Content

Power and Resistance: conference introduction ... 03

Reflections on agony of power - Alen Toplisek ... 06

Reflections on theory and practice - Sofa Gradin ... 07

Reflections on technopolitics - Matheus Lock ... 08
Agments from Disobedient theory and Interventions into normality - Kelvin Mason ... 10
Organization for a free society (OFS): An introduction ... 14
A drawing from the field: anthropological reflections on violence and conflict in Syria - Mia Sung Kjaergaard ...24
Challenges to political expression in a changing academic landscape:
a personal view - Anna Alekseyeva, Elodie Negar Behzadi, Anna Davidson, Kelsi Nagy, Victoria Wyllie de Echeverria ...28
Contemporary and nineteen sixties activism compared: the limits of protest - Mike ODonnell ... 36
Warning! Your brain is being hacked - Mark R. Leiser ... 42

POWER AND RESISTANCE

Conference
Introduction

03

This open source magazine is the result of many

different thoughts and efforts on how to
intervene creatively into our daily basis political
reality and also on how to break down and
surpass old dichotomies and binaries. All the
papers published here were presented in the
conference Power and resistance: theory and
imaginative activism.
This event was a two-day conference in May 2014
at Queen Mary, University of London. The idea for
this conference came out of thinking about
alleged divisions between political thought and
action. If academics and students sit in ivory
towers while activists are caught in strategic
battles with the police and other enemies, how
can political thought and action best learn from
each other? Power & Resistance has a strong
inter-disciplinary and open character, inviting
thinking and acting minds from both the
academic sphere and its surroundings. One of
our main aims is to think about the oppositional
binary that we usually put conceptually between
theory and practice, and how theorising can aid
us in understanding the changing world,
consequently even affecting the way we
normally conduct ourselves.
We have invited theorists and activists to think
about questions that arise when we want our
research or activism to have an
important/signicant social impact. The
conference asks what (theoretical) interventions
are effective in todays society, if any, and whether
they can contribute to the changing of the
landscape of the status quo. In this way, we
wanted to encourage the participants to think
about their own projects or research and how it is
situated within the complex network of social
and power relations. The conference tapped into
both theoretical/methodological questions as
well as more practical/experiential insights of
engaging in society.
Thinking for a while about all of these issues, we
came up with some different clusters of
questions which later turned into conference
panel topics:

The rst one relates to the nature of the power or hegemony we would
seek to intervene into. Is hegemonic power all-consuming, rendering all
attempts at intervening/disobeying/counter-conducting ultimately
hopeless? How are then power and resistance related as actualities or
potentialisations of the two concepts: is resistance merely one form in which
power relations are reproduced? Or can we on the contrary interpret certain
resistant practices as beyond the reach of (hegemonic) power? Can we
evade the traps of hegemony and imaginatively practice activisms that
genuinely resist hegemony/domination? And what does make good
interventions/disobedience/activism? What kinds of practices are powerful
and compelling interventions today in this regard?
The second one relates to the boundaries of fruitful intervention. If the
aim is to pursue some form of political change, at what point do
interventions become powerful? Do theoretical interventions need to relate
to lived experiences to be fruitful? If the self is inherently tied to the
production of theory, is intervention something we can implement in
seminar rooms and ofces, then leave on our desk as we switch off the
lights and go home?
The third one is perhaps more self-reexive for us as academics: how do
radical academics ensure their work is politically worth while? Is academia
really a safe and tucked away ivory tower? There are many debates in
academia on the position of the researcher in their own research, the role
they play and whether or not they should abide by the strict and (today
increasingly contentious) rules of neutrality and objectivity. What are
some obstacles researchers encounter and how do we see our own research
with relation to our dissenting spirit?
The fourth one is about the infrastructure in which political knowledge
and communications takes place. How is the digitization trend affecting the
way politics are being made and how can it be used in favour of resistance?
How do we subvert digital materiality for more diversity, freedom and
escape from the incessant informational control imposed by the
governments and companies? How do we make the digital realm a
common space, radically democratic and inclusive? How do we render this
collective production a common good without it being co-opted by the
hegemonic logic?

