The Multifaceted Concept of Resistance in Social Movements

When we think about resistance, the image that often comes to mind is a crowd marching in the streets, holding signs and chanting slogans. But resistance is far more complex than open confrontation. It operates in whispers, disguises, jokes, and everyday acts that most people would never recognize as political at all. Understanding resistance in its full range – from mass counter-movements to the subtle subversions of daily life – is essential to understanding how power works and how it is challenged in any society.

Defining resistance: beyond the obvious 🔗

Resistance, in sociological terms, refers to any act, practice, or organized effort by individuals or groups to push back against structures of domination, inequality, or unjust authority. But that definition alone barely scratches the surface. Resistance is not a single thing – it is a spectrum. It ranges from large-scale organized political opposition to the barely visible habits of the powerless. It can be deliberate or instinctive, collective or deeply personal, public or completely hidden.

Crucially, as political scientist Stellan Vinthagen and others in resistance studies have noted, reducing resistance to only its organized, principled, and overtly revolutionary forms misses how much of it actually occurs. The constraints imposed by power itself shape what forms resistance can realistically take. When open defiance means imprisonment or violence, resistance goes underground – and it is no less real for doing so.

Michel de Certeau: tactics of the weak 🔗

One of the most important theoretical contributions to understanding everyday resistance comes from French philosopher Michel de Certeau. In his influential work The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau drew a fundamental distinction between strategies and tactics. Strategies belong to those who hold power – institutions, governments, corporations – and are deployed from a position of established authority. Tactics, by contrast, belong to those without power. They are improvised, mobile, and opportunistic.

According to de Certeau’s framework, a tactic operates within the enemy’s own territory, seizing whatever space or moment becomes available and moving on. It cannot secure a permanent base; it must be constantly agile. A worker who uses company time for personal errands, a tenant who quietly modifies a rented apartment, a student who redirects a class discussion – these are all tactics. They do not overthrow the system, but they create room within it, asserting the individual’s own purposes against dominant intentions. De Certeau showed that even seemingly mundane activities – walking, reading, shopping – become acts of creative opposition when people use them on their own terms.

Trickery, concealment, and humor as resistance tools 🔗

Three specific practices stand out within everyday resistance: trickery, concealment, and humor. Trickery involves using cleverness to subvert power without directly challenging it – think of workers who appear to comply with management directives while subtly undermining them, or communities under authoritarian rule who develop coded language to communicate dissent. Concealment involves hiding resistant activities from those in power, from underground organizing to simply keeping one’s true beliefs private. And humor – satire, irony, mockery – has long been a weapon of the powerless, allowing people to expose the absurdity of authority while maintaining a level of deniability. Political cartoonists, court jesters, and stand-up comedians have all historically occupied this role.

E.P. Thompson and the moral economy of resistance 🔗

E.P. Thompson, the British Marxist historian, contributed a different but equally important dimension to understanding resistance. His landmark study The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and his 1971 essay “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” showed that working-class resistance was not simply reactive or driven by hunger. It was principled.

Thompson argued that 18th-century English food riots were grounded in a shared popular belief about what was fair and what was not – a moral economy. As Thompson observed, the rioters were not a savage mob but a community acting according to what they saw as legitimate traditional rights. They believed elites had obligations to the poor, and when those obligations were broken – when grain merchants hoarded food during famines or sold to the highest bidder rather than the local community – they acted collectively and with a clear sense of justice. The riots, in other words, were a form of resistance rooted in moral claims about how society ought to work.

Thompson’s approach gave us “history from below” – a framework that takes the experiences, consciousness, and agency of ordinary people seriously as forces that shape history. It revealed how collective identity and class consciousness emerge not from abstract ideology but from lived struggles against exploitation.

Gramsci and counter-hegemony 🔗

Perhaps the most sophisticated theoretical framework for understanding resistance at the level of ideas and culture comes from Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Writing from a fascist prison in the 1930s, Gramsci developed the concept of hegemony to explain how dominant groups maintain power not only through force, but through shaping the ideas, values, and beliefs of the people they govern. When the worldview of the ruling class becomes “common sense” – when it is accepted as natural and inevitable by those it actually disadvantages – hegemony is at work.

But Gramsci was equally interested in how this dominance could be challenged. Counter-hegemony involves building alternative ways of understanding society that contest dominant narratives at the cultural and ideological level. As described in Gramscian theory, counter-hegemonic groups do not begin as radical organizations. They work through persuasion, consciousness-raising, and the gradual construction of alternative values and institutions. Gramsci described this as a “war of position” – a slow, patient struggle for ideological and cultural ground – as opposed to a direct frontal assault on state power.

