Social Science Research Council

Social Science Research Council and the Fond d'Analyse des Sociétés Politiques

June 15-16, 2004
Workshop Summary

The Social Science Research Council, in cooperation with the Fond d’Analyse des Sociétés Politiques, organized a two-day meeting to consider how opposition, resistance, and dissent form within and against empires, imperial power, and hegemony. The discussion produced a number of useful insights and frames for understanding these phenomena, which will help inform three remaining SSRC workshops in this series. The participants are listed at the end of this summary document.

The purpose of the workshop was to take a broad, historical view of how forms of dissent, opposition, and resistance take shape in the context of empire, imperialism, and hegemony. Taxonomies of these concepts were kept at bay. By exploring how various patterns of opposition arise to contest imperial forms of domination in different historical circumstances, we are likely to be better able to see current forms—both of hegemonic power and the points where it encounters resistance, and how effective dissent coalesces.

The historical dimensions unveil configurations of power and resistance of greater complexity and gradual evolution than briefer views reveal. As one participant noted, the current situation in Iraq looks less strange if one regarded the force fields of the previous two hundred years in that part of the world. The presentations in the workshop consistently reinforced this useful observation: opposition often unfolds from unexpected quarters and for unforseen reasons, with shifting allegiances and inchoate ideologies. What appeared to be a cadre and code of obedient service to the imperial center in one generation could be the incubator of revolution two generations later. Dissent, opposition, resistance often is depicted in terms of nationalism v. colonialism, but this, too, is partial. Many expressions of resistance were transnational (anti-slavery, proselyting religions, etc.), and nationalism itself could merely follow on a colonial project that was failing, abandoned, or purposefully reformed. Hegemonic power also emerged from oppositional movements against empire.

The nature and purpose of imperial governance shift, and shape the forms of resistance and dissent, although this relationship is not readily discernable. Empire itself is not a system of total domination, and the forms of colonialism in the 16th to the early 20th centuries evolved to reflect the difficulties of taming the colonies as many colonizers had intended. Did attempts at basic transformations—in social organization, religion, epistemology, labor, etc.—likely lead to certain kinds of resistance? Did custodial colonialism, or the even more indirect rule of, for example, the Ottomans, advance fewer provocations? Did attempts at reform, most prominently, the extension of citizenship, raise the expectations of the colonized and induce new demands on the imperial center?

Seven forms of dissent were articulated at the outset that, while not intended to be definitive, offered a useful typology. Briefly, and crudely, they are:

1. Militant opposition, including armed resistance, to conquering and occupying armies in the name of some community. Empires reacted variously, sometimes recruiting some to fight local kings, often giving local elites a share of the gains.

2. The myriad ways in which local peoples were incorporated into the imperial system could gradually and subtly transform that system, not least by the nurturing of networks that made demands on imperial resources.

3. Transcultural or diasporic networks could be the vehicle of opposition and demands, while also providing a separate space or position from traditional or colonial. Religion, in particular, was a typical form of this, as John Peel and Enseng Ho demonstrate, and religions could support or undermine empire.

4. Universalistic ideologies and organizations, such as Christianity and Islam, but also liberalism and socialism, among other possibilities, which provided ideas enabling transnational networks to oppose imperial forms.

5. Creole nationalism—the European settlers of what became the United States being a prime example—sometimes began as a reformist project that turned into nationalism when reforms failed and further political turmoil from below loomed.

6. Rival empires became vehicles of opposition and change—opportunities to shape alternatives.

7. Nationalist movements of the kind we became so familiar in the latter 20th century.

Perhaps the key perspective of the conference was to view dissent and resistance as one should also view the political, social, and cultural organization of empire: as a fluid set of relationships, ideationally opportunistic, influenced by myriad forces within and from outside the empire. Much of imperial power is exercised through the everyday expressions of power in the ways people live, the practices and discourses of life—this is the “vulgarization” of power—and dissent is exercised within the workings of this exercise of power, some of which are pre-colonial power relationships that have been integrated into the newer imperial system.

An example of how these relationships invert dynamically is the priyayi in Java, a “service class” of the Dutch colonial state (and to an earlier aristocracy) that became a revolutionary elite in the 19th century. Their social need to forge an identity distinct from the blood aristocracy led to an ascetic ethos that served them well in terms of moral power—moral autonomy that was immune to Dutch history—when revolutionary conditions emerged. In this, the priyayi are an example of how imperial systems are vulnerable to local elites who become integrated into structures of governance.

Other examples of this abound—the history of the Caucasus offers several in different eras—and while it may be obvious that the locally empowered elites would be the most likely group to engineer resistance, rebellion, or other forms of opposition, the ways in which these protests took shape are crucial. It was noted, for example, that in the different periods of dissent in the Ottoman empire, often stirred by different classes with different interests, the dissenters had to find a language of protest from a cultural repertoire. The tension between inclusion and exclusion is perhaps most succinctly grasped in view of the local elites who are sometimes the representatives of the imperial power, sometimes the self-appointed representatives of the subjected; sometimes act on the principles of empire and sometimes reject them; and so on. Locating the tipping point between these alternatives—atrocities, class interests, challenges from other empires?—is among the fraught questions explaining dissent and rebellion.

There were also fateful relationships spatially, notably, between dissent in the periphery (such as self-determination movements) and at the center. This underscores the significance of networks—whether kinship, commercial, religious, or others—in the development of effective opposition. The Hadrami kinship network throughout the Indian Ocean was a significant lever in opposing British imperialism. Religious networks, transnational in scope, were the essential form of organizing the anti-slavery movements of the 18th and 19th centuries. The Communist nomenclatura in the Caucasus, ethnically based, was an example of how imperially created networks became vehicles of later opposition. More contemporary resistance linked those in the dominions with a moral protest in the metropole.