These issues led us to create the conference and this resulting

magazine of contributions. The sections of this magazine relate
directly to the panels topics:
Disobedient Theory: Interventions into Normality: This section
invited participants to reect on the border-territories of activism
and theory. Instead of attempting to come up with bland or
overgeneralising rules of thumb, we focused on speaking through
specic examples, movements and organisations, drawing out what
they can tell us about such admittedly generalising questions.
Kelvin Mason's contribution discusses 'academics' who use 'activist'
strategies to place academic practices and resources outside of
academia. (But as we have seen, there is little substance to these
labels anymore.) The Organization for a Free Society discusses
'activists' who use and make 'theory' and who let the process of
understanding how the world works be a central part of changing it
for the better. Mia Sung Kjaergaard's contribution reects on the
tensions that arise when one tries to make theory out of activism,
especially when that activism surrounds sensitive personal and
political catastrophes.
Activism in Academia: this part the contributors debated about
activism within academia. Michael ODonnell approaches the topic
attempting to close the gap between what is necessary at the macro
level. And what is possible in radical activism at the micro-level. He
suggests that the creation of a link between both levels made by an
academic activist group. Anna Alekseyeva, Elodie Negar Behzadi,
Anna Davidson, Kelsi Negar, Victoria Wyllie de Echeverria went to a
more empirical contribution. Departing from a feminist theoretical
perspective, they interviewed academics and PhD students to
understand how the academics experience has been changing with
the growing of neo-liberalism within academic institutions, and also
how theses academics experience activism in such environment.
Technopolitics: Activism and Subversion in the Digital Age: this
section sought to address the issues in the fourth series. Mark Leiser,
in his paper Political Deception in the Online Environment, debates
forms of on-line persuasion and how individuals use digital
platforms to express and spread political ideologies.
We hope that, with this magazine, we all can start to critically think
on how to creatively intervene in our world to make it a better and
fair place to all, overcoming obstacles, uniting forces and ghting
together; because we all know and desire it: another world is
possible.

06

REFLECTIONS ON AGONY OF POWER

ALEN TOPLISEK

When we listen to radical political theorists, the word power

resonates with negative percussions, most often
summoning images of violence, force and compulsion. A
similar view is given by Jean Baudrillard in his book The
Agony of Power where power is seen as an all-dominating
hegemonic force, the meaning of which is evidently
pejorative. The pervasiveness of this attitude pushed the
alternative conceptions of power to the margin or into
inhibition until at least Hannah Arendt wrote the Human
Condition and later Michel Foucault started uncovering the
before-unwritten-about dimensions of the notion of power.
Power shouldnt be a dirty word in the vocabulary of a
theorist or an activist. Power also underlines key
components of emancipation when it comes to individual
or collective empowerment, or resistance. The paradox
arises when we throw into discussion another troublesome
word, that is, politics. As Max Weber already noted, notions,
such as power and resistance, need to transition into
routinization due to their ephemerality. Without going into
that next step of institutionalization and formalization,
movements and resistance groups are threatened by the
inevitability of diminishing power and effectiveness. It was
Foucault who noted that /p/olitics is nothing more and
nothing less than that which is born with resistance to
governmentality, the rst revolt, the rst confrontation*.
Politics and resistance therefore are not worlds apart in the
conceptual and ontological sense, as it might seem at a rst
glance.
This conceptual debate becomes even more difcult when
it is situated within the context of todays post-austerity
neoliberal governmentality. It has become increasingly
clear in the Western capitalist societies that resistance to the
prevailing governing order is (or so it seems, at least) futile.
Anti-establishment protest movements are nding it hard
to spread their message across the barricades of the
periphery and the parties of the left (centre). The latter, even
when they resist the pro-business or other antipopular
policies, they quickly fall into the hegemonic lure of
compromise and reappropriability. If the moment for a
revolution still hasnt arrived and the gradualist approach to
change hasnt done much to avert the expanding social
inequalities, what then there is left to do?
* Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the
Collge De France, 197879. Ed. Michel Senellart. Trans.
Graham Burchell. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
Page 217.

