University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA
June 18-21, 2026
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Journal of Resistance Studies
The first journal dedicated to developing the field of Resistance Studies.
Nonviolent resistance failure: internal reasons why campaigns struggle to win (and what we can learn from it)
Lea Bonasera
Existing literature on nonviolent resistance typically emphasizes the elements that contribute to a campaign’s success. Conversely, mechanisms leading to the failure of such nonviolent resistance camp...
From Ordinary to Revolutionary: Dynamics of Mobilization in the Egyptian Revolution
Mohamed El Meadawy
The Egyptian revolution of 2011 was one of the earliest waves of the Arab Spring. Within only 18 days, Mubarak was forced to step down, ending thirty years of authoritarian rule. This study seeks to e...
Mashrou’ Leila’s Musical Affective Politics: Queer Resistance in the Egyptian Social and Political Uprising
Izat ElAmoor
On June 14, 2020, queer Egyptian Sarah Hegazy died by suicide in Canada, where she was exiled shortly after her release from prison in Egypt for raising a rainbow flag during a Mashrou’ Leila (ML) con...
‘Everyday Constructive Resistance’: Exploring Bottom-Up Transformative Change
Monica Carrer
Stellan Vinthagen
This article delves into the interplay between everyday peace, everyday resistance, and constructive resistance, exploring their potential for transformative change. Drawing insights from case studies...
‘The Harvest is a Poem’: everyday practices as culture and resistance in the occupied Palestinian territory
Aurélie Broeckerhoff
Laura Sulin
Mahmoud Soliman
Marwan Darweish
The Palestinian communities in the South Hebron Hills (Masafer Yatta), occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), face double marginality: from the Israeli occupation and within Palestinian society. In the...
Resistance with and against symbolic objects: material targets of resistance and symbolic recruitment in the American Revolution, the anti-Apartheid movement, and Just Stop Oil protests
Benjamin Abrams
Peter Gardner
This paper discusses the roles played by physical objects in resistance, drawing on three case studies: the dismantling of the statue of King George III during the American Revolution, the burning of ...
Structural violence and repertoires of resistance in South Africa
Hilde Ibsen
Penelope Engel-Hills
Carolina Jernbro
"South Africa is listed as one of the most unequal societies in the world. Communities in this country face the aftermath of apartheid segregation, coupled with present neoliberal development strategi...
Artpeace: Validating Power, Mobilising Resistance, and Imagining Emancipation
Oliver P. Richmond
Art has apparently followed political power for much of history, while avoiding representations of social, subaltern, and political resistance, or experimentation with new approaches to emancipation. ...
Beyond “Individual” or “Collective” Resistance: Assessment towards an Agenda for Future Research on Dissent
Mona Lilja
Stellan Vinthagen
Kristin Wiksell
We argue that studies of resistance have suffered from a bifurcation of fields, whereby some focus on organized forms (social movements, civil society or revolutions), while others are concerned with ...
The need to document, evaluate, and develop actions and strategies of resistance
Jørgen Johansen
Excerpt: "In this issue, we have articles that again expand, develop, and clarify what resistance studies are about. The number of academic fields that include research on resistance is growing rapidl...
Thinking communicatively and relationally about practices of resistances
Sophie Del Fa
Geneviève Boivin
Ann-Sophie Boily
Ève Leclair
By reviewing the literature on practices of resistances in social sciences, organization studies, and communication, this essay aims to show how a communicative relationality perspective anchored in t...
Overcoming the ‘Barrier of Fear’ in Order to Resist: the 2020 Protests against the Lukashenko Regime in Belarus
Craig S. Brown
In August 2020, widespread open resistance emerged against Lukashenko’s regime in Belarus, in the wake of the presidential elections. Through a media content analysis, this paper assesses how the emot...
Humanitarian Grass-roots work in Refugee Resettlement during the Trump Administration: A Study of Constructive Resistance
Barbara Franz
The COVID-19 pandemic, in combination with the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies, has led to policy shifts and temporary bans that essentially ended asylum and refugee resettlement in t...
