribution of capabilities ascribe non-elites limited agency to influence large-scale political and economic change. Existing agent-centred approaches tend to simplify the social dynamics of the everyday politics of money by concentrating on how elites determine formal changes within monetary systems. Answers to this question from a material-based perspective often point to a breakdown in elite political support, driven by actors' material incentives to cheat on their multilateral commitments rather than cooperate to overcome the collective action problem that a monetary union entails. Recent ideational perspectives have focused on the role of shared economic ideas among elites, as well as elite struggles over national identity, as crucial ingredients in the construction, maintenance, or failure of a monetary union. While drawing on the insights of rationalist and constructivist theories, this article uses a historical sociology approach to argue that the everyday actions taken by non-elites as survival strategies in a monetary crisis provide an important additional ingredient for understanding monetary system change. This approach is illustrated through a case study of the collapse of the ruble zone monetary union over 1991-1993.

The relations between everyday life and political participation are of interest for much contemporary social science. Yet studies of social movement protest still pay disproportionate attention to moments of mobilization, and to movements with clear organizational boundaries, tactics and goals. Exceptions have explored collective identity, ‘free spaces’ and prefigurative politics, but such processes are framed as important only in accounting for movements in abeyance, or in explaining movement persistence. This article focuses on the social practices taking place in and around social movement spaces, showing that political meanings, knowledge and alternative forms of social organization are continually being developed and cultivated. Social centres in Barcelona, Spain, autonomous political spaces hosting cultural and educational events, protest campaigns and alternative living arrangements, are used as empirical case studies. Daily practices of food provisioning, distributing space and dividing labour are politicized and politicizing as they unfold and develop over time and through diverse networks around social centres. Following Melucci, such latent processes set the conditions for social movements and mobilization to occur. However, they not only underpin mobilization, but are themselves politically expressive and prefigurative, with multiple layers of latency and visibility identifiable in performances of practices. The variety of political forms – adversarial, expressive, theoretical, and routinized everyday practices, allow diverse identities, materialities and meanings to overlap in movement spaces, and help explain networks of mutual support between loosely knit networks of activists and non-activists. An approach which focuses on practices and networks rather than mobilization and collective actors, it is argued, helps show how everyday life and political protest are mutually constitutive.

This article examines to what extent, and how, people engaging in political talk within ‘non-political’  discussion forums – online lifestyle communities – leads to political (or personal) action or calls-to-action. The analysis is framed in the context of wider questions of citizenship, civic engagement and political mobilization. To capture everyday political talk amongst citizens requires us to move beyond the now widely analysed online spaces of formal politics. Instead, we  focus on  online  third  spaces concerning lifestyle issues  such as  parenting, personal finance and popular culture. Drawing on a content analysis of three popular UK-based discussion forums over the course of five years (2010–2014),  we found that (for two of the three cases) such spaces were more than just talking shops. Rather they were spaces where political actions not  only emerged, but  where they seemed to  be cultivated.  Discussions embedded  in  the  personal  lives  of participants often developed – through talk – into political actions aimed at government (or other) authorities. The article sheds light on the contributing factors and processes that (potentially) trigger and foster action emerging from political talk and provides insight into the mobilization potential of third spaces.

By thinking with (il)legality, I show the everyday rhythms and tropes of cultivation and mule driving through which peasants explain their engagements with different legal and illegal economies (marijuana, coca, and tourism) on a coastal mountainside in Colombia. I explore how peasants engage in ethical deliberations drawn from everyday practices through which they try to live " the best possible life " in very volatile contexts, while also providing a trenchant critique of the state, legality, and corruption. In this community, the talk about and pragmatic use of (il)legality and corruption are full of judgments about the right, the good, and the decent, or at least " the better than. " I analyze how law and electoral politics, the state and the judiciary, are not where peasants chiefly look for their theories of right and wrong. Peasants perceive corruption as practices shaped within the law, especially when the law does not comply with the legitimate claims of fairness or justice. Illegality may be an unexpected consequence of otherwise ethical judgments, but corruption, in contrast, is not redeemable. The distance that campesinos feel from corruption is not a triumphalist account of their ethical authority but instead marks the impossibility of their inclusion in either petty clientelism or urban middle-class anti-corruption platforms.

