Making and Breaking Families in Danish Nation-Building

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A guest post from Malene H. Jacobsen. Malene is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Geography, Maynooth University, Ireland. Grounded in feminist political geography, Malene’s work focuses on war, displacement, and the lived experience of refuge. Over the years, her research has been supported by the US National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Danish Institute in Damascus. Malene has published peer-reviewed articles and chapters on issues related to forced migration, citizenship, and feminist methodologies. Funded by the Irish Research Council, her current research project “Precarious Protection: Syrian and Somali Struggles for Refuge in Denmark” explores the legal shift towards temporary refugee protection in Denmark. 

Babies, birth rates, and borders. Like many other countries with declining populations, Denmark has become increasingly anxious about falling birth rates and their repercussions for the viability of the country’s famed welfare state. To bolster fertility rates, several campaigns have been created to encourage young women and heterosexual couples to have (more) children, preferably early in their lives. For instance, in 2015, the Danish Public Broadcaster DR produced a Saturday evening program called “Bang for Denmark” (Knald for Danmark), which focused on how Danes could become more reproductive. The same year, the municipality of Copenhagen launched the “Count your eggs” (Tæl dine æg) campaign to encourage women to have children earlier in their lives. In 2016, the Danish travel company Spies aired commercials under the title “Do it for Denmark!” Using crude terms and questionable statistics, these commercials encouraged Danes to go on short getaways to Paris or to take active sport holidays to foreign destinations to increase their fitness and desire for sex. Spies linked foreign travel with fertility, claiming that 10% of Danes are conceived abroad. While acknowledging its own commercial interests in promoting foreign travel, Spies urged young Danes to “do it”, if not for the nation (fædreland) then for “mom”.

These commercials presented a specific imaginary of the Danish family. Spies used white actors and portrayed an idealized version of heterosexual coupledom by showing upper-middle class leisure activities including traveling to foreign destinations, doing yoga, playing tennis, and dining out. “Doing it for Denmark”, then, means (re)producing the white, heteronormative, bourgeois nuclear family. And these efforts seem to be working. Several of these campaigns claim that birth rates are on the upswing, even if they have yet to reach the state’s desired levels. However, Denmark’s celebration of fertility and the family does not extend to all intimate ties. Alongside its growing obsession with babies and birthrates, the project of reproducing the white, heteronormative, bourgeois nuclear family has also involved a range of policies and practices that regulate, separate, and preclude the intimate ties of racialized, colonized, queered, and other subaltern peoples.

If reproduction, as Sophie Lewis[i] has elaborated, is an irreducibly raced and classed project of social engineering, I argue that in the Danish context this project has long been and continues to be a distinctly geopolitical project of bordering and intimate separation. I develop this claim by exploring the forced separation of kin across borders using two examples, namely the repatriation of Danish citizen children currently living in prison camps in Syria and the Danish state’s attempt to strip Syrian refugees of their protection status. As I explore below, these examples remain hotly contested by politicians, NGOs, and legal practitioners, yet are rarely seen as connected. By bringing them together and situating them in Denmark’s long history of empire, I de-exceptionalize them as somehow isolated and unprecedented, and instead show how they are part of a broader project of racialized nation building.

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Judith Butler Goes to Norway

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A guest post from Ida Roland Birkvad. Ida is a PhD student in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. Her thesis interrogates the concept of Aryanism, which she understands as a set of contingent and contradictory relations connecting India and Europe. Her broader research interests include global intellectual thought and history, and postcolonial theory.

Butler, Judith. 2020. Kjønn, Performativitet og Sårbarhet. Preface by Stine Helena Bang Svendsen. Translated by Lars Holm-Hansen.Oslo: Cappelen Damm, Cappelens Upopulære Skrifter. (147 pages)

For the very first time, the work of philosopher and queer theorist Judith Butler is being translated into Norwegian, in a publication encompassing extensive excerpts from her books Gender Trouble (1990), Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) and Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (2018).

Why is it that we had to wait until the year 2020 to be able to read Butler in Norwegian? One way to think about that question might be to interrogate the unheimlich nature of her work in a Norwegian context. How does Butler’s theories of the performativity and fiction of gender fare in Norway, a country where the most successful feminist movements have been those predominantly reformist in nature, concentrated around state-centric demands for ‘gender equality’? How is Butler read in a country whose feminist imaginaries can be said to be particularly ‘womb-centric’, with an often inbuilt ontological scepticism of genderbending impetuses such as Butler’s (Jacobsen in Bendixsen, Bringslid, and Vike 2017)? Poststructuralism, the theoretical impulse most central to her work, has also been comparatively late to arrive in Norway (Riiser Gundersen 2016). And when it appeared, along with its queer theoretical descendants, it was highly contested (Danbolt 2012).

