Against ‘resistance’? Towards a conception of differential politics in international political sociology
| Published date | 01 June 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231185569 |
| Author | Jef Huysmans,João P. Nogueira |
| Date | 01 June 2024 |
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https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231185569
European Journal of
International Relations
2024, Vol. 30(2) 359 –381
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/13540661231185569
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Against ‘resistance’? Towards
a conception of differential
politics in international political
sociology
Jef Huysmans
Queen Mary University of London, UK
João P. Nogueira
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Abstract
‘Resistance’ and related concepts like ‘counter-conduct’, ‘counter-politics’ and
‘revolution’ continue to gain an intense interest and use. At the same time, however,
we observe an intensified questioning of the concept of resistance and in particular
the logic of negativity that it inscribes into our understanding of difference and its
politics. Engaging with contributions that have pushed the concept of resistance and its
dialectic logic of negativity to its limits in order to explore what it yields for analysing
different political practices, we look for new interventions into modes of thinking about
critical politics. To that purpose, we introduce the concepts of ‘folds’ and ‘folding’. They
allow for understanding how differences work not through opposition to something
but through enveloping in dynamic structures of multiple connections that generate
a specific social field. We speak loosely of ‘against resistance?’ not as a claim that the
concept of resistance has or should be moved to the dustbin of history but rather to
argue for experimenting in International Political Sociology with conceptions of non-
dialectic critical politics that work in a perspective of co-existence in heterogeneity and
multiplicity and the conditions for openness and social possibility that it creates.
Keywords
Resistance, negativity, critical politics, folds, foldings, Deleuze, international political
sociology
Corresponding author:
Jef Huysmans, Queen Mary University of London, London, E1 4NS, UK.
Email: jef.huysmans@qmul.ac.uk
1185569EJT0010.1177/13540661231185569European Journal of International RelationsHuysmans and Nogueira
research-article2023
Original Article
360 European Journal of International Relations 30(2)
Introduction
Recent trends in world politics have instigated a renewed interest in the nature and rele-
vance of various forms of contestation and resistance, as renewed debates on insurgen-
cies, rebellions and revolution indicate (Dean, 2019; Faramelli, 2018; Lawson, 2019;
Selbin, 2019). This current interest in resistance comes into International Relations (IR)
and international political sociology against a background of at least half a century of
intense intellectual revisiting, critique and crisis of what is called resistance and a multi-
plicity of practical experimenting with various modes of critical politics that do not fit
the mobilisation of a historical subject or tightly coordinated and organised social or
political movements. Resistance has been disconnected from totalising horizons and
world histories leading to foregrounding situated and heterogeneous practices that can-
not be aggregated into a global historical process.
The concept of resistance, however, limits analyses of such de-centred and heteroge-
neous social processes by integrating them into an opposition to a supposedly coherent
order such as the world economy or neoliberal governmentalities as a condition for the
production of critique (Bonanno, 2017; Coleman, 2013). Conceptualised as a negative
force within a horizon of social transformation of which it is a necessary condition,
resistance remains dependent on what it opposes, limiting the possibilities of affirmative
and creative politics, in particular under conditions of highly dispersed agency (Hoy,
2004). The intensification of interest in resistance and related concepts goes hand in hand
with an explicit questioning of whether the concept of resistance can indeed be the
default or baseline concepts through which to organise a critical analytics of the politics
of difference as they are actualised today (Checchi, 2021). The latter has invited experi-
menting with reconceptualisations of ‘resistance’ that push the concept to its very limits
and with creating new conceptions of non-dialectic critical politics that work in a per-
spective of co-existence in heterogeneity and multiplicity and the conditions for ‘open-
ness instead of closure of social possibility’ (Connolly, 1995) it creates.
In this article, we seek to contribute to this conceptual experimenting. We reflect on
how resistance structures thought on critical politics and the limits it imposes to thinking
the political differently. We speak loosely of ‘against resistance?’ not as a claim that the
concept of resistance has or should be moved to the dustbin of history but rather to
express that ‘resistance’ is not to be taken as a default concept of critical politics in inter-
national political sociology. Engaging with contributions that have pushed the concept of
resistance to its limits in order to explore what it yields for analysing different political
practices, we look for new interventions into modes of thinking about everyday struggles
and co-existence. To that purpose, we introduce the concepts of ‘folds’ and ‘folding’ as
articulated in the late work of Gilles Deleuze. They allow for a distinctive understanding
of how differences work not through opposition to something but through enveloping in
dynamic structures of multiple connections that generate a specific social field. In doing
so, we seek to introduce a mode of thinking critical politics (a) outside of the logic of
negativity, which is so central to the concept of resistance, and (b) as a continuous de-
centring of political practice that operates transversally rather than dialectically.
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