This paper explores the strengths and complexities of using solicited journals/diaries with a marginalised,itinerant population in Vietnam’s capital city Hanoi. We draw on journals completed by Hanoi street vendors to better understand the everyday lived experiences of a population targeted by state officialsfor fines and retribution. Since 2008, street vending has been banned on a number of streets and public spaces in Hanoi. Yet concurrently, livelihood options for those without formal education or skills are increasingly limited. Based on solicited journals kept by street vendors during 2012, we find that journals provide a channel for everyday politics and subtle resistance measures to be reflected on by research participants, and for detailed understandings of state–society relations to emerge. Moreover, from an analysis of participants’ journal entries as well as de-briefing interviews, we consider the strengths and complexities of this qualitative method,situated within a context of state-induced fear among an itinerant and sometimes non-literate population. While the strengths of the approach became quickly apparent in the detailed and insightful narratives we received, literacy limitations, vendor feelings of inadequacy regarding journal entry style and complications regarding a sense of obligation to us as researchers raise a number of concerns.Researchers must therefore reflect carefully on the practicalities,ethics and power relations involved with this method. Nonetheless, we also note how participants became inspired to rework the journaling process to meet their own needs and were empowered to circumnavigate state controls to voice counter-narratives of their rights to the street.

This paper draws upon ethnographic research with Muslim communities in Hyderabad, India and South Asian Muslim American communities in Seattle, USA, showcasing the work of grassroots women's organizations that negotiate and theorize tangled webs of marginalization and their violent effects. Building from their insights, I offer a critical theorization of slow nonviolence, or ideas and actions focused on long-term, incremental (but substantial) change, which resist both the visible and invisible effects of structural violence. I argue that these organizations undertake slow nonviolence by responding to the slow violence of dispossession, operationalizing the everyday as a site of politics, and constructing more equitable relationships. This slow nonviolence varies across place and community, but demonstrates a purposeful effort to contest violence as organizers encounter it, as a complex, everyday, layered, diffuse, slow, and yet material reality. The ubiquity of violence in women's lives presents a staggering challenge to any person or institution seeking to reduce or end such violence. This applies to the particular case of gender-based violence, which refers to a spectrum of violence arising from power relations associated with gender inequality and primarily targeting women and girls. That staggering effect can quickly slide into paralysis when one also considers the additional violence that women, and gender and sexual minorities, experience as members of other subaltern groups, based on class, religion, caste, race, Indigeneity, disability. This is especially true in

We evaluate existing case studies of “everyday resistance” and explore the possibilities for a systematic research on its political impacts. Research concerning “everyday forms of resistance” or “infrapolitics” has grown since the 1980s, today amounting to a vast range of theoretical and empirical studies on a multitude of aspects, groups and contexts. However, due to its elusive nature, the impact of this less visible resistance has rarely been studied. We only find single case studies that make references to varied outcomes in a particular context. Main theorists within the field do suggest a loose hypothesis of “cumulative” effects in which (thousands of) individual acts can have a significant impact over time, with triggered mobilization of “scale shifts” into public mass actions. However, we still do not have any evidence-based knowledge of the mechanisms that create certain effects. Our exploration points to a potential for establishing knowledge of immediate outcomes, particularly through comparative case studies.

This paper draws from research on small-scale maize production in Mexico’s Central Highland region to discuss the geopolitical implications of everyday agricultural practices. An overwhelming majority of maize farmers in this region, as well as in the country more broadly, continue to cultivate locally-adapted maize varieties they have bred themselves – criollo maize is the vernacular term – despite decades of concerted government attempts to effect the widespread adoption of commercially-bred and licensed hybrid varieties. This state effort to restructure agricultural systems and food security according to nationalist and capitalist priorities is one tactic in a long and violent struggle for control over peasant land and labor in Mexico. By integrating feminist scholarship in geopolitics and in political ecology, I am following the lead of geographers who regard the materialities of everyday life as a foundation for political tensions and conflicts that are constantly unfolding along intersecting lines of difference. Though geopolitics has rarely turned its attention directly to theories of intimate socio-ecological relations, I argue that the field has much analytical and political leverage to gain by engaging with political ecology, and that feminist geographic imaginaries provide a crucial space in which to do so.  This approach allows for an analysis of how a dominant geopolitics of land and agriculture is being undermined through the routine production of criollo maize, revealing new potential for creating broad political alliances with social movements that are currently working toward alternative visions of agriculture and food security.

