Transnational Resistance and the Fabric of Global Justice

What is the proper role of resistance in democratic politics? In the age of reproductive rights protests, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the 2021 attack on the US Capitol—which, taken together, illustrate both the promise and the dangers of resistance movements—this question cries out for an answer. But, too often, we assume the nation-state is the most fertile ground for democratic politics and that if resistance has a role to play in democracy, it will take the form of citizens resisting their own state. My current book project challenges these assumptions, both of which are outmoded in an increasingly globalized world, to generate a novel account of the relationship between resistance and democracy.

As we must judge the proper limits of states’ power and when to resist it, we must judge the proper limits of the international state system’s power and when to resist it. As such, we should not only concern ourselves with the ethics of citizens’ resistance to their own states, but also with the ethics of resistance undertaken in the transnational arena and resistance against the state system as opposed to any one state. This book project centers a transnational, systems-level perspective. As anticolonial theorists have long argued, oppression is often enacted through the very organization of the world order and effectively opposing it therefore requires challenging this organization. Thus, we need a transnational, systems-level perspective to fully understand both the varieties of oppression and the possibilities for liberation in our world.

This project examines the ethics of transnational resistance movements, especially among those routinely subject to but excluded from exercising political power within the state system—like stateless, undocumented, and Indigenous people—and leverages this examination to investigate the (il)legitimacy of the state system. It explores the connections among political exclusion, epistemic injustice, and the ethics of resistance, bridging often-disparate literatures on democratic theory, epistemic justice, and political obligation—and bringing them into conversation with Indigenous political thought and scholarship on the ethics of refugee and migration policy.

More specifically, this project investigates the role resistance—especially transnational and anti-statist resistance—would play in a just, democratic world order. I propose that transnational resistance movements can give us one model of what democratic politics that transcends the nation-state could look like. I suggest that such resistance may be necessary to achieve justice and politically enfranchise stateless, undocumented, and Indigenous people. I do not mean only that resistance may be instrumentally necessary to achieve these goals, but further that practices of resistance may be partly constitutive of justice and democracy.

If this is true, it suggests a particular understanding of the claim (made by democratic theorists like Fraser and Mouffe) that democratic systems should avoid treating policy issues as permanently settled. After all, when resistance is a regular part of global politics, even if formal state and international institutions treat some issue as settled, it can still be democratically contested through other channels via resistance. If resistance (perhaps even lawbreaking resistance) is partly constitutive of justice and democracy, this also complicates the traditional distinction between “ideal” and “non-ideal” theory and Rawls’s decision to treat the ethics of lawbreaking as belonging to the latter category. I aim to explore this complication and its implications for political theory more generally.

I outline two working papers that are part of this project— “The Specter of Statelessness” and “Resistance Culture as a Remedy for Epistemic Injustice”— on my Working Papers page.