Notably, among the debates engendered between the dominions and the central imperial power were those of citizenship, either citizenship in empire, or citizenship (and sovereignty) outside it. Imperial projects and state formation were closely integrated in many cases, Russia and America among them, and thus the political status conferred during expansion was a crucial determinant of the imperial state itself. France extended citizenship to a number of its conquered, which stimulated various kinds of demands, from those in the West Indies, including the rebellion in Haiti in the late 18th century, to those of the Algerian war. The pivotal issue at stake in the European expansion across North America (apart from war itself) was sovereignty, the giving and the taking and the dividing of it, its gradual erosion and confinement, for indigenous peoples. Pontiac’s war against the British was significantly a reaction to imperial abuses, and this very militancy made the British rethink the nature of sovereignty and citizenship. When the “creole nationalism” of Washington et al succeeded, it created in London a crisis over political representation that resonated powerfully through the debate on slavery. Resistance and dissent in many cases spurred pinball-like actions and reactions within and between different imperial configurations, one affecting another, sometimes intentionally as dissident rebels were recruited by one empire to subvert another.

Dissent against empire arrived in cultural outbursts, too, although the force fields produce crosscurrents rather than a uniform pull. Consider the use of knowledge. The European dominance of Africa included a siphoning off of knowledge (of art, culture, and science via artifacts and other data), a reconceptualizing of what the data “were,” as well as a colonial invention of tradition—clearly, measures of social control as well as rationalizations for imperialism. The attempts by Africans to recapture history (and to reject narratives of nationalism), tradition, and indigenous knowledge systems can be seen as forms of cultural resistance. Religions introduced alongside or as part of empire-building projects acted both as liberating ideologies and organizations, and as handmaidens of imperialism. World religions, namely, Christianity and Islam, came from “somewhere else” and were therefore more powerful platforms for dissent than traditional religions were; local needs for empowerment— and whether a particular religion “works” locally—are thus important for understanding where such religions were adopted. Religions can be treated by colonists, local elites, and resistance movements alike as sources of power. Religion is source of security as well, central to the problem of spiritual insecurity, due in part to the disruption and transformation of ancestral power by colonial conquest and evangelizing. But it is also important to recall that religion often worked hand-in-glove with imperialism, as with the Russian Orthodox Church in the Caucasus, or indeed Islam’s coincident expansion.

The cultural and political aspects of opposition were integrated powerfully in the Algeria independence movements of the 1950s and ’60s. The Cold War shaped the ideas and actions of some key players—the Communist Party in particular—which saw in nationalist struggles an entry point for the United States and saw the status of Algeria as similar to non-Russian “republics” of the USSR. The end of French colonialism in Indochina, the Suez crisis, and Pan-Arab nationalism were added backdrops that colored the Algerian drama. Political parties were largely divided over Algeria. This context, perhaps, permitted French and Algerian intellectuals, periodicals, and clergy to be especially influential, invoking cultural tropes like the Resistance or human rights. One can regard the Algerian situation as demonstrating how different global forces were in play—like great tectonic plates creating new ruptures and outcrops—as indeed was a panoply of forms of resistance and dissent. It exerted a strong influence more broadly, most notably through Fanon’s writings and his impeaching the French narrative of colonialism.

Among the vital questions raised is whether those who mobilize resistance and dissent do so with empire in view: what is their frame of reference, and in what ways does it matter? How do people come to view themselves as a community of dissenters, as anti-slavery advocates did? In this process, too, in what ways are demands or claims against empire articulated specifically as moral claims, and on what basis? This process of dissent formation, so to speak, necessitates (as does empire itself) will, capability, and ethics. In what ways are dissenters able to alter the “rules of the game,” appealing to or using structures of legitimacy that move outside those also used by imperial power? To what extent are repertoires of dissent dependent on goals: does reform of the terms or operability of hegemony always imply different kinds of actions, ideology, and organizing than goals of outright resistance or emancipation? How does one lead to the next?

Empires, and the relations between and among them in their various forms, should be seen as a system, with global politics reorganizing itself over time as systems of empire in particular kinds of order, one giving rise to another. There are “spaces in between” where resistance forms, where for example world religions began. There are shifting spaces for the center and the periphery, for populations that move from one to the other, linking empires, participating both in empire formation and in dissent. Sovereignty itself in these systems is not “crisp,” it is porous, as is the sense of social belonging, and these relations shape the possibilities and modes of dissent as well. Collective action is contingent on this internal and external ordering of hegemonic relations.

Participants

Adam Ashforth, Princeton University
Karen Barkey, Columbia University
Jean-François Bayart, CERI-CNRS
Romain Bertrand, CERI-FNSP
Omar Carlier, Université Paris X Nanterre
Frederic Cooper, New York University
Gregory Evans Dowd, University of Michigan
Martin Evans, University of Portsmouth
Thornike Gordadze, Institut d’Etudes Politiques
Enseng Ho, Harvard University (absent due to illness)
Dani Nabudere, Afrika Study Centre and University of Mbale, Uganda
John Richard Oldfield, University of Southampton
JDY Peel, School of Oriental and African Studies
Jan Nederveen Pieterse, University of Illinois
Janet Roitman, CNRS/MALD
John Tirman, SSRC

The conference was held at the Maison de l’Amerique Latine, Paris, France. Thanks are due to Petra Ticha of SSRC and Laurence Moureau of FASOPO for their indispensable help in organizing the meeting, thanks are also due to the MacArthur Foundation for its financial support of the project.