Everyday Politics and Resistance

Türkiye, her iki dünya savaşı ertesi köklü dönüşümler geçirdi. İlki 600 yıllık Osmanlı hanedanına son verdi. İkincisi ise Tek Parti döneminin sonu oldu; Türkiye’de siyasi demokrasinin yolunu açtı. İkinci Dünya Savaşı’nda Türkiye tarafsız kaldı. Ancak, savaşın tüm olumsuzluklarını bilfiil yaşadı. Tek Parti döneminin toplumsal dengeleri büyük ölçüde hasar gördü. Milli Korunma Kanunu, Varlık Vergisi, Toprak Mahsulleri
Vergisi, İş Mükellefiyeti gibi uygulamalar toplumsal katmanları iktidara karşı tavır almaya sevk etti. Devletin savaş içinde kararlarını hayata geçirme konusundaki zaafları belirginleşirken; kitlelerin gündelik yaşamda tepki ve direnişleri de çığ gibi arttı. Gerek çok partili sisteme geçişte, gerekse 1940’ların ikinci yarısında gündeme gelen sosyal politika alanındaki reformlarda toplum tabanında gözlenen yılgınlık ve
tepkiler önemli bir rol oynadı.
Murat Metinsoy’un kitabı işte bu zor yılların toplumsal öyküsünü gündeme getiriyor. Olaylar dizinini tabandan irdeleyerek; kitlelerin yaşam deneyimlerini, serzenişlerini, gündelik yaşamdaki direnişlerini vurgulayarak… Otoriter dönemlerde bile toplumun
gündelik mücadelelerinin ve taleplerinin siyasete etki edebileceğini
ortaya koyarak…
Zafer Toprak, Boğaziçi Üniversitesi

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.

In his book, Man’s Search For Meaning, psychologist Victor Frankl recalled his experiences in Nazi concentration camps, saying:
"…There were always choices to make. Every day, every hour offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become moulded into the form of the typical inmate."
At its heart, the study of everyday politics and everyday resistance seeks to establish the validity of such a statement, not only in the horrific circumstances of the holocaust, but in everyday interactions. These decisions, choices, and powers can also accumulate to shape larger political processes and outcomes. To understand the meaning of everyday politics, this essay will begin with a review of definitions. The remainder will then be framed around three classical studies and their critiques: Kerkvliet’s (2005) study of peasant politics, Scott’s (1985) research on everyday resistance, and finally Nina Eliasoph’s (1997) work on the political apathy in American communities. In addition to the established literature, there are an endless number of examples where one can see the real implications of everyday politics, some of which will be included throughout. Through classic and applied studies, it is clear that everyday politics and resistance is crucial to not only understanding, but altering political processes and outcomes. As Victor Frankl rightly suggests, everyday choices and interactions should never be taken for granted, since larger powers can be affected.

Muhtars, the lowest level elected political position in Turkey, hold an ambiguously defined place within the administrative hierarchy. They are public officials, but local citizens do not always associate them with the central government. Street-Level Governing is the first book to investigate how muhtars carry out their role—not only what they are supposed to do, but how they actually operate—to provide an ethnographic study of the state as viewed from its margins. It starts from the premise that the seeming "margin" of state administration is not peripheral at all, but instructive as to how it functions.
Muhtars exist at the intersection of everyday life and the exercise of power. Their position offers a personalized point of contact between citizens and state institutions, enabling close oversight of the citizenry, yet simultaneously projecting the sense of an accessible state to individuals. Challenging common theories of the state, Massicard outlines how the position of the muhtar throws into question an assumed dichotomy between domination and social resistance, and suggests that considerations of circumvention and accommodation are normal attributes of state-society functioning.

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.

This special issue brings together six research articles that speak to the dynamics of digital communication in the Philippines, a country firmly located in the global geography of the digital economy and an early adopter and innovator in mobile communication. Increasingly, the rise of digital platforms is spurring on new business models and applications that find a wide range of appropriations in a developing economy with a high level of communication skills and a high level of inequality. These dynamics have, in turn, fuelled the popularity of social media and the populism that has gained international attention and, more critically, taken the country into uncharted political terrain. We introduce this Special Issue by taking stock of the legacies and potentials of digital communication in the country and highlighting how the articles sustain and extend past conversations. Drawing from the articles that cover a range of topics (entertainment, intimacy, labour, journalism and politics, scandals and pornography), we identify three overlapping themes that capture the socio-technical dynamics of digital communication in the Philippines: (1) how digital communication is emplaced in material, social and structural conditions; (2) the potentials of networked publics and communication; and (3) the convertibility of capitals and emergence of new competencies. These dynamics and potentials point to the contradictions, continuities and changes that relate to Philippine modernity in the context of global digital capitalism.

