Resistance and Repression: understanding and engaging contested system change in politics and the academy

Abstract:  

In universities, nation states, and institutions, powerful groups consolidate power while others struggle for a place at the table. Yet people belong to multiple, co-evolving groups—professions, organisations, nations—and interact across diverse groups and goals in patterned ways as they move through time, places, and social spaces. Within any single contest, factional dynamics emerge that are integral to intergroup contestation and align with intersectional divides: Elites who claim to govern for the whole are disproportionately drawn from certain subgroups and govern in their narrower interests. Groups also may contest their relative disadvantage in one comparative context while cementing their advantage in another.  Seemingly opposed groups—resistance movements versus repressive regimes, or progressive versus reactionary parties—can nonetheless empower each other relative to the broader population, cooperating to reproduce shared ideologies and practices around democratic resilience or backsliding, peace or violence, and subordination or equality. The concept of political plasticity is relevant to these patterned mixes of competition and cooperation: change occurs faster in some behaviours and norms than others. Norm and identity/relationship changes are key drivers, and because people are embedded in complex relational networks, volatility and cyclicality result. What then? 

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