PUBLIC LECTURE 10.06 at 6PM  AT SIGMUND FREUD PRIVAT UNIVERSITY BERLIN

Unarmed Militancy: Tactics and Subjectivity in Recent Disruptive Protest

This talk uses ethnographic engagement and oral history interviews with activists to characterize an emerging tactical stance that I call “unarmed militancy.” Around the world, fierce, confrontational, property-destroying, and property-repurposing forms of mass action coexist within a larger strategy of mass mobilization. Urban Bolivian activists who organize road blockades and strike waves—the subject of my year of fieldwork in Cochabamba, Sucre and La Paz—are paradigmatic examples of unarmed militants. These activists refuse to yield in confrontations with state forces; they fight back in order to hold physical space, obstruct the flows of daily life, and impose social costs.

This talk places these Bolivian experiences in a global conversation among unarmed militant practices and theories from Oaxaca, Argentina, Egypt, and North America. Tear-gas masks, stones, slingshots, blockades, and defiant crowds are the visual icons of this language of protest, one that has brought down governments on five continents. Compared with classical models of revolution, these upheavals expand quickly, involve enormous numbers of people, and rely far less on armed violence as a means. Yet they also lie outside conventional understanding of nonviolence and civil disobedience. The tactics chosen by unarmed militants deploy (and require) a numerical advantage to offset the capacity for state repression. 

 

These confrontations were at once political and physical, relying on both symbolic and practical weaknesses of the regimes they confronted. I argue these mobilizations succeeded through both symbolic demonstrations of their legitimacy and tactical victories against state attempts to repress them.

Speaker bio: Carwil Bjork-James is a cultural anthropologist who conducts immersive and historical research on disruptive protest, environmental struggles, state violence, and indigenous collective rights. He is the principal investigator of Ultimate Consequences, a digital archive on death in Bolivian political conflict, and author of The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia. He is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Law at Vanderbilt University.

 

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Sigmund Freud Private University Berlin
Campus Tempelhof
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