This is why Gramsci paid close attention to organic intellectuals – people who emerge from within a subordinate group and articulate its interests, helping build a counter-hegemonic consciousness. Gramsci’s ideas inspired Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, liberation theology, and many approaches to popular media and education as tools of social change. Environmental movements, feminist movements, and civil rights movements can all be understood partly through this lens – each worked to reframe cultural narratives about nature, gender, and race before and alongside their legal and political battles.

James Scott: infrapolitics and hidden transcripts 🔗

While Gramsci focused on organized counter-hegemonic struggle, political scientist James C. Scott directed attention to a quieter, more dispersed form of resistance that he called infrapolitics. Developed across several books – most fully in Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990) – Scott’s framework captures the resistance that happens when open defiance is too dangerous or too costly.

Scott showed that common behaviors of subordinated groups – foot-dragging, feigned ignorance, petty theft, absenteeism, sarcasm, gossip – are not always what they appear to be. They are tactics that exploited people use to both survive and quietly undermine domination. What makes infrapolitics powerful is that these acts require little coordination, are difficult to attribute, and avoid the rapid and severe retaliation that open defiance might provoke. Yet, multiplied across thousands of individuals, they can seriously disrupt the plans of those in power.

Scott introduced two key concepts to capture how this works: public transcripts and hidden transcripts. Public transcripts are the official face of power relations – how the dominant group portrays itself and how the subordinate group is expected to perform deference. Hidden transcripts, by contrast, are what takes place offstage – the critiques, the jokes, the real conversations that subordinate groups keep concealed from those in power. The gap between the two is where infrapolitics lives.

Scott’s framework also distinguishes three forms of this hidden resistance: direct resistance by disguised individuals against material domination (such as poaching or squatting), hidden expressions of anger or dignity against status domination, and dissident subcultures – religious movements, myths of social bandits, and class heroes – that sustain resistance against ideological domination.

Counter-movements: resistance from the other direction 🔗

Resistance does not always serve progressive ends. Counter-movements are organized efforts to oppose social change – they represent resistance to resistance. When the women’s suffrage movement gained momentum in the early 20th century, it triggered organized counter-movements of people who believed women should not vote. When civil rights activists challenged racial segregation, they faced organized resistance from those committed to maintaining existing hierarchies.

Counter-movements are typically declared, collective, and organized responses to perceived threats to the social order. They remind us that resistance is not inherently liberatory – it depends entirely on what is being resisted and whose interests are served. This complexity is important: analyzing resistance requires asking not just whether people are pushing back, but what they are pushing back against and why.

How these frameworks connect 🔗

De Certeau, Thompson, Gramsci, and Scott each illuminate a different register of resistance, but they are also deeply connected. As scholars have noted, Scott’s “weapons of the weak” and de Certeau’s “tactics” are closely aligned – both focus on the small, dispersed, often invisible actions of those without formal power. Thompson bridges the gap between everyday grievance and collective action, showing how moral claims become the basis for organized resistance. Gramsci provides the broadest cultural and political canvas, explaining how fundamental change requires not just political action but a transformation in how people understand the world they live in.

Together, these frameworks dismantle any simplistic picture of resistance as either heroic public protest or absent submission. They reveal a rich, layered landscape where power is constantly contested – in ballot boxes and in break rooms, in protest marches and in whispered conversations, in front-page headlines and in the hidden transcript of everyday life.

What do you think? If infrapolitics and everyday resistance rarely lead to large-scale change on their own, at what point do hidden transcripts need to become public ones for meaningful transformation to occur? And can counter-hegemonic cultural work – changing hearts and minds – ever be sufficient without accompanying political and economic struggle?

References

1. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2158379X.2018.1478642
2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303516884_Everyday_Resistance'_exploration_of_a_concept_its_theories
3. https://www.brh.org.uk/site/articles/the-moral-economy/
4. https://www.globalsouthstudies.org/keyword-essay/moral-economy/
5. https://www.powercube.net/other-forms-of-power/gramsci-and-hegemony/
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterhegemony
7. https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/focaal/2024/99/fcl990105.xml
8. http://www.kentstateuniversitypress.com/wp-content/uploads/symposium/Nieman/Popular_Public_Resistance.htm