This piece invites us to consider these questions, thinking both with Butler and her critics to examine the potentials and pitfalls of contemporary Norwegian political discourses on the relationship between political emancipation and ‘the body’.

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‘Indian Migration and Empire’: response from Radhika Mongia

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This is the final post in our symposium on Radhika Mongia’s Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State, in which Radhika responds to her interlocutors.

Each of my interlocutors foregrounds and engages with different aspects of my book, Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State. In this response, I want to dwell on four interrelated elements they stress: namely, (1) the distinction between free and forced migration, their differential management in migration regimes and the current incarnations of this distinction; (2) the place of processes of racialisation with regard to migration regimes, to understandings of citizenship and to the contours of nationhood; (3) the enduring Eurocentrism of certain disciplinary presuppositions; and, lastly, (4) the relationship between the colonial state and the modern state, that lies at the heart of the book.

One of the central concerns of the book, as I noted in my introductory post, is to interrogate the remaking of ‘freedom’ in the nineteenth century though a consideration of the distinction between ‘free’ and ‘unfree’/‘forced’ migration and their differential regulation. I unpack this distinction in relation to the 1834 abolition of slavery in the British empire and the state-supervised movement of Indian indentured labour that followed in its wake. Slavery and the memory of the slave trade (the latter abolished in 1807) were at the heart of the contentious legal debates on how, and whether, to regulate Indian migration. Animating these debates was an abiding concern with how to legally distinguish slavery from freedom, violation from volition, coercion from consent, and thereby not only enable, but facilitate, a movement that could be coded as ‘free’. At the centre of the regime that regulated indenture was the appearance of a renovated ‘free labour contract’ that elevated the metaphysical notion of ‘consent’ (a variant of ‘intension’ or of ‘will’), diminished concerns with ‘fairness’ and radically transformed understandings of ‘freedom’. Both Luke and Bridget draw out aspects of this theme and how it endures in our present, by directing our attention to how current migration regimes are also structured around the notions of ‘free’ or ‘forced’ movements. But now, as they point out, we see a twist. If, in the nineteenth century, the concern was to facilitate ‘free’ movement (to avoid charges of a second slave trade), the rationale of our prevailing dispensation is to prohibit ‘free’ movement. Currently, in many national-state spaces, it is only those who according to always-shrinking governmental criteria can be characterised as ‘forced’ or, in the new parlance, as ‘refugees’, who are allowed to move. Others, many more, understood as ‘economic migrants’, who attempt intentionally (and, thus, ‘freely’ and ‘willingly’) to escape the depredations of their circumstances are illegalised, rendered interlopers. Reading Luke and Bridget’s engagements alongside my argument concerning ‘historicising freedom’, it is evident that we have seen yet another profound remaking of freedom in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—one committed to a sedentary bias that demands that ‘freedom’ is best practiced in your ‘assigned’ place. Or, as Nandita Sharma puts it, increasingly, migrants are conceived as ‘people out of place’. Moreover, as both Luke and Bridget point out, a discourse of ‘protection’ underlies and makes possible the current distinction between ‘free’ (economic) and ‘forced’ (refugee) migration. It was precisely a discourse of protection of, on the one hand, Indian indentured migrants and, on the other, the formerly enslaved in the colonies of Mauritius and the Caribbean, that enabled state regulation of Indian indentured migration. Thus, returning to the details of how this regime was put in place (as I do in my book), serves as an important lesson in thinking about current articulations.

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‘Indian Migration and Empire:’ comment by Nadine El-Enany

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The fourth post in our symposium on Radhika Mongia’s Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State is by Nadine El-Enany, who is Reader in Law at Birkbeck School of Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Race and Law. She is author of(B)ordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire (Manchester University Press, 2020), co-author of Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto, 2021) and co-editor of After Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response (Pluto, 2019).