What is the core of resistance studies? To challenge conventional perspectives on resistance?
Stellan Vinthagen
Excerpt: "Seven years into the successful establishment of the Journal of Resistance Studies (JRS), it seems appropriate to make some reflections on what makes ‘resistance studies’ its own field; an a...
The Method of Political Resistance and the Concept of the ‘People’ in Tosaka Jun and Enrique Dussel
Dennis Stromback
It is rather common to couple Japanese Marxist Tosaka Jun (1900-1945) with critical theorists like Walter Benjamin or Theodor Adorno in the comparative philosophy literature, but little, if anything a...
Violence in Nonviolent Action: Power Relations in Joint Activism in Israel and Palestine
Anne de Jong
This paper critically engages with nonviolent activism and resistance in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. By placing nonviolent direct actions directly in the context of its violent su...
Rural Women in the Balkh and Herat Provinces of Afghanistan Simultaneous Resistance to, and Reproduction of, Patriarchal Power Structures
Sarah Louise Edgcumbe
"This article will examine how rural Afghan women employ practices of everyday resistance as a means of challenging extremely patriarchal power structures and male domination in Afghanistan. The resea...
Techniques of Resistance through Weaponization of the Body During Palestinian Hunger Strikes
Ashjan Ajour
This article conceptualises the techniques of resistance developed by Palestinian hunger strikers. Through the weaponization of the body they seek to disrupt the techniques of power exercised over the...
The Journal of Resistance Studies initiates collaborations with academic associations and activist communities
Jørgen Johansen
Stellan Vinthagen
Excerpt: "There exist thousands of journals, and as a reader it is not easy to find the journals that write on topics you are really interested in and publish the kind of high quality work you want to...
Levelling the Political Playing Field: How Nonviolent Resistance Influences Power Relations After Democratic Transition
Markus Bayer
Felix S. Bethke
Daniel Lambach
Nonviolent resistance (NVR) is being used successfully as a strategy to depose dictators and achieve political change around the globe. This study explores how NVR not only advances democratic transit...
Beyond Hunger Strikes: The Palestinian Prisoners’ Movement and Everyday Resistance
Julie M. Norman
Studies on prison-based resistance often focus, understandably, on the phenomenon of hunger strikes. However, most collective hunger strikes are preceded and complemented by other types of resistance,...
Literal Tricks of the Trade. The Possibilities and Contradictions of Swedish Physicians’ Everyday Resistance in the Sickness Certification Process
Mani Shutzberg
This article deals with the ways Swedish General practitioners (GPs) informally deal with the stricter standards of sickness certification and the implications of understanding these ways in terms of ...
Recognizing Everyday Activism: Understanding Resistance to Facial Recognition
Nora Madison
Mathias Klang
The widespread implementation of facial recognition systems as a tool for live surveillance is challenging the ability of individuals to be anonymous in public, and through this, addressing the level ...
Mobile Ambivalence at Standing Rock: surveillance, antagonism, and mobility at the Dakota Access Pipeline protests
Tyler DeAtley
The protests surrounding the Dakota Access Pipeline were marked by ambivalence, both in the blurring of protest spaces and in the interactions in digital spaces surrounding the protest. The Facebook c...
RESIST: Examining Black Lives Matter in the Changing Landscape of Social Trust
Shauna A. Morimoto
Diana Cascante
#BlackLivesMatter represents a quintessential example of digital resistance. The tenets of democratic change, however, rely on building social capital and social trust to sustain democratic action. Th...
The Rainbow Flag as Part of the ‘Apartheid Wall’ Assemblage: Materiality, (In)Visibility and Resistance
Anna Johansson
This paper explores the case of a mural, Through the Spectrum, painted with the colors of the rainbow flag in 2015 by the Palestinian visual artist Khaled Jarrar on a section of the 'Apartheid Wall' s...
Do military leaders resist organizational challenges?
