Organizer: The University of Michigan Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Description:

Both historically and today, most acts of resistance to systems of power, hierarchy, and exploitation do not take the form of social movements with names, official-holders, flags, rules of order, headquarters, and initials (e.g., NAACP, ACLU, BLM, AfD). There are at least two reasons, Scott proposes, that help explain this fact. First, historically open resistance for most of the world’s population, living in undemocratic settings, is dangerous, even fatal. When it occurs, it is an act of desperation. Second, even in relatively permissive political settings, the transaction costs of creating formal organizations are often so great that smaller, informal, and individual acts of resistance are simpler to pull off and often safer as well. The aggregation of thousands of such acts of resistance (e.g., desertion, squatting, poaching) may, over time, achieve more at a de facto level than open, publicly-declared resistance.

Click here to register.