Reflections on theory and practice

Sofa GRADIN
Whenever we take action to improve the world, we are already drawing
on our knowledge of what the world is like. The protester on the street
waving a banner telling the government to change a law has already
made an analysis of the political situation, of whom to direct the message
towards and why. The pregurativist stirring a pot of vegan stew in a social
centre, creating an alternative space where activists can think and interact
beyond capitalism, is already drawing on theory and ideas of how and
why this can be done. We are all using political theory and ideas all the
time sometimes we know and say so explicitly, and sometimes we don't.
Similarly, to think, speak and discuss is already to do. Theory, analysis and
ideology are so central to our existence in the world that rethinking
cannot be separated from redoing. As J.K. Gibson-Graham put it,
'Successful theory "performs" a world; categories, concepts, theorems,
and other technologies of theory are inscribed in worlds they presuppose
and help to bring into being'*.
It is curious, then, that political theory and activism have come to be seen
by many as somehow separate from each other. The stereotype of
theorists is that they lock themselves into exclusive ivory towers, rubbing
tweed-patched elbows with other nerds and writing obscure books that
bear no relation to the real world outside. When I run a skillshare or give a
talk about political theory in activist groups I'm involved in, I sometimes
get told that academia has nothing to offer activists, that political theory is
middle class wankery, that academics are dinosaurs.
With horror I remember a documentary I watched a few years ago about a
nun in one of Sweden's few remaining fully functioning convents. This
deeply devout young woman spoke of her passionate feelings about
global poverty. She learned of the famine and poverty that so many
experience, she had learned the atrocious statistics of global inequality;
and decided to devote her life to eradicating them. Her course of action:
to go into the convent for the rest of her life, spending her days inside the
walls of this small building in rural Sweden, praying about it.
As a PhD student, I fear I may end up in some respects like her, sitting in a
room somewhere trying to think away the world's problems. I'm sure the
neoliberals and neoconservatives would love it if all the lefties did that.
On the other hand, the respective stereotype about activists is that they
are running round on the streets caught up in petty quarrels with the
police or government ofcials, without a comprehensive or critical
understanding of what they are doing. How can you seriously attempt to
change the world if you do not understand the intricacies of power?

There is certainly a grain of truth at either

extreme of the theorist/activist binary but
the problem does not arise from any
inherent separation between thinking and
acting. The problem with the nerdy scholar
whose writing never sees the sun rise
outside the university library basement, is
not the nerdiness, but the failure to reach
beyond a small academic bubble. What
makes theory potentially irrelevant for
activists is not its focus on political thought
or its pausing to follow through and
critically analyse ideas rather, it is the
limited access that is problematic. That
academic education costs money. That
literature is copyrighted and commodied.
That all schools are not equally resourced
and able to give students good
foundations for further critical study. That
university is something you are either fully
in (as a fee-paying registered student) or
outside of (as a member of public barred
from campus buildings and academic
libraries).
As for activists who get caught in strategic
battles with the police or politicians,
perhaps we would be even more successful
if we saw thinking and critical analysis as
something integral to what we do.
Thankfully, the extreme stereotypes of the
theorist/activist binary do not bear much
relation to real life. As we have seen,
activists are already theorising, and
theorists are already being active. The
contributions in this magazine are only
some empirical examples of that.
* Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2006) The End of
Capitalism (As We Knew It), New Edition Ten
Years On. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press. Pages xx-xix.

07

08

Reflections on technopolitics
Matheus Lock*
One of the many issues that arises in my mind when I
think about theory and activism is, rst of all,
regarding the old fashioned binary that divides both
to extreme poles. In relation to this initial issue, I can
only reason that both concepts can no longer be
separated; they are two sides of the same existence,
and are merged as expression and content of the
same assemblage. Following this idea of
non-separation of theory and practice another
important issue arises, this time related to the
materiality that surrounds us and mediates our
exchange of information and communication, both in
our daily lives and in political activities. Once we
realise that theory and activism are part of the same
social process, based on interaction and
communication, then the importance of the medium
where this process takes place also becomes clear. The
importance of the material circumstances and
platforms for discursive practices is not new in politics.
In 1917, Lenin stated that the close relationship
between material circumstances and the condition of
possibility of a certain statement to take place, and the
potentiality of a given statement to exert effect in the
material assemblage.
Nowadays, maybe more than ever before, the
medium and materiality of communication,
information exchange and power relations are again
in the spotlight of political debate and activism. From
the late 1940s, with the emergence of the rst digital
and micro-electronics technologies, until the rst two
decades of this century, we have seen an explosion
and expansion of digital technologies for
communication and information. Of course we have
to contextualise this technological expansion and
understand it within the very apogee of capitalism.
The world has been through constant changes not
only with regard to the technique itself, but also in its
forms of production and reproduction of capital, in the
management and development of knowledge and
discourses of truth, in the forms of relationship and
sociability, in the political struggles, and in policy
making.

