Power, Government and Dissent at the World Summit

2

Counter-conducts in South Africa:

Power, Government and Dissent at the World Summit

Carl Death

Abstract

This paper introduces Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘counter-conducts’ – ‘struggles against the processes implemented for conducting others’ – in order to rethink the relationship between power and dissent. It proposes an ‘analytics of protest’ to address forms of resistance, through which this paper focuses on the mentalities, practices and subjectivities produced at protests in South Africa at the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development. These protests were some of the largest public expressions of dissent since the end of apartheid, yet the paper illuminates the ways in which power and resistance are mutually reliant and co-constitutive. These Summit counter-conducts both contested and reinforced existing power relations, and were disciplined by discourses of civility/violence, partnership/disruption, and local/foreign from state authorities and the media. They were also disciplined by internal discourses of liberal dissent and radical protest from within the movements themselves. The article concludes that, from a Foucauldian perspective on counter-conducts, forms of dissent that are strategic, reversible and flexible are preferable to those that are sedimented and entrenched.

Correspondence address:

Dr Carl Death

Department of International Politics

Aberystwyth University

Penglais, Aberystwyth

Ceredigion, SY23 3FE

The UN World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), held in Johannesburg between 26 August and 4 September 2002, was accompanied by the largest street protests in South Africa since the end of apartheid. Over 20,000 activists and members from groups such the Landless Peoples’ Movement and the Anti-Privatisation Forum marched on 31 August from the township of Alexandra to voice their grievances outside the conference venue in Sandton, where summit delegates claimed to be reinvigorating the global commitment to sustainable development. In this respect the Johannesburg Summit protests were typical of a broader global ‘return to the streets’ since 1999, particularly associated with protests against major international summits in Seattle, Genoa, Prague, London and elsewhere (Della Porta and Tarrow, 2005: 12). Such protests present a number of issues for the theorisation of power and resistance. The Johannesburg protests did not aim to seize state power or set out a revolutionary programme, but neither did they seek to engage summit delegates in deliberation or debate. In many ways the protests disrupted familiar binaries of political thought: power and resistance, national and international, and dissent and collaboration, binaries which have meant that protests tend to be framed in terms of either reform or revolution, governance or resistance (Maiguashca, 2003). I argue here that such summit protests are tightly interconnected with the forms of power they resist: their hybrid, rhizomatic forms reveal the mutually constitutive relationship between power and protest.1 Despite this, such forms of dissent are subject to powerful disciplinary mechanisms, revolving around the dichotomy between liberal dissent and radical protest constructed within movements themselves, and around binaries of civility/violence, partnership/disruption, and local/foreign constructed by state authorities and the media. Summits such as Johannesburg in 2002 therefore represent powerful sites for the disciplining of dissent, the production of certain forms of civil society, and for the performance and reconstitution of state power.

In order to re-conceptualise the role of these summit protests within global power relations, this papers turns to Foucauldian political thought. A number of recent attempts to theorise resistance have drawn explicitly on Michel Foucault (Amoore, 2005; Barry, 2001; Bleiker, 2000; Krishna, 2009; Kulynych, 1997; Odysseos, 2011). Despite this, discussions of the summit protests of the 1990s and 2000s often still seem reliant on many of the conceptual categories which a Foucauldian perspective seeks to destabilise (see, for example, Stephen, 2009: 484). Furthermore, there has been a degree of reluctance from those writing from a broadly Foucauldian perspective to engage with social movements, protestors and organised dissent, particularly within what has become known as the Anglo-governmentality literature.2 With these points in mind, and recognising that the possibility, indeed inevitability, of resistance is at the heart of Foucault’s political thought, this paper aims to suggest some ways in which Foucauldian thought can be operationalised for the study of dissent and protest in international politics.

To this end, I elaborate Foucault’s notion of counter-conducts, described as ‘the will not to be governed thusly, like that, by these people, at this price’ (Foucault, 2007b: 75). The idea of the counter-conduct was developed by Foucault in the context of his work on governmentality, and denotes the close interrelationship between practices of government and the forms of resistance which oppose them (Cadman, 2010; Odysseos, 2011). Counter-conducts can be studied through what I have termed an ‘analytics of protest’, examining their mentalities, practices and subjectivities, inspired by Mitchell Dean’s ‘analytics of government’ (1999). Such a framework can be applied to the Johannesburg Summit protests of 2002, focusing on the various ways in which resistance or dissent was produced, conditioned and disciplined during these protests.3 This approach facilitates a closer examination of how forms of dissent are disciplined both in terms of their own mentalities, practices, and subjectivities, and also by the forms of government to which they are opposed. Seeing protests as counter-conducts can highlight the co-constitutive relationship between practices of government and forms of dissent, and enables a more nuanced assessment of forms of dissent than a stark binary between co-optation and confrontation.