The existing literature on street vendors has largely examined processes of marginalisation of informal enterprises amid rapid urban development. At the same time, the resistance methods of street vendors against the constraints of urban development have been extensively explored. However, these studies tend to focus on the binary position between informal and formal, as well as on the overt confrontation and conflicts between vendors and the state, which risks simplifying the heterogeneity of interests in the everyday practice of street vending. Delving into the daily work of street vendors in Bandung city, this article explores the everyday practice of traders in order to identify their subtle forms of resistance to removal and to the negative perceptions attached to them. By adopting the analytics of ‘people as infrastructure’ (Simone, 2004) and the idea of ‘building blocks of success’ for small enterprises (Turner, 2003), this article argues that social infrastructure is constituted and practiced through the construction of personal relationships and varied forms of informal economic exchange between vendors and their customers, informal organisers and neighbours, as well as through the adoption of new technology. Social infrastructures have become a means of building everyday politics for street vendors and a vital way of challenging the negative perception attached to street vending activities.

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.

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.

That is, the hybrid turn focuses on broader processes of 'state formation' rather than the narrower, more technical focus of 'statebuilding' which relies on the essentially technical processes of institutional transfer and 'capacity building' over short time frames.

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 pow...

ABSTRACT We evaluate existing case studies of ‘everyday forms of resistance’ and explore the possibilities for a systematic research on its political impacts. 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. 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.

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.

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.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

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.

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 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 officials for 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 aims to analyze everyday relations of Iranian asylum seeker women with the Turkish state, transformation of their perceptions of identity, and their ways of resistance against social exclusion from a feminist perspective. The research was conducted between 2011 and 2013 in Central Anatolian cities of Ankara, Eskişehir and Çankırı through participant observation. Participants are women from Persian, Lor and Kurdish ethnic backgrounds who were living in Turkey temporarily under the asylum law. In addition to legal restrictions that shape their everyday life in Turkey, there are cultural, political, economic and gender based factors which affect asylum-seeker women's perceptions of identity and society. The temporary legal status of asylum seekers in Turkey, lack of work permit, restriction of mobility and language barrier bring severe isolation and social exclusion. Within such a context, Iranian women asylum seekers' relation with the state, especially with the police and the municipalities, is problematic. As a result, their living environment is restricted to their diasporic political communities where traditional relations of patriarchal domination subtly reproduce themselves. Keywords: Political migration, Asylum Seekers, Women and the Nation State, Everyday Resistance

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.

In her book, Ordinary Vices (1984), Judith Shklar identified the ‘ordinary’ as a neglected domain of political activity and interest. Shklar wrote of the ‘democracy of everyday life’ that typically proceeds outside of formal political institutions and beyond the purview of so much institutionally-focused political theory. More recently, there has been a growth of interest among political theorists around the ordinary and everyday dimensions of political life. We see this, for instance, in Danielle Allen’s work on the everyday sacrifices of citizens, in Bonnie Honig’s engagement with the ‘public things’ of democratic life, in Michael Ignatieff’s assessment of the ‘ordinary virtues’, in Nancy Rosenblum’s discussion of the ethics of the ‘good neighbour’, in James C. Scott’s analysis of ‘everyday resistance’, in Marc Stears’ articulation of ‘ordinary life’ as a resource for the revitalisation of democracy, and in Bernardo Zacka’s examination of the everyday ethics of ‘street-level bureaucrats’. Within the domain of the ordinary we find not only a vast and underexplored terrain for political theorising, but also a distinctive methodological puzzle concerning how best to conceptualise and investigate the everyday. Indeed, the work cited is striking for its methodological eclecticism and innovation - its willingness to move beyond the conventional methods of political theory to engage with empirical case studies, ethnography, history, art, film, and literature.

It is the aim of this workshop to explore this broad cluster of themes. Possible topics might include, but are by no means limited to, the following:

• Conceptualising and problematising the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘everyday’
• Investigating the ordinary (methodology)
• Ordinary vices and ordinary virtues
• Ordinary/everyday citizenship and democracy
• Everyday exclusion and inclusion (everyday racism and sexism; microaggressions)
• Everyday obedience, disobedience, and resistance
• Everyday political institutions, practices, and rituals

We encourage the participation of scholars at all career stages including postgraduate researchers. Scholars working outside of political theory, but with interest in related interdisciplinary topics are also very welcome. We anticipate holding the workshop in hybrid format to allow for in-person and online participation. If you would like to participate, please send an abstract of no more than 300 words (prepared for blind review) for a presentation of 30 minutes (pre-circulation of papers will be optional) to Demetris.tillyris@canterbury.ac.uk by 23 May. Selected speakers will be notified shortly thereafter.

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.

While in the past two decades a rich literature has emerged about the politics of public space, many of these theoretical works and empirical studies consider public space interactions and behaviors against the backdrop of deliberative or representative politics. In this special issue, to which this article is the preface, we offer some reflections on how the everyday and the micro-level can be sites of political expression, leading inevitably to a critical discussion of the central assumptions regarding private/public space and its generational, gendered, classed, and “culturalized” construction. This analysis takes place with three theoretical axes in the background: Katz’s minor theory, anarchist theory on prefigurative politics, and Foucault, de Certeau, and Lefebvre’s work on power, knowledge, and place.

