Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics

This book demonstrates how popular dissent is becoming an increasingly important aspect of global politics.

Roland Bleiker (Author)

9780521778299, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 2 March 2000

312 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.46 kg

'Bleiker's book is a beautiful disruption of IR's contemporary theoretical doldrums. It is ambitious - both in structure and purpose - yet aware of its limits, and the impossibility (indeed undesirability) of final resolution for many of the issues it raises.' Millennium

Popular dissent, such as street demonstrations and civil disobedience, has become increasingly transnational in nature and scope. As a result, a local act of resistance can acquire almost immediately a much larger, cross-territorial dimension. This book draws upon a broad and innovative range of sources to scrutinise this central but often neglected aspect of global politics. Through case studies that span from Renaissance perceptions of human agency to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the author examines how the theory and practice of popular dissent has emerged and evolved during the modern period. Dissent, he argues, is more than just transnational. It has become an important 'transversal' phenomenon: an array of diverse political practices which not only cross national boundaries, but also challenge the spatial logic through which these boundaries frame international relations.

Introduction
Part I. A Genealogy of Popular Dissent: 1. Rhetorics of dissent in renaissance humanism
2. Romanticism and the dissemination of radical resistance
3. Global legacies of popular dissent
Part II. Reading and Rereading Transversal Struggles: 4. From essentialist to discursive conceptions of power
5. Of 'Men', 'Women' and discursive domination
6. Of great events and what makes them great
Part III. Discursive Terrains of Dissent: 7. Mapping everyday global resistance
8. Resistance at the edge of language games
9. Political boundaries, poetic transgressions
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: International relations [JPS]