Counter-conducts, Power and Protest

Whether addressing summit protests, social movement struggles, counter-hegemonic wars of movement and position, or foot-dragging infrapolitics (Scott, 1990: 183), there has tended to be an assumption that power and resistance are located at opposing poles (Bond, 2006; Della Porta and Tarrow, 2005; Drainville, 2002; Gills, 1997; Keck and Sikkink, 1998). The pervasive power of this dichotomy is seen in Sankaran Krishna’s argument that the basic dynamic of world politics is constituted through the relationship between globalized neoliberalism and postcolonialism. The latter, for Krishna, ‘articulates a politics of resistance to the inequalities, the exploitation of humans and the environment, and the diminution of political and ethical choices that come in the wake of globalization’ (2009: 2). This assertion of the fundamentally Manichean opposition between globalisation and postcolonialism, from an author who elsewhere stresses hybridity and the erosion of settled identities, indicates the pervasive strength of the ‘power versus resistance’ dichotomy.

The difficulty of escaping from this dichotomy was explored in a special issue of the Review of International Studies in 2003, devoted to the theme of ‘Governance and Resistance’. Whilst contributors like Mark Rupert tended to re-affirm the fundamental division, or dialectic relationship, between governance and resistance (2003), others decried the ‘emerging, but increasingly facile, orthodoxy’ that frames politics ‘in terms of the simple opposition between governance and resistance’ (Clark, 2003: 77). Yet, as Bice Maiguashca notes in the introduction to this special issue, ‘while recognising this overlap between the agents of governance and resistance, with the exception of Clark, all our authors either explicitly or implicitly accept the framing of world politics along these broad lines’ (2003: 17).

This conceptual opposition between power and resistance is frequently taken a step further, with the normative categorisation of specific social movements or protests as either revolutionaries or collaborators (Stephen, 2009: 485). Mark Rupert encapsulates much of the enthusiasm surrounding the so-called Global Justice Movement, when he observes that ‘[a] new kind of social movement was emerging and seemed to be constructing a new political culture, forms of political organisation and activity, which were premised upon transnational solidarity and emergent norms of collective responsibility and reciprocity’ (2003: 195). A similar valorisation of social movement resistance leads to Barry Gills’ call for academics to position themselves ‘in conscious alignment with counter-hegemonic movements and dissenting social forces’ (1997: 11). A Foucauldian approach to resistance as counter-conduct challenges these assumptions that power and resistance are located at opposing poles, and that they are embodied in particular actors or groups.

An alternative approach starts from Foucault’s rejection of the concept of liberation, with its assumption of an unencumbered human subject that can be freed or emancipated (Foucault, 1997: 282). His attention to various modes of subjectification – or subject-production – through which relations of power and resistance interpenetrate and overlap, problematises the assumption that the resisting subject pre-exists the act of resistance (Cadman, 2010: 540). It is this which has led to his concept of resistance being regarded as ‘maddeningly indistinct’ (Kulynych, 1997: 328) and politically ‘troubling’ (Pickett, 1996: 466). In the particular context of his work on governmentality, however, the lecture series Security, Territory, Population, delivered at the Collège de France in 1978, elaborates usefully on ways in which resistance might be theorised or described. Rather than attempts to seize political power or material wealth, Foucault is interested here in ‘revolts of conduct’ (2007a: 194), resistance to processes of governmentality, as distinct from revolts against political sovereignty or economic exploitation, and he takes as his example forms of resistance to the Christian Church in the Middle Ages. He charts how, through movements of asceticism, mysticism, the return to Scripture, the adoption of eschatological doctrines, and the formation of closed holy communities, these revolts of conduct mobilised ‘border-elements’ which had been marginalised by the early Church (ibid: 204-15). Moreover, these border elements were later partially reincorporated within the official history of the Christian Church. When ‘threatened by all these movements of counter-conduct, the Church tries to take them up and adapt them for its own ends’, leading of course to the Reformation and counter-Reformation (ibid: 215).