Another important transformation of our

contemporary era is that immaterial capitalism
and new digital technologies have become
mutually interdependent. It means digital
technology is not only a network structure that
serves as a productive base to capitalism, but
capitalists also invest in it with all their strength
to extract as much value as possible. In this
sense, there is a movement of expansion of
digital technology propelled by capitalism in
every area of society, which increases its reach.
Such a materiality presents an ambiguous
potentiality.
On one hand, digital technology allows people
to communicate, exchange information and
knowledge, in order to create and share their
own symbolic content, in a much faster, more
accessible and dynamic way than previous
communication technologies. This kind of
technology enables people to engage in social
interaction and in the production of their own
opinions and narratives. In fact, digital
technologies have been used not only as a
platform for communication, entertainment or
consumption, but also as a highly strategic tool
for political struggles and the articulation and
diffusion of alternative political opinions that are
not necessarily presented in the traditional
channels of political information. Good
examples of such use can be seen in
movements such as the Arab Spring, Occupy
and Indignados (but we could also name many
other initiatives like Wikileaks, Open Democracy
etc.). With the expansion of digital technology,
the sources of information and political
narratives have increased, making political
disputes more complex, implying changes of
various orders, especially in the relationship
between the political eld, the media sphere,
the market in general, and civil society. This in
turn introduces new processes, practices, forms
of sociability, political actors, groups, etc. There is
a pluralisation of voices, collective production
and political action.

*Scholarship from CAPES Foundation, Ministry of Education of Brazil, Braslia - DF 70040-020, Brazil

On the other hand, there is a double movement made both by

capitalism itself and by government towards complete control over
digital technologies. It is well known that corporations such as
Google and Amazon track peoples consumer behaviour online to
extract prot from it. These companies identify social patterns,
trends and forms of collective production and try to co-opt and
capture them into capitalisms dynamic. They also try to limit
collective creation of knowledge and sharing of information,
controlling such production by restricting the ux of discourses and
practices, and by lobbying for the privatisation and patenting of
intellectual property. The second movement, the one made by
governments, is as invasive and brutal as the one made by
corporations. Nonetheless, as governments hold the monopoly of
law creation and legal violence, their movement to control the ux
of information and surveillance data is much more complex and
deceiving than those put in practice by companies, which, in most
cases have to respect some limitations imposed by sovereign
states. Moreover, government practices can always be legitimized
by discourses of fear and security. So it goes without saying all the
perils and constraints to freedom of speech and political action are
imposed by surveillance programs (such as the one run by the
NSA) or censorship of the internet (as occurs in countries like China
and Iran).
The contemporary paradox presented by digital media shows all
the potentialities and fragilities that this medium offers directly or
indirectly to anyone. It is not hard to notice an intensication of
political struggles that render both online and ofine worlds one
and the same battle eld. It is also noticeable the importance to
engage in this struggle, both producing content and expressions,
making theory our political practice, and our political practice, the
theory that will guide us.
* Lenin, Vladmir. Collected Works, available on Lenin Internet
Archive.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jul/15.htm

FRAGMENTS FROM

DISOBEDIENT THEORY AND

INTERVENTIONS INTO NORMALITY
Summary for readers in a rush
Provoked by the notion of disobedient theory and
interventions into normality, the fragments (of a longer article)
presented here explore what constitutes fruitful and
compelling political action for radical academics. In the context
of the domination of global capitalism and the neoliberalising
university, they challenge the double binary opposition
between theory and practice and domination and resistance.
Conceptually, I draw on Sojas notion of critical thirding to
analyse imaginative activism. I conduct participatory action
research (PAR) with academic activists who are engaging
collectively with radical social movements. Offering an account
of fuller geographies, I present it as a shared ethic and project
circulating in academia, a space-relational militant
particularism being elaborated among human geographers
especially. One key strand of fuller geographies is schole as a
revolutionary educational project that seeks to develop our full
human potential beyond the capitalist political-economy. Via
the stories of the communifesto for fuller geographies,
academic seminar blockades, and radical reading groups, I
illustrate how academics themselves can put theory into
compelling practice, how theory can be active while practice is
continually rethought as it is enacted. Research ndings
support the idea of a continuum of theory-practice along
which ideas and actions can slide, overlap, and engage
fruitfully without the binary being wholly dismissed.
Public Geographies: slower, more engaged and
passionate
In The Discomting Rise of Public Geographies Fuller and
Askins identify an academic competitiveness which
undermines collective engagement with public scholarship
(Fuller & Askins, 2007). The individual competitiveness which
Fuller and Askins identify seems to dictate that a turn to public
geographies shifts ridiculously quickly to beyond public
geographies as the institutional spur for the burgeoning
career academic to say something new and ll the theory gap
supersedes the need to fully unpack and develop practically a
notion with potential social benet.

