Beyond “Individual” or “Collective” Resistance: Assessment towards an Agenda for Future Research on Dissent

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 individual types (everyday, local and dispersed) of resistance. This de facto academic division has unwittingly obscured the links, dynamics, hybridity and entanglements between different forms of resistance. In order to stimulate a more complex and nuanced understanding of resistance, we propose a new research agenda for transdisciplinary studies of resistance and present some connections between individual and more collective/organized forms of resistance that need to be systematically explored in future research. Overall, this article argues for the need to recognize both the variation in forms of resistance, and the (often hybrid) linkages between them. The recognition that individual acts of resistance are fundamentally entangled with collective or organized dissent is necessary for shifting our understanding of resistance.