It is a pleasure to be part of this symposium, especially because Radhika’s work has been such an inspiration to me. Unfortunately for me, her book came out just as I was finishing my own book, (B)ordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire. Though I managed to include some engagement with her work, I wished I’d had her book when writing my own. I have learned so much from it and can see various exciting links and possibilities for conversations with my own. For that reason, I’m particularly glad to have a chance to be part of this symposium. 

Radhika’s book takes the apparent ‘unremarkability’ of the monopoly states exercise over the movement of people and shows how, in actual fact, there is much to be said about this status quo that might lead us to rethinking and rearticulating scholarly and, indeed, activist approaches towards migration in a context of violently protected national boundaries. For me, one of the most salient contributions of the book is the revelation of the relationship between the metropolitan or modern state and the colonial state – in particular, the way in which the former has been shaped by the latter. The contours of Anglo-European nation-states, which once had empires ranging in scope and size, are historically contingent, having been moulded in the course of the formation and implementation of colonial migration regulations. In tracing the transition ‘from a world dominated by empire-states into a world dominated by nation-states’ (p. 1), Radhika thus points to a ‘fundamental colonial genealogy of the modern (nation-)state, in both the metropoles and the colonies’ (p. 3).

Radhika and I share an interest in drawing out and subjecting to analysis ‘the formation of key techniques and technologies for regulating migration’ (p. 3). For Radhika, such a focus enables the illumination of the relation between ‘patterns of migration’ which would otherwise be ‘held distinct’ (p. 3). Crucially, this approach allows for the undoing of ‘methodological nationalism’, which, as Radhika writes, ‘sees the national as the privileged site and scale for investigating migration, and, thereby, misunderstands how definitions of the “national” are necessarily implicated in, and emerge from, non-national, cross-statal, transcolonial, and inter- and intra-imperial forces’ (p. 3).

To my mind, this is a crucial project – to begin to unsettle the methodological nationalism which pervades mainstream scholarship on migration. Those of us who teach migration law from a critical perspective, will be familiar with the wide-eyed looks from students who are asked to question the legitimacy of the supposedly sovereign states they have come to take for granted, both as having always existed, or always destined to somehow come into existence, and crucially, as the only way of organising human life politically and geographically. However, when we begin to chisel away at this seemingly unshakeable status quo, as Radhika’s book does so powerfully, the geographical and political remnants of empire begin to surface, and like re-found jigsaw puzzle pieces, create a much clearer picture of seemingly separate sovereign nation-states as, in fact, embedded in their colonial pasts, and I would argue, suffering from a crisis of legitimacy.

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‘Indian Migration and Empire’: comment by Sanjay Seth

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The third response in our symposium on Radhika Mongia’s Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State is by Sanjay Seth, who is Professor of Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Marxist Theory and Nationalist Politics: The Case of Colonial India (Sage, 1995), Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Duke University Press, 2007 and Oxford University Press, 2008) and, most recently, Beyond Reason: Postcolonial Theory and the Social Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Radhika’s Indian Migration and Empire is subtitled ‘A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State’, and part of the book’s argument is that while it is assumed that control of migration ‘is a defining, definitive, unchanging, and unchangeable element of (state) sovereignty’ (p. 7), in fact control of migration within the British empire occurred late and helped to produce state sovereignty. In making this argument Radhika traces how, in the wake of the abolition of slavery in 1834, the British empire played an active role in facilitating the movement of its Indian citizens into its ex-slave plantation colonies as much needed indentured labour, and developed elaborate governmental machinery to do so; by contrast, the movement of peoples other than indentured labourers within the British empire was largely unregulated and not constrained. It was in fact the white dominions of the empire that sought to restrict and regulate the entry of non-white imperial subjects, finally achieving their aim following the Komagata Maru incident in 1914. It was only after this that the freedom of British subjects to move from one part of the empire to another was abandoned, and a passport system allowing race-based restriction was introduced. Mongia concludes, ‘control over mobility does not occur after the formation of the nation-state … the very development of the nation-state occurred, in part, to control mobility across the axis of the nation/race’ (p. 139, emphasis in original). The modern sovereign state thus has a colonial and imperial genealogy.

komagata maru

This book is a distinguished addition to a growing literature that requires us to recognise that the conventional picture of the sovereign state as the foundation of certain practices has things the wrong way around. Another recent example is Tarak Barkawi’s Soldiers of Empire (2017), which similarly challenges the assumption that modern wars between states have been fought by the armies of these states, such that we may assume a ‘sovereign territorial package of state, army, and society’. In fact, this has been the exception rather than the rule. The armies that fought in most of the colonial campaigns of the coloniser countries, and in the world wars, were imperial armies, most notably in the cases of France and Britain. The British Indian army numbered some one million men during World War I, and 10% of the soldiers who fought for the British Empire in this war were in the British Indian army; in World War II the Indian army comprised more than two million members and operated across three continents. The nation-state army is in significant measure an outcome of World War II, rather than the basis of it and the mode in which it was fought; it was only well after that war that national armies and sovereign states became isomorphous, and thus, as Barkawi colourfully expresses it, this war ‘consumed one world order and spat out another’.