While in the past two decades a rich literature has emerged about the politics of public space, many of these theoretical works and empirical studies consider public space interactions and behaviors against the backdrop of deliberative or representative politics. In this special issue, to which this article is the preface, we offer some reflections on how the everyday and the micro-level can be sites of political expression, leading inevitably to a critical discussion of the central assumptions regarding private/public space and its generational, gendered, classed, and “culturalized” construction. This analysis takes place with three theoretical axes in the background: Katz’s minor theory, anarchist theory on prefigurative politics, and Foucault, de Certeau, and Lefebvre’s work on power, knowledge, and place.

The literature on contentious politics often explains the dynamics of collective action as a product of sequential events in national and international politics. This time-centred perspective disregards the spatial dynamics of contention. Similarly, analysis on the relation between the Turkish state and Kurdish national movement tends to focus on dynamics and actors in macro politics. However, in the case of urban warfare, macro-level explanations cannot by themselves illustrate why certain localities experienced urban warfare while other districts in the same city or region continued their everyday life. Therefore, this article shifts the focus from macro-political dynamics to micro politics to examine the emergence of urban warfare in Suriçi, Diyarbakır, in 2015. It argues that socio-spatial dynamics comprised significant mechanisms that facilitated the conflict. Overall, it claims that the urban warfare in Suriçi demonstrates that dynamics of mobilization can be captured through a dialectical approach to macro and micro-level politics.

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

This paper broadens and deepens the debates on the recent protests against austerity in Greece. The paper begins by investigating how the global crisis is understood, embodied and contested through the participatory forms of collective action and political organization in Greece. Secondly, it highlights transformations in the political behaviors and lived experiences of the subjects who participated in the recent and on-going wave of anti-austerity mobilizations in Greece. Finally, it emphasizes the ‘(re-)politicization of everyday life’ through the commons, which is a process grounded in the establishment of novel and open spaces of solidarity and trans-local collective action within and beyond institutional and state solutions. Building on these considerations, it is argued that the recent forms of everyday collective action have played a crucial role in challenging the prevailing neoliberal crisis politics, while at the same time are raising key issues for progressive governments and other institutional agents.

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.

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.

This paper examines the articulation of Canadian civic culture from below. Focusing on digitally mediated grassroots mobilizations, it asks how citizens construct and discursively deploy voice and listening as civic values. The paper draws from three empirical cases: the 2014 mobilization of parents during the teachers’ strike in British Columbia; the 2015 citizen mobilizations in support of Syrian refugees; and the 2016 sit‐in protest outside the Toronto Police headquarters. Citizens participating in these initiatives were keen to “speak up,” establishing voice as a civic value. Yet, this is not accompanied by equal attention to the role of listening. This invites simplistic takes to citizen participation, leaving it vulnerable to populist hijackings.

This article takes an under-explored approach to politics and social change, focusing not on critiquing per se but on establishing local relations that enable community building. The study objective is to envision a type of politico-economic agency that would contribute to building local relations that are characterized by socially just production of tourism spaces. The topic is explored in the context of tourism economy and related injustices in local communities. The study draws on Lefebvre’s work The Production of Space and its insights on politico-economic subjectivity, difference, and politics. His concepts of ‘abstract’ and ‘absolute’ spaces are highlighted as central in studying social transformations. The proposed view on social change is explored empirically in the context of local tourism politics in the Ylläs destination in the Finnish North. The case study illustrates how in its current mode the prevailing tourism politics is not sufficient to advance socially just production of tourism space. Based on an ethnographically oriented study of the existing everyday tourism realities it is proposed that the injustices are reproduced by a mutual lack of attention to different perspectives between groups. It is argued that dialogical everyday politics is needed for facilitating mutual understanding across difference, and thus widening the perspectives from which local development needs are discussed. The article concludes that critical research should recognize that it is essential to improve inter-group relations in communities if the aim is a just production of space in which the diversity of voices is taken into account.

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.

Recent efforts on the part of International Political Economy (IPE) scholars to place an emphasis on the importance of everyday spaces and actors in analyses of the global
political economy have largely tended to overlook the significance of gender. However,
gender and other intersecting factors serve to inform everyday actions, which—as ‘everyday IPE’ scholars suggest—impact the international. Therefore I present a feminist everyday politics of the global economy (or FEPGE) approach that aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between gender, everyday actions (in particular, resistance), and the international. Drawing on data from interviews with former transnational call center workers in Ontario, Canada, this approach is used to explore the significance of gendered everyday acts of worker resistance. I argue that along with the ‘feminization of labor’ within the industry, it may also be necessary to discuss the ‘feminization of resistance’.