[ecrea] CFP - Governance/Resistance: A Workshop

CALL FOR PAPERS

Complexities of Governance/Resistance

A workshop

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 24-25 May 2012
Hosted by the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus
Funded by the Finnish Academy and the University of Nottingham Malaysia 
Campus

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Julian Reid

The question of governance/resistance lies at the heart of a broad 
spectrum of modern and contemporary accounts of political life. Critical 
approaches ranging from classical to post-Marxism, to 
post-structuralist, post-colonial and feminist approaches have addressed 
the complex intricacy of this relationship. That rationales for 
governance and resistance, and their internal dynamic, remain contested 
has recently become all-too evident through a resurgence of political 
opposition and struggle against, for instance, war, capitalism, bankers, 
neoliberal prescriptions for development and dictatorial regimes. 
Moreover, this problematique features in responses to global warming, 
financial crisis, natural disasters, global health scares, immigration 
and refugees, etc.

These manifestations indicate that the complexity of 
governance/resistance refers not merely to direct opposition to liberal 
governance but also to modes of resistance intrinsic to the project 
itself. Liberal governance is both built on and challenged by forms of 
crisis and resistance, which simultaneously undermine and reinforce its 
capacities to govern life.

In order to characterise this dynamic, Michel Foucault developed the 
notion of a mechanism of security, which refers to the management of an 
open series. “[S]ecurity will try to plan a milieu in terms of events or 
series of events or possible elements, of series that will have to be 
regulated within a multivalent and transformable framework.” The milieu 
is open, mobile and complex, marked by the simultaneity of movements of 
production, perturbation, order, resistance, reinforcement destruction 
and disorder; it simultaneously builds on, produces and reproduces 
movements of governance and resistance. Liberal governance operates on 
the basis of the integration of crisis and resistance, of making these 
perturbations work productively for the reproduction of order.

The question is whether contemporary manifestations of crisis and 
resistance challenge the liberal order in more fundamental ways, or 
whether liberal governance continues to thrive through the integration 
of (perturbing) forces? What is the relationship between governance and 
resistance in the contemporary world? If governance operates through 
resistance, then how to challenge the stifling effects of the ways in 
which the limits of liberal political life are framed through these 
mechanisms? How does governance/resistance function to create, 
integrate, maintain, undermine and challenge contemporary political life?

This workshop seeks to explore the complex intricacy of 
governance/resistance: forms of resistance to governance, governance 
through resistance and the governance of resistance. We invite papers 
that address this thematic from across the disciplines. Paper topics 
could include, but are not limited to:

·         Social movements and political activism
·         Global governance
·         The biopolitics of development/security
·         Poverty, forced migration, immigration, refugees and statelessness
·         War and conflict

Please send your abstract (250-300 words) to Dr. Leonie Ansems de Vries 
((leonie.ansemsdevries /at/ nottingham.edu.my)) and Dr. Tiina Seppälä 
((tiina.seppala /at/ ulapland.fi)) by 29 February 2012.



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Tiina Seppälä
Dr.Soc.Sci. (Ph.D.)
Post-Doctoral Researcher
International Relations
Faculty of Social Sciences
University of Lapland
P.O. Box 122, 96101 Rovaniemi
FINLAND
work phone +358-40-484 4233
mobile +358-40-726 2687

(tiina.seppala /at/ ulapland.fi) <mailto:(tiina.seppala /at/ ulapland.fi)>

http://www.ulapland.fi/?deptid=18557

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