10

KELVIN MASON

Geography and Planning, University of Liverpool

Kelvin.Mason@liverpool.ac.uk

Moreover, the authors are critical of a culture of patronising

academic expertise (us) which frames public scholarship as
handing knowledge down to society (them), god-like: who
the fuck do we think we are? Doing public geographies
should challenge the binary of lay and expert. They
highlight that academics and universities are not isolated from
publics and public arenas but rather are embedded parts
thereof, affected by the same processes that must be resisted
by critical scholarship - neoliberalisation with its attendant
privatisation, corporatisation and managerialism being their
prime case in point: Emancipation means for everyone in the
groups, communities, publics that we engage with (and are
not divorced from) but also emancipatory for us as
academics. central to critical public geographies analyzing
the academy, I see a need to decolonise the Self (p.588).
Ultimately, Fuller and Askins issue a call to action: Geographers
must participate in resistance both inside the academy and in
the public domain; they must: Act out SLOWER, MORE
ENGAGED AND PASSIONATE GEOGRAPHIES. Fuller and Askins
ask wouldnt it be great to be asked to review a research
project whose outcome is a community event? (p.600)
Grounding fuller geographies: critical thirding
My approach to binaries such as domination/resistance and is
best summed up by Ed Soja, referring to theory/practice, as
aiming to: open up our spatial imaginaries to ways of thinking
and acting politically that respond to all binarisms, to any
attempt to confine thought and political action to only two
alternatives, by interjecting an-Other set of choices. In this
critical thirding, the original binary choice is not dismissed
entirely but is subjected to a creative process of restructuring
that draws selectively and strategically from the two opposing
categories to open new alternatives (Soja, 1996, p. 5).

So, confronted by binaries of theory/practice and

domination/resistance, I propose that the aim of fuller
geographies is to open up alternatives, spaces of hope,
entangled becomings.
Links to case studies of fuller geographies
The communifesto for fuller geographies
PyGyRG 2012 communifesto for fuller geographies Antipode
Foundation Participatory Geographies Research Group
(http://antipodefoundation.org/2013/01/23/symposium-on-p
ygyrgs-communifesto-for-fuller-geographies-authors-reply-to-c
ritical-responses-2/) Accessed 27 February 2014
Antipode Foundation 2012 Symposium on the Participatory
Geographies Research Groups communifesto for fuller
geographies: towards mutual security
http://antipodefoundation.org/2012/10/15/symposium-on-th
e-participatory-geographies-research-groups-communifesto-fo
r-fuller-geographies-towards-mutual-security/
PyGyRG 2012a Connectivity, Creativity, Hope, and Fuller
Subjectivities: Appreciating the Responses to the
Communifesto for Fuller Geographies Antipode Foundation
Participatory Geographies Research Group
(http://radicalantipode.les.wordpress.com/2012/12/pygyrg-r
eply.pdf) Accessed 24 April 2014
Doing Schole
Purcell M 2012) Schools of our own, Antipode Foundation
(http://radicalantipode.les.wordpress.com/2012/10/purcell-r
esponse.pdf) Accessed 22 March 2014
Mason K & Purcell M 2014 forthcoming Beyond the defence
of public education: Building a new schole IN The
Para-Academic Handbook HammerOn Press
Academic seminar blockades
Mason K 2013 Academics and Social Movements: Knowing
our place, making our space ACME Special Issue: The Politics of
Climate Change12 1 22-43
Mason K & Askins K 2013 COP15 and beyond: Politics, protest
and climate justice ACME Special Issue: The Politics of Climate
Change 12 1 9-22
Mason K & Askins K 2012 Us and us: Faslane 30 and
Academic Direct Action Medicine, Conict and Survival 28 4
282-288