Although her book crosses many disciplinary boundaries, Radhika writes, I think, above all as a historian (as do I, though interestingly, we are respectively in departments of sociology and politics), and part of the strength of the book is the varied and dispersed archive upon which it is able to draw. But the import of her argument, as she recognises and seeks to develop it, applies to all disciplines and forms of intellectual activity which take the sovereign, territorial state as a given – that is to say, almost all social science and humanities disciplines.

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‘Indian Migration and Empire’: comment by Bridget Anderson

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The second response in our symposium on Radhika Mongia’s Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State is from Bridget Anderson, Professor of Mobilities, Migration and Citizenship at the University of Bristol and Director of its Specialist Research Institute Migration Mobilities Bristol.  Her interests include citizenship, nationalism, immigration enforcement (including ‘trafficking’), and care labour. Her books include Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Controls (OUP, 2013). She has worked closely with migrants’ organisations, trades unions and legal practitioners at local, national and international levels.

This is a phenomenal book. At only 150 pages (minus the copious footnotes) it condenses detailed and meticulous archival and legal research into a ground-breaking analysis of the making of modern states. It offers a new critique of methodological nationalism that is, to quote Antoinette Burton’s blurb, ‘A corrective to facile transnational arguments’, but importantly it moves beyond critique to understanding how the production of difference lies at the heart of state-making. As Radhika puts it: ‘The histories presented … point, unmistakably, to the lineaments of a world produced through processes of relationality and coproduction, not autochthony’ (p. 147).

Like any good title, the title of Radhika’s book is the concentration of her argument. Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State analyses how the global organisation of the world into nation-states is not a consequence of the diffusion of Westphalian states over the globe, but rather was a co-production of contingency and muddle, a response to particular historical circumstances, not the simple application of doctrines and laws to already existing nations and territories. The book explores the key distinction between imperial states and the facilitation of movement and nation-states and the logic of constraint, arguing that it is not simply that these different state formations give rise to different kinds of responses to migration, but that attempts to control human movement are critical to the development of contemporary state forms, even as these contemporary state forms continue to be entangled in colonial logics.

People’s movements and the huge efforts to govern it are, quite literally, world-making, shaping how ‘migrants’ and ‘citizens’ alike are governed. In her chapter ‘The Migration of “Free” Labor: Contracting Freedom’ Radhika examines how the importance of being able to characterise the movement of indentured labourers as ‘free’, in contrast to the slave trade, gave rise to the emphasis on consent as the distinctive element of freedom in contract law. This is of huge significance to liberal ideas of freedom. Hagar Kotef has asked how it is that although the lack of ‘external impediments’ to physical mobility was foundational to liberal ideas of freedom in classical liberalism, in contemporary debates on freedom, physical movement is no longer central. Radhika demonstrates the key role of indentured workers in this. In the nineteenth century, state intervention in the regulation of the movement of indentured workers was, in line with this ideal of freedom, viewed as an exception to the assumption of freedom of movement. In order for it to be rendered acceptable including, crucially, to differentiate it from slavery, the control over movement claimed to protect not only the formerly enslaved and the general population but also the workers themselves. This has been fully integrated along with all its contradictions into contemporary understandings of immigration controls and enforcement. The distinction between forced and free movement is fundamental to global mobility controls as it structures the differentiation between asylum and economic migration. Significant restrictions are typically placed on economic migrants – they may be tied to employer, sector or region; they may not be allowed to marry, required to live in particular premises, deported if they do not comply with employer demands, subjected to inferior terms and conditions in comparison with citizens – yet still this is entirely un-ironically constructed as ‘free’. These restrictions can be so onerous that in some circumstances people avoid regularisation exercises or prefer undocumented crossings. Yet these restrictions may be cast as protection, not only protecting the labour market for citizen workers, but also protecting migrants from exploitation. More specifically, anti-trafficking laws typically represent border enforcement as a means of rescuing migrants and saving them from ‘modern slavery’. Processes of identifying this ‘slavery’ can stretch the notion of consent to breaking point and rely on state paternalism and migrant voluntarism. As state regulation of indenture was justified in terms of the ‘necessary ignorance’ of colonial subjects so anti-trafficking policies are justified in terms of the ‘vulnerability’ of migrant women. The entanglement of the colonial and the contemporary are clearly illustrated: the lived contradictions of freedom and contract are often pushed to their limits in immigration controls.