Aida Alvinius
Arita Holmberg
Eva Johansson
Armed forces in many Western countries have been facing societal change processes for more than twenty years, including value changes, government savings, and more recently, an unstable security envir...
What we (do not) want to publish in the Journal of Resistance Studies
Jörgen Johansen
Stellan Vinthagen
Entering the fifth year of publishing JRS, we can look back at a number of articles on a wide variety of topics within resistance studies. The interest is growing, and the field of resistance studies ...
Institutional resistance to transparency: the quest for Public Sector Information in Mexico
Guillén Torres
Despite the popularization of progressive Freedom of Information and Open Data policies, both transparency practitioners and academia have warned about an increase in attempts to control and reduce th...
The internationalisation of nonviolent resistance the case of the BDS campaign
Marwan Darweish
Andrew Rigby
This paper analyzes the factors that contribute to the success of international civil society solidarity networks, using the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement as a case study and compa...
Mining Conflicts in Peru Civil Resistance and Corporate Counterinsurgency
Michael S. Wilson Becerril
Studies of protest have argued that repression “backfires”—it activates indignation and galvanizes resistance. However, most activists know that this is not always the case. When does repression actua...
Travelling Artefacts: The Role of Recognition, Belongings and Acts of Resistance
Mona Lilja
Lena Martinsson
This paper, by using manga comics and the veil as examples, argues that increased scholarly attention to artifacts involved in political struggles could add new insights to previous research on resist...
The Materiality of Resistance: Resistance of Cultural-Material Artefacts and Bodies
Anna Johansson
Mona Lilja
Lena Martinsson
Excerpt:
This editorial, and the collection of articles in this issue, provides new insights into the knowledge that a focus on materiality can offer us, particularly with respect to various resis...
Resistance, Materiality and the Spectre of Cartesianism: A Contribution to the Critique of Feminist New Materialism
Evelina Johansson Wilén
Carl Wilén
An important camp within the emerging field of resistance studies has been characterized by a tendency to study and theorize matters of culture, language, and discourse at the expense of matter itself...
Resistance or Complicity, Songs of Changkhup: An Ethnographic Approach to Exploring Sipsongpanna Tai Lüe Oral Media in Contemporary China
Kefan Yang
In contemporary China, many ethnic minority groups such as Tibetans, Mongolians, Miao, and Tai have their own oral cultures, functioning as oral media. Tai Changkhup, for example, verbally disseminate...
An Exit from the Garbage City: Resistance and “Chikonko” in Zambian Waste Management
Clive Mutame Siachiyako
Erica von Essen
Elin Ångman
This study examines citizens’ responses to exclusions, injustices, and power asymmetries in the context of public participatory processes in solid waste management within the Mtendere township in Lusa...
Resistant Materialities and Power Tools: Dynamics of Power and Resistance in Everyday Consumerism
Otto Von Busch
In an everyday perspective of resistance, there is a tendency to favor human action and agency, both in the exercise of power or in the acts of resistance. The aim of this study is to examine material...
Glorifications and Simplifications in Case Studies of Danish WWII Nonviolent Resistance
Majken Jul Sørensen
Danish resistance to Nazi occupation during WWII is frequently used in literature on civil resistance as an example of how nonviolent resistance has been improvised. Considering the newest historical ...
Researching Resistance: Methodological Challenges, Ethical Concerns and the Future of Resistance Studies
Anton Törnberg
While reviewing the submissions for this special issue, I noticed that none of them ventured predictions about the future of Resistance Studies. This is likely due to the discipline's emphasis on expl...
Activist Ethics: the Need for a Nuanced Approach to Resistance Studies Field Research
Joanna Allan
This paper addresses a significant gap in the literature by exploring the ethical challenges faced by researchers working with resistance activists in conflict zones, using the case study of Moroccan-...
