Circumvention as Resistance: Revisiting Four Theoretical Traditions to Rethink the Politics of Exit

This article advances resistance studies by theorizing circumvention as a politically significant yet undertheorized mode of resistance. It conceptualizes circumvention as a dual process of individual and collective self-extrication from coercive socio-material assemblages and the terraformation of alternative infrastructures that sustain structural distance. Anthropological and historical literatures indicates that political fission is normative, durable, and recurrent feature of human social organizations. From plebeian secessions, peasant flight, and maroon societies to back-to-the-land movements, 1960s communes, eco-villages, draft resistance, and off-grid housing; circumvention reconfigures power not through direct seizure, but rather by their subtraction from dominant logics, infrastructures, and compulsory relations. Such practices are marginalized in social theory, which often reflect state-centrism and progress narratives that cast exit as apolitical, regressive, or irrelevant to resistance struggles. In response, the article engages four traditions (functionalism, exilic liberalism, anarchism, and post-Marxism) to recover and reframe circumvention’s political significance. The article further challenges safety valve theories that portray departure as pathological, selfish, or system-preserving. Circumvention is reinterpreted as historically persistent and pragmatically indispensable. In a time of infrastructural saturation and systemic exhaustion, the concept of circumvention offers resistance studies a lens for analyzing practices of refusal, autonomy, and alternative world-making.