Askins K. & Mason K forthcoming 2014 Us and Us: Agonism,

non-violence and the relational spaces of civic activism ACME
Mason K 2012 Academia beyond 365 and the blockades IN
Vinthagen S, Kenrick J & Mason K eds Tackling Trident Irene
Publishing, Sweden
Vinthagen S, Kenrick J & Mason K eds 2012 Tackling Trident:
Academics in Action through Academic Conference Blockades
Irene Publishing, Sweden
Kenrick J & Vinthagen S 2012 Critique in Action Academic
Conference Blockades IN Vinthagen S, Kenrick J & Mason K
eds Tackling Trident: Academics in action through Academic
Conference Blockades Resistance Studies Series Irene
Publishing, Sweden 14-39
Zelter A 2008 Faslane 365: A year of anti-nuclear blockades
Luath Press, Edinburgh
Radical reading groups
Halvorsen S, Burton K & Mason K 2014 forthcoming Radical
Reading Groups: The co-production of critical public spaces
AREA
Reflections on fuller geographies and schole
What is that makes a political intervention compelling? This
question dees any prescriptive answer. For some participants
in academic seminar blockades, for example, I would claim
that what serves to make taking action with others irresistible is
the creative and joyful collective manifestation of the deant
hope articulated by Solnit (2005). However, I know that for
many people the risk associated with such a transgression of
normality is off-putting rather than attractive. In discussion in
and around the seminar blockade, participants considered the
role of entry level actions, state-approved and stewarded
marches, for example, in calming participants fears and
allowing them to taste resistance. Our tactics need to be
constantly rethought to make political intervention compelling
for different publics. Moreover, we must strive to incorporate
some appropriate measure of resistance that challenges
subjection and domination: Interventions must be
transgressions, however small, they must be deantly hopeful.

But at what point do interventions gain meaning or become

powerful? Here, Solnits claim might be that empowerment happens
in the moment where subjection, domination and/or exploitation are
challenged and that in these moments we lay the foundation for an
ongoing series of acts of deance that ultimately lead to
emancipation. This contention demands unpacking. How can those
moments of empowerment be sustained to become the normal
passage of time? How can they become cumulative, adding up to
bring an end to oppression? Do we even dare hope for such an end,
or rather can we theoretically even conceive it? Solnits claim is
seductive but Foucauldian analysis, in particular, conrms Sojas
notion which we have deployed in this paper: subjection,
domination and exploitation cannot be made to disappear; they
cannot wholly give way to a critical thirding with resistance (you
cannot have synthesis without thesis and antithesis, becoming
without being and non-being).
I believe our task is to grow us and us, what Hannah Arendt terms
power-with, while diminishing but appreciating us and them as
necessary and enduring constituents of our becoming, that radical
democracy which must be antagonistic (Mouffe, 1993, 2000, 2005).
For Arendt, power (i.e. power-with) arises when people communicate
and act together in concert: Power is what keeps the public realm,
the potential space of appearance between acting and speaking men
(sic), in existence (Arendt, 1958, p. 200 in Goehler, 2000, p. 41).
Institutions are signicant sites where power sediments and so are
where our task may prove most fruitful, as well as most arduous. For
academics, acting against domination in our universities making
them truly ours - is where we might most productively intervene.
Political thought and action best learn from each other when thought
is put into action and each is inuenced by the encounter. Theoretical
interventions need to relate to lived experience to be fruitful. And
perhaps the most fruitful interventions relate to our own lived
experiences, given that these are surely what we know best and
should be able to intervene in most readily. I do not want to argue,
though, that intellectuals should not make theoretical interventions
that relate to the lives of oppressed others of whom we have no lived
experience. On the contrary, we should of course intervene where we
have resistant knowledge, but we should also question the most
fruitful way of intervening with oppressed others, wary of our own
expertise.
My main point, however, is that while intervening on behalf of
oppressed others we should not neglect ourselves or indeed
proximate others, for example our colleagues working or not
working in all aspects of reproducing the university (c.f. Fuller and
Askins, 2007): We must intervene not only as individuals but, more