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‘Indian Migration and Empire’: comment by Luke de Noronha

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The first response in our symposium on Radhika Mongia’s Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State is from Luke de Noronha, who is an academic and writer working at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation at University College London (UCL). He is the author of Deporting Black Britons: Portraits of Deportation to Jamaica, and producer of the podcast Deportation Discs. He has written widely on the politics of immigration, racism and deportation for the Guardian, Verso blogs, VICE, Red Pepper, openDemocracy, The New Humanist, and Ceasefire Magazine. He lives in London and is on Twitter @LukeEdeNoronha.

What I want to do in this short piece is to draw out some of the political implications of the arguments in Indian Migration and Empire, and to discuss how Mongia’s analysis of Indian migration from 1834 to the early twentieth century, resonates with and informs our present (or not).

Freedom and consent

The first chapter on indentured migration explores the emergence of the ‘contract’ as a guarantor of consent and freedom, particularly for indentured migrants whose movement had to be constructed as ‘free’. This was especially important because the system of indenture began in 1834, the year that Britain abolished slavery across the Empire. As Mongia puts it: ‘Since indentured labor was transported to replace slave labor, the primary concern animating these early regulations was to ensure that the migration was “free” and distinguishable from the slave trade’ (p. 16). She goes on: ‘the debates occasioned by Indian migration in the wake of abolition were one crucial site where we witness the rise of “consent” as a definitive element of freedom, which characterizes nineteenth-century transformations in contract law’ (p. 16). In short, if we sign a contract, we are free.

This distinction between freedom and unfreedom is central to liberalism: people should not be coerced or enslaved; they should be free to choose, even if that freedom amounts to little more than freedom to choose to be exploited by one boss or another. As Mongia explains, this means that slavery is simply the absence of contract, and with indenture, ‘freedom was merely the ritual of consent to a contract, severed from the material conditions it stipulated’ (p. 48, emphasis in original).

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Symposium On Radhika Mongia’s ‘Indian Migration And Empire: A Colonial Genealogy Of The Modern State’

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The Disorder of Things is pleased to host a symposium on Radhika Mongia’s Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State (Duke University Press, 2018 and Permanent Black Press, 2019), the introduction to which can be read here. Radhika Mongia is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at York University, Toronto. Her current research examines recent transformations in the citizenship regime in India. In this introductory post, she outlines some of the key arguments of the book.

This set of blog posts on my book, Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State, is the result of a panel held at Birkbeck, University of London, in the halcyon days before the Covid-19 pandemic. My very sincere thanks to Sarah Keenan and, especially, Nadine El-Enany, co-directors of the Centre for Race and Law at Birkbeck, for organising the panel, to the panelists, Bridget Anderson, Luke de Noronha, Nadine El-Enany and Sanjay Seth, for their generous and generative readings of the book, and to the audience for their astute engagements. Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to capture the warmth and conviviality of the evening in these remarks. My thanks also to the forum provided by The Disorder of Things, to respond in more depth, and with more care, to the panel’s provocations, which I do in the closing post. In this introductory post, I briefly outline some of the chief arguments of the book.

Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State is an investigation into the history of state control over migration. At the heart of the book are two main questions: First what histories can we chart of the increasing and incremental state control over migration that culminate, by the early decades of the twentieth century, in a state monopoly over migration? Second, what can these histories tell us about state formation, inter-state relations, state sovereignty and modern subject constitution? The book considers colonial Indian migration from about 1834, when Britain abolished slavery in its plantation colonies, up to about 1914, when, with the onset of World War I, the world confronted a new geopolitical reality. In the course of less than a century, we see profound transformations in the logics, rationales, institutions and legal forms of state control over mobility. My analysis argues that the formation of colonial migration regulations was dependent upon, accompanied by and generative of profound changes in normative understandings of the modern state. Traversing a diverse array of British colonial formations, including Mauritius, the Caribbean, India, Canada and South Africa, the book foregrounds the analytical modality of co-production to inquire into the relational processes, across these varied sites, that produced a state monopoly over migration. This monopoly, accompanied by the ‘nationalisation’ of migration, is an integral part of a fundamental shift, in the twentieth century, from a world composed of empire-states to a world composed of nation-states.

