“Reverse Discourse” Revisited: Cracks, Formations, and a Complex Understanding of Power

Abstract

Notable scholars within International Relations (IR) have nuanced the concept of resistance, as well as, more generally, paving the way for acknowledging how Foucauldian approaches support thinking about resistance within IR (see e.g. Death 2016; Odysseos, Death, and Malmvig 2016; Lilja and Vinthagen 2014; Malmvig 2016). Based on this theme, this special issue aims to further carve out forms and nuances of resistance. Not surprisingly, there are several papers in Global Society that address creative responses to power, as well as power’s responses back. Not least, a recent special edition of the journal has made the study of resistance more complex by embracing “counter-conducts”; that is, a concept that was recently recovered fromMichel Foucault’s Security, Territory, Population (2009) lectures. We find the constructive use of the concept of counter-conducts interesting and original. However, in our thinking, the valorisation of the concept, in some senses, leads to an omission of Foucault’s multiple forms of resistance. Resistance, in Foucault’s texts, is sometimes described as resistance against authorities (sometimes the state and other governing units, and sometimes local authorities; Foucault 2009, 201; Foucault 1982, 329–331; Foucault 1991, 149). In other texts, however, he describes resistance as a discursive phenomenon. Discursive resistance, which appears as repetitions of signs across time, more generally, does not signal major ruptures, breaks or discontinuities. Indeed, this resistance, which occasionally aims to establish alternative truths, could be seen as a slow-motion form of resistance as it suffers from the inescapable time-lag of processes of signification (Lilja 2021, 2018). It is the strategic codification of different points of resistance that, in the end, becomes the hotbed for radical social change (Foucault 1990, 96; Bhabha 1994). Sometimes, these more linguistic forms of resistance take the form of reverse discourse. According to Foucault (1990, 101–102):