fruitfully, construct place-based and spatial militant

particularisms. We should also strive to link our
militant particularisms with wider struggles via
networks and social movements, especially in
convergence spaces, thereby building solidarities
(C.f. Routledge, 2003; Routledge et al, 2007;
Cumbers et al, 2008; Featherstone, 2012).
The most fruitful political interventions involve
putting theory into practice, instigating newly
creative action, and thence producing new theory
from/with practice. The abstract and the practical do
not cannot wholly disappear in thirdspace, the
space of critical thirding: There must be room for
abstract theory just as there must for, say, actions
founded in emotional responses to injustice: There
must be governmentality (Foucault, 2006) just as
there must be the scream (Holloway, 2002). This
does not contradict my claim that the most fruitful
political interventions will include syntheses of
theory and practice.
Developing more disobedient theory
Following Fuller and Askins, developing
disobedient theory means practicing slower, more
engaged and passionate scholarship. Radical
academics must reject the competitiveness which
atomises our solidarities and blocks the
emergence of militant particularisms as
theory/practices. We must reject too
competiveness as a spur that moves us too quickly
beyond exposing theories to practice and so
re-theorising practice and re-practicing theory
There must be a place in academia for long-term,
participatory and committed scholarship as itself a
valid path to new, more empowering theory. In the
spirit and practice of radical democracy, we should
also claim a new space in the public realm wherein
we welcome and engage in contestation of the
knowledges we contribute to emancipatory
struggles, neither privileged nor abashed by our
scholarship. I sense breathtaking radical potential
for wider academia practices of fuller scholarship
and doing schole, potential that should be
developed as it is practiced as it is rethought

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Sage, London

14

Our Work
I. The Basics
Organizing for a Free Society Our Work
II. Our Politics
Methods for Understanding the World Around Us Totality of
Oppressions
The Story We Are Told
Visions of the World We Want
A Strategy From Here to There
III. Here and Now
The Political Moment
Today and Tomorrow Moving Forward with OFS
This Introduction to Organization for a Free Society was collectively
written by our members. Its purpose is to give a broad overview of
what we stand for and how we carry that out.
I. The Basics
Organizing for a Free Society
Organization for a Free Society (OFS) is a participatory socialist
organization(i) made up of activists and organizers immersed in
different grassroots movements, struggling collectively toward a free
society.
OFS is a home for revolutionaries working both to develop holistic
politics, vision, and strategy and to strengthen the broader
movement.(ii) We study together to deepen our politics, but OFS is
not a study group. We hit the streets and organize together, but OFS
is not a direct action afnity group, either. We are a united group of
committed revolutionaries growing and struggling together,
connecting theory and practice, and attempting to embody the
seeds of the future in the present. We have political connections to
movements in different parts of the world, but our organization is
primarily based in the United States, and our analysis and strategy
reect our country and its role in the world.
OFS is committed to a fundamental transformation of the social,
political, economic, and environmental values and institutions of
society and we draw from a rich history of social movements that
came before us.

Internally, we practice an intentional and exible form

of participatory democracy with structures for active
decision making and shared leadership. Our
organization strives to provide space for the individual
growth of our members and for collective action.
In our grassroots work(iii) we have fought budget cuts
and tuition hikes at universities, mobilized against war,
organized in restaurants, fought right to work
legislation in the Midwest, fought against the mass
incarceration of people of color, and worked with
youth from the South Bronx to Palestine to Tibet. We
have been active against the foreclosure crisis in New
York City as well as the climate crisis in efforts across
New York State; we have stood up for reproductive
justice and done work to heal the impacts of sexual
violence in our own communities.
Our members have helped to found political
organizations, educational collectives, training
institutions and communal living spaces. In addition
to our grassroots organizing, we try to popularize our
politics and our work through the media to which we
have access. We write articles and pamphlets, produce
lms and radio shows, perform music and spoken
word poetry, and create visual art.
Following the lead of oppressed communities and
drawing on the experience of movement elders, our
goal is to work with others to grow and deepen the
movement and to develop a revolutionary,
participatory socialist tendency within it. In the service
of these goals, we carry out internal study and public
education to deepen our theory and analysis and we
strategize to use our collective energy to support
movements and hone our ability to rally in moments
of crisis. Working together, we have played an
important role in the Occupy movement and served
vital relief, recovery and rebuilding functions in the
wake of Hurricane Sandy.
We are proud of our work on the ground and we
understand that we are one small part of building a
movement that is capable of transforming our world
into something just, beautiful and sustainable.