The largescale transfer of land from rural communities to private corporations has become a defining feature of India's development trajectory. These land transfers have given rise to a multitude of new 'land wars' as dispossessed groups have struggled to retain their land. Yet while much has been written about the political economy of development that underpins this new form of dispossession, the ways in which those threatened with dispossession have sought to mobilize have to a lesser extent been subject to close, ethnographic scrutiny. This article argues that an 'everyday politics' perspective can enhance our understanding of India's new land wars, using a case from Singur as the starting point.

Hybridity on the Ground in Peacebuilding and Development engages with the possibilities and pitfalls of the increasingly popular notion of hybridity. The hybridity concept has been embraced by scholars and practitioners in response to the social and institutional complexities of peacebuilding and development practice. In particular, the concept appears well-suited to making sense of the mutually constitutive outcomes of processes of interaction between diverse norms, institutions, actors and discourses in the context of contemporary peacebuilding and development engagements. At the same time, it has been criticised from a variety of perspectives for overlooking critical questions of history, power and scale. The authors in this interdisciplinary collection draw on their in‑depth knowledge of peacebuilding and development contexts in different parts of Asia, the Pacific and Africa to examine the messy and dynamic realities of hybridity ‘on the ground’. By critically exploring the power dynamics, and the diverse actors, ideas, practices and sites that shape hybrid peacebuilding and development across time and space, this book offers fresh insights to hybridity debates that will be of interest to both scholars and practitioners.

During the last twenty years, Palestinian women have practiced creative and often informal everyday forms of political activism. Sophie Richter-Devroe reflects on their struggles to bring about social and political change.

Richter-Devroe's ethnographic approach draws from revealing in-depth interviews and participant observation in Palestine. The result: a forceful critique of mainstream conflict resolution methods and the failed woman-to-woman peacebuilding projects so lauded around the world. The liberal faith in dialogue as core of "the political" and the assumption that women's "nurturing" nature makes them superior peacemakers, collapse in the face of past and ongoing Israeli state violences.

Instead, women confront Israeli settler colonialism directly and indirectly in their popular and everyday acts of resistance. Richter-Devroe's analysis zooms in on the intricate dynamics of daily life in Palestine, tracing the emergent politics that women articulate and practice there. In shedding light on contemporary gendered "politics from below" in the region, the book invites a rethinking of the workings, shapes, and boundaries of the political.

The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is one of the last communist states ruled by a single political party. Despite what the one party rule in Vietnam may suggest, issues related to urban planning reveal a great complexity of interaction between stakeholders in the country, and an aggregation of new coalitions concerned with growth, who question the regime's political choices and development orientations. The authoritarianism of the Vietnamese political regime is undeniably key to understanding the socio-spatial organisation of cities in the country.  However, this paper aims to show how the contemporary urban planning of these cities is participating in the recent evolution of the political regime, towards what can be called a “negotiated authoritarianism”. With the implementation of new urban projects; debates over notions of justice and injustice, common good and private interests, community and individuality are emerging. These values are conveyed by the authorities, as well as the citizens, in order to negotiate their participation in decision-making and their access to new wealth. Our goal is then to question the links between political authoritarianism and the production of the city in contemporary Vietnam.

Resumen. La precarización y el estigma vividos en los asentamientos informales de la Zona Metropolitana de Monterrey, merman los derechos de personas que resisten cotidianamente para hacerse un lugar en la sociedad. En este artículo, se analizan los tránsitos entre espacios y actividades formales e informales atravesados por relaciones de dominación y resistencia en un asentamiento informal de la urbe. Habrá de observarse que, en estos tránsitos borrosos y negociables, hechos por la captura estatal, el estigma, el contacto ventajoso y la huida táctica, la gente se rebela contra la dominación y lucha interminablemente por su inclusión desde posiciones de desventaja atizadas por el Estado.