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

Across historical and contemporary struggles, acts of strategic departure have been politically consequential. Yet within dominant traditions of political and social theory, exit-based practices are routinely marginalized, pathologized, or dismissed, often reduced to “safety valve” functions that preserve systems rather than challenge them. This paper advances Resistance Studies by theorizing circumvention as a politically significant yet undertheorized mode of resistance. Circumvention is a form of constructive resistance, conceptualized 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. It treats infrastructure as that which binds actors into compulsory dependence and the solution through which autonomy becomes materially possible. The argument develops from the observation that political fission is not anomalous but recurrent and constitutive of human social organization. Historical examples include reversions to nomadism, plebeian secessions, peasant flight, maroon societies, colonial self-absconding, religious separatists, the Exoduster movement, back-to-the-land homesteading, 1960s communes, draft resistance and more. While significantly different, a similar process undergirds the off-grid housing movement and other alternative living movements including tiny houses, van-life, and transitions towns. To provide better conceptual tools to understand such cases, the paper moves through four theoretical traditions (functionalism, exilic liberalism, anarchism, and post-Marxism) to recover partial insights and their constraints. Functionalism recognizes, ye reabsorbs departure into systemic equilibrium. Exilic liberalism elevates the moral dimension of exit while under-theorizing collective material practices. Anarchist often valorizes autonomy and self-organization, but can drift into romanticism of “autonomous spaces” that underestimates infrastructural reproduction required for durable alternatives. Post-Marxist approaches to exodus identify lines of flight but can subordinate circumvention to a future rupture rather than treat it as an autonomous political modality in the present. Instead of positioning the four traditions as competing explanations, the paper reads them as ways exit gets rendered intelligible and simultaneously misunderstood. As a corrective, the paper reframes exit as a constructive political modality rather than an impulse at the margins of “real” struggle.