II. Our Politics

Methods for Understanding the World Around Us
As people we are shaped and limited by the institutions around us, and at the same time we
are the ones who create and perpetuate these institutions. In order to create a free society, we
must use theory to help us overcome both systemic oppression and our own internalized
oppression.
First, we must understand the various faces of the system that oppress us in different areas of
our lives. In understanding capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy(iv), environmental
destruction, and the violent state that enforces them, we see that each system has distinct
characteristics but that they all share a common factor hierarchy and domination are the
values at the root of each of these systems. Second, we see that those systems of oppression
are interwoven, and are able to recreate, reinforce and defend one another.
We have all arrived at this holistic analysis by growing and developing in different tendencies,
like feminism, anarchism, national liberation, and Marxism, and we bring these paths with us
into our work. We can focus on confronting one form of domination or exploitation in a
particular moment for example, we focus on institutional racism when we take the streets to
protest the NYPDs murder of yet another young Black man. Likewise, there can be broad
political moments in which one form of oppression takes precedence and must be confronted
rst, but we always remember that other forms of oppression are present as well.
We do not subscribe to a perspective that holds one system as the root of all others. Though
we can identify particular aspects of oppression in different areas of social life (our workplaces,
relationships, etc.), we see one totality of oppressions. We call this method of analysis
complementary holism.
It is not enough to understand that one system of oppression is not historically more
important than others. We must take all systems of oppression into account in our analysis of
society, understanding that different types of oppression can accommodate, dene and
reproduce one another. If we were to say that we use concepts of feminism to analyze
patriarchy, anarchism to analyze state power, Marxism to analyze economics, and so on, we
would still only get a two-dimensional picture of each of these systems. We cannot abstract
the economy from the rest of the social fabric, analyze it in a vacuum and think that we can
arrive at a sufcient strategy to dismantle capitalism. Ultimately, we must confront the totality
of oppressions if we are to build a free society.

Totality of Oppressions
The system in which we live is comprised of interwoven methods of oppression that function
differently, but work together to maintain what we experience as the status quo.
White supremacy in the U.S. exists in many complicated forms, beginning with the arrival of
Europeans to this continent, the genocide of and theft of land from Native Americans, and African
slave labor. Today, Black and Latino men are under- and unemployed, policed, incarcerated, and
murdered, a phenomenon that devastates whole communities. Many communities of color suffer
from displacement through gentrication, policing on the basis of immigration status, lack of
health insurance and denial of care, and chronically low wages. Entire groups of people are
invisibilized and exploited based on immigration status and are constantly harassed and
threatened with incarceration and deportation. All of this exists in a framework that gives better
treatment to people with light skin, who comprise a ctional white race, created in comparison to
other ctional races. The logic of white supremacy bends and twists to accommodate any situation,
always with the goal of maintaining a power structure. Within and across communities of color
there also exists discrimination on the basis of skin color, from shadeism to outright exclusion of
one group by another group, due to notions of superiority among people of different nationalities,
regions within countries, and so on. The experience of white communities in rural Appalachia sheds
light on the fact that capitalism always requires an oppressed class and remains loyal to no one. In
multiracial regions, whiteness is used as a tool of oppression, but in places that are predominantly
white, poor white people become the underclass.
Capitalism is a prot-driven, market-based economic system premised on a division of society into
hostile classes, based on the private ownership of the means of production. In order to maximize
prot, the capitalist class must maintain a large, exploitable pool of laborers the working class
who are relegated to conditions of physical and psychological subjugation in order to keep them
dependent on their jobs. As modern capitalism evolved and as a result of the rapid technological
developments and increased division of labor, the economy developed a professional-managerial
sector, out of which arose a coordinator class(v), which has class antagonisms to both capitalists and
workers.
Today, this system is exported and enforced through neocolonial international relations and global
power structures inherited from imperialism. Former colonial countries are able to exploit the labor
and resources of former colonies via capital, international banking systems, and threat of force.
Further enriching themselves, wealthier nations can pacify larger portions of their citizenry with
materialism and notions of cultural supremacy, and they can use the unrest in the Global South
that this system produces to justify further intervention.

The Story We Are Told

This system is based on the premise of perpetual material

growth, which is depleting the natural wealth of our Mother
Earth, making her less and less inhabitable for people and for
many other animals and plants. We are living in a time of
unprecedented loss of species and habitat diversity, as well as
deterioration of vital resources such as clean air, clean water,
and healthy soil. As we experience these crises of
environment and climate, the wisdom of indigenous
peoples that helped to sustain humanity for so long
continues to be silenced through the marginalization and
destruction of