Critical agency, resistance and a post-colonial civil society

Abstract

IR’s dominant theoretical and methodological approaches are, to varying degrees, compliance oriented. IR needs a theory of resistance if it is to survive its current methodological and ethical crisis. Resistance, read from a broadly Foucaultian perspective, is a process in which hidden, small-scale and marginal agencies have an impact on power, on norms, civil society, the state and the ‘international’. This may be in the form of individual or grass-roots critical agency not coordinated or mobilized on a large scale but still globally connected. Such agency is often discursive and aimed at peaceful change and transformation. Through such critical agency a post-colonial civil society has emerged, which is transversal, transnational, fragmented, but may be constitutive of new, hybrid and post-liberal forms of peace.