Mongia Cover Small

Studies of Indian indentured migration note that the system followed the abolition of slavery. However, with rare exceptions, the scholarship has simply seen abolition as a mere backdrop and not adequately examined what the regulation of indenture can tell us about state (trans)formation or how indenture was implicated in redrawing the contours of the central antinomy that haunted and shaped the nineteenth century: the distinction between freedom and slavery. By tracking how slavery was at the heart of the contentious legal debates on how to facilitate Indian migration in the aftermath of abolition, the book shows how various features of ‘freedom’ were thoroughly recalibrated. In particular, we see a decidedly profound change in what constituted a valid ‘free labour’ contract, where the nebulous, metaphysical notion of ‘consent’ becomes the most significant characteristic of the contract and of freedom—dispensing with notions of ‘fairness’ or ‘equality-in-exchange’, as minor elements. In other words, the regulation of Indian indentured migration that followed in the wake of abolition would irrevocably transform both the meaning of freedom and the extent of state authority in regulating migration.

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Seeding Territory

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The conclusion of our symposium on Chris Rossdale’s Resisting Militarism: Direct Action and the Politics of Subversion (Edinburgh, 2019), from Chris himself. Chris Rossdale is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Bristol. His research explores how radical social movements operate as incubators of critical knowledge and theory, with a particular focus on those contesting militarism and state violence. Alongside Resisting Militarism, his recent work considers anarchist approaches to critical security studies, explores the limits of ontological security as a critical concept, and thinks with Emma Goldman about the radical potentials of revolutionary dance. He is currently editing a special issue of Security Dialogue on the relationships between militarism, racism and colonialism (to be published later this year), and writing about the Black Panthers as radical theorists of security, militarism and prefiguration. Chris is also a Director of Campaign Against Arms Trade. All posts are collected together here. And recall that the paperback of Resisting Militarism is currently discounted with use of the code NEW30 at the EUP site.

I read the contributions from Anna Stavrianakis, Erica Chenoweth, Rachel Zhou and Elena Loizidou with joy and fascination. Each has seen things in the book that have entirely eluded me until now, and all have challenged me to think again about the political, strategic, ontological and ethical arguments at play. It’s a rare privilege to have one’s work read with such generosity, clarity, and thoughtful critical attention. So, to begin, I’d like to extend my heartfelt thanks to these four brilliant scholars, and to Pablo for his wonderful work in bringing us together for this symposium.

In this spirit, I’d like to take the opportunity to think with the other contributors about how we are situated and might situate ourselves in relation to the shifting but sticky constellations of martial power that structure our world. To do so, I want to focus on the themes of pessimism, failure, prefiguration, success and violence, and think about the registers by which we have each engaged with these ideas differently. My hope is that through this we can think about the challenges we face as scholars and activists committed to resisting militarism.

Failure and Prefiguration

A theme that runs through all four responses, albeit in quite different registers, is attention to Resisting Militarism’s pessimism, manifested in my scepticism that we can ever situate ourselves outside of militarism, and accompanying critiques of anti-militarist politics that proceed with this aspiration. Loizidou appreciates the caution that this attitude brings to reflecting on movement politics, but is concerned that refusing to imagine a world beyond militarism is itself a trap. Chenoweth too laments the lack of a vision of a world beyond militarism, while also calling for a standard by which we might be able to measure the success of anti-militarist politics. Contrarily Zhou appreciates the attention given in the book not only to how anti-militarist resistance is shaped by military power, but also to the processes by which anti-militarism reproduces militarism. All three are naming a refusal in the book to locate anti-militarism outside of militarism.