Queering Resistance, Queering Research: In Search of a Queer Decolonial Feminist Understanding of Adivasi Indigeneity
Padini Nirmal
In this paper, I place both the methodological and epistemological realms of my doctoral research with the Adivasis (indigenous peoples) of Attappady, Kerala under a queer decolonial feminist lens in ...
Decolonizing Australia’s Body Politics: Contesting the Coloniality of Violence of Child Removal
Sara C. Motta
In this article, I develop a critique of the continual historic and contemporary use of child removal to systematically pathologize and criminalize Black, Indigenous, and poor-white motherhood. I demo...
Little feminism, but lots of feminists: Feminist resistance and the Scottish independence movement
Jenny Morrison
The Scottish independence campaign became a mass social movement against austerity in the lead-up to the independence referendum of 18 September 2014. The participation of the radical left in the camp...
Feminizing Resistance, Decolonizing Solidarity: Contesting Neoliberal Development in the Global South
Tiina Seppälä
Social movements in the global South have contested neoliberal development, a major cause of forced displacement, already for decades. Since it is usually the poor, low-caste women who suffer most fro...
Sexual and Spiritual R-Evolution through Animism: The Feminine Semiotics of Puppetry
Aja Marneweck
This article examines resistant representational strategies of the feminine through animism-based creative practices like puppetry. It engages with critical issues of identity, representation, and emb...
Recoupling Groups Who Resist Dimensions of Difference, Opposition and Affirmation
Tristan Partridge
This article explores a shift in focus from the outcomes of collective action to the processes and cooperation forms that resistance groups create and embody. By rejecting imposed categories of differ...
Repertoires of Resistance: How Agency Fuelled Rhetoric, Resistance and Rebellion During Mao’s Housing Revolution
Angela Maye-Banbury
Little published research highlights how Chinese residents sought to resist state imposed housing policies when Mao Zedong was Communist Party leader (1949 - 1976) of the People’s Republic of China. B...
Some notes on the Journal of Resistance Studies and its exploration of “resistance”
Stellan Vinthagen
The interest and discussions that our first issue of the Journal of Resistance Studies created motivate a further clarification of our conceptual and theoretical standpoints. Several people – among th...
Citizen Science as Resistance: Crossing the Boundary Between Reference and Representation
Christopher Kullenberg
This article analyses citizen science as a resistance practice with regards to the contradictions that emerge when scientific methods are used for political struggles. Departing from how science and p...
The Journal of Resistance Studies is an international, interdisciplinary and peer- reviewed scientific journal that explores unarmed resistance. The focus is on critical understandings of resistance strategies, discourses, tactics, effects, causes, contexts and experiences. Our aim is to advance an understanding of how resistance might undermine repression, injustices and domination of any kind, as well as how resistance might nurture autonomous subjectivity, as e.g. constructive work, alternative communities, oppositional ways of thinking.
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Submitting to the Journal of Resistance Studies
We publish twice a year digitally and in print, with world-wide free shipping. All articles and issues are made open access two years after publication.
We invite journal articles or book reviews and debate contributions.
Call for Papers
Special Issue
Situated Resistance and Hope in the Everyday
In the global context of increasing authoritarianism and social exclusion, there is an urgent need to renew theoretical references and share practical knowledge from contexts where forms of resistance...
Deadline: January 15, 2026
Issue: Spring 2027
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What do we want to see in submissions to Journal of Resistance Studies?
JRS receives more submissions than we can possible publish. Most of them are good articles with high academic standards. But that is not enough for the editorial board to accept them for publication. As a journal for a relatively new academic field it is important for us to publish texts that contribute to developing this specific field with theoretical ideas, high quality empirical material, interesting analysis, and/or cases from a wide spectra of societal contexts.
Crucial for inclusion in JRS is a clear focus on resistance and how acts of resistance influence power relations. That means that what constitute “resistance” and “power” (or “domination”) and how they relate need to be analyzed. It is important to understand that JRS is not simply one more journal on “social movements”. See our Policy Statement for more details.
All questions regarding the journal should be directed to: [email protected].