In discussing how to label such revolts of conducts, Foucault decides that ‘revolt’ is ‘both too precise and too strong to designate much more diffuse and subdued forms of resistance’ (ibid: 200). On the other hand, ‘disobedience’ is too weak, ‘insubordination’ is too closely linked to the military, and ‘dissidence’ is ‘exactly suited’ but for the particular context it had acquired in the Cold War world of the 1970s (ibid: 200-1). He therefore settles on the term ‘counter-conduct’ [French: contre-conduite]; namely a ‘struggle against the processes implemented for conducting others’ (ibid: 201). These struggles raise the perpetual question of ‘how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them’ (2007b: 44). This is ‘the art of not being governed quite so much’ (ibid: 45), or ‘the will not to be governed thusly, like that, by these people, at this price’ (ibid: 75), rather than a complete or total rejection of government. Rather than looking for manifestations of resistance ‘beyond government’ (Rose, 1999: 281), a counter-conducts perspective implies that resistance is already present within government (Cadman, 2010: 540). Forms of resistance rely upon, and are even implicated within, the strategies, techniques and power relationships they oppose since, according to Foucault, ‘the history of the governmental ratio, and the history of the counter-conducts opposed to it, are inseparable from each other’ (2007a: 357).

In order to show how the idea of counter-conducts can be translated into a framework for analysing protests, Mitchell Dean’s ‘analytics of government’ (1999: 20) can be adapted in order to construct an analytics of protest. Doing so focuses attention on the mentalities, practices and subjectivities which constitute forms of resistance.4 The following analysis of the Johannesburg Summit protests in 2002 shows how the protestors both resisted and reinforced regimes of power and government. As such it refocuses attention on what John Gibson describes as the ‘contingencies, limitations, and ambiguities’ of power and government (2008: 436), as manifested at global summits, which a Foucauldian approach can highlight. This section is not a comprehensive analysis of the Summit protests or the movements involved, but instead works to illustrate the potential benefits of a counter-conducts approach.

Counter-conducts at the Johannesburg Summit

The Johannesburg Summit, coming ten years after the Rio Earth Summit, was regarded by many as one of the largest political meetings in human history (Munnik and Wilson, 2003; Wapner, 2003). Alongside the journalists, lobbyists, negotiators and state representatives, many came to Johannesburg to protest against a range of issues from lack of progress on the Rio ‘Earth Summit’ agreements, to neo-liberal capitalist hegemony and entrenched global inequality. The protests at the Summit took diverse forms and various manifestations, but the most visible expression of dissent was the march of the social movements on 31 August, when between 20,000 and 25,000 people marched from the township of Alexandra to the Summit convention centre, in opposition to ‘the hoax of the W$$D’ (Munnik and Wilson, 2003: 31) and to label the South African state ‘the local and continental agent of imperialism’ (Appolis, 2002: 10). Alongside the mass march there were other forms of protest including a Greenpeace banner hung on the Koeberg nuclear reactor near Cape Town, the noisy disruption of Colin Powell’s speech in the Sandton Convention Centre, angry speeches in the Global People’s Forum, a satirical Greenwash Academy Awards ceremony, a candle-lit march for freedom of expression, and a pro-Palestinian demonstration outside a university campus over a scheduled speech by Shimon Peres.

Rather than seeing these protests as ‘counter-hegemonic movements and dissenting social forces’ (Gills, 1997: 11), their myriad forms and close interrelationship with forms of established power relationships means they can be usefully viewed as counter-conducts. A counter-conducts perspective also militates against seeing these protests as one-off or extraordinary moments, but rather locates them within a longer context of social protest both in South Africa, and globally. The carnivalesque elements of the marches in Johannesburg resonated in a post-Seattle era of anti-summit protest, displaying reiterated, repeated and reinvented practices and mentalities of dissent (Drainville, 2002: 18; O’Neill, 2004; St John, 2008). For South African observers, the toyi-toying marchers invoked memories of apartheid-era township ungovernability, as well as drawing upon growing discontent towards the governing African National Congress’ (ANC) neo-liberal economic policies and the cost-recovery strategies of municipal government, as well as pervasive and continuing environmental and social inequalities and injustices. Commentators and marchers saw the 2002 march as inaugurating ‘a new phase of struggle’ in South Africa (Ndung’u, 2003: 15; see also Appolis, 2002). The increasing frequency of protest in South Africa post-2002, with peaks in 2004/5 and 2009, has led Doreen Atkinson to suggest that ‘the “young, unemployed, and angry” stratum of society may become a permanent fixture of South African politics’ (2007: 73). The Johannesburg Summit provides an illuminating snapshot of these movements, and was itself a foundational moment in their history. By viewing these protests as Foucauldian counter-conducts they can be seen as assemblages of mentalities and practices which come to constitute dissenting subjectivities, rather than attempts to seize political power or material resources by pre-existing actors, interests, or social movements. The following sections therefore discuss these Summit counter-conducts in terms of their mentalities, practices and subjectivities.