Stavrianakis’ account of the same draws on a shared experience between the two of us, which I’d like to extend as a route into this. We did indeed share a delightful sunny afternoon in Brighton in the summer of 2019, during which we discussed the previous week’s Court of Appeal judgment, which – whatever else is to be said about it – did have the effect of temporarily stopping the UK government from granting export licences for arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The judgment was unprecedented, the result of years of careful and tenacious work by Campaign Against Arms Trade and others, and for all its complexities was deserving of celebration. I was there to celebrate outside the Royal Courts of Justice on the morning of the verdict. When the target of your political work is the international arms trade, there are few real opportunities to mark a win. And when there is a glimpse of possibility of limiting some of the relentless assault visited on Yemen by the UK-backed Saudi coalition, that must be taken seriously.

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Subjects and (Dis)obedience

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The last commentary in our symposium on Chris Rossdale’s Resisting Militarism: Direct Action and the Politics of Subversion (Edinburgh, 2019), from Elena Loizidou. Elena is Reader in Law and Political Theory at the School of Law, Birkbeck College. Her research interests range from anarchism and political theory to theories of gender and sexuality, law and culture. Her recent publications include Disobedience: Concept and Practice (edited, 2013), Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics (2007), ‘What is Law?’’ in The Anarchist Imagination: Anarchism Encounters the Humanities and the Social Sciences (2019), ‘Law, Love and Anarchism’ (2018), and ‘Dreams and The Political Subject’, in Vulnerability in Resistance (2016). A rejoinder will follow shortly; all posts will be collected for future perusal here.

Chris Rossdale’s Resisting Militarism: Direct Action and the Politics of Subversion is a beautifully written book and one of those very rare academic books where the concrete (ethnographic) and the theoretical critique each other and reveal the complexity of socio-political phenomena such as anti-militarist actions. The contributions to knowledge that this book offers is immense: (a) it provides us with an ethnography of anti-militarist groups in Britain including, Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT), Stop the Arms Fair (STAF); Smash EDO; Plowshares (or Ploughshares) and Space Hijackers emanating either from Rossdale participating or study over the last 12 years; (b) it widens our understandings of concepts such as (but not only) militarism (through linkage of war, conflict, state violence “to more intimate relations of power, authority domination” (p. 4), anti-militarism (through questioning the prefigurative claims of the groups he has studied) and disobedience (by drawing our attention to its attachment to obedience); and (c) it expands the methodological teachings of ethnographical studies by relating them to theoretical claims. Indeed Rossdale should be congratulated for his ability to navigate effortlessly between the concrete and the theoretical and challenge our perceived notions of concepts and politics.  His method of study will guide and should guide ethnographic studies in the future.

Anyone that studies social movements, whether it is the anti-militarist, anti-capitalist or anarchist movements (as I do), tends to present such movement in radical and pure ways. More specifically we tend to present such movements them as being diametrically opposite to what the social/political order that it is contesting. Resisting Militarism presents us with a delicate and nuanced reading of the anti-militarist movement. In doing so it exposes that there is a much more intimate relationship between the anti-militarist movement and militarism, or as Rossdale puts it anti-militarist actions and militarism are ‘mutually constitutive’ of each other (p. 12).  I will go a step further and suggest that as the book reveals they are not only  ‘mutually constitutive’ but rather they depend upon each other in the way in which Judith Butler interpreted Hegel’s ‘masterand servant dialectic’ in Subjects of Desire (1999); the existence of both parties (master (militarism) and servant (anti-militarism) ) somewhat paradoxically– as the former produces and sustains war, domination, authority and the latter contests them – depends on the non-destruction of each other.  If the servant for example annihilates the master their existence – as it is inextricably link to the master’s recognition, will cease to be. Rossdale very carefully tracks down how our protesting, direct actions, blockades, and other activist actions at times resemble the very master that we may want to undo, and how prefigurative politics (politics associated with anti-militarist movements) at times fall short of their very aspirations, namely not reproducing the violence associated with militarism.  Rossdale for example, shows how gender hierarchies may permeate such groups and how such a hierarchy works against the anti-hierarchical structures and aspirations of anti-militarist groups. Nevertheless, the intention of the book is not to suggest that anti-military resistance should be abandoned. On the contrary, by demonstrating the distance between word (e.g. anti-hierarchy aspiration in the structure and organisation of resistance) and the practice Rossdale, is asking us to cultivate a more mindful ‘ethic of resistance’. It is possible as he suggests that if we become more reflective of our actions that we stop from reproducing militarism – racism, sexism, homophobia and authority, the very things that anti-militarist actions desire to challenge and change. Put differently the book teaches how we are all implicated in the production of violence despite our desires or best intentions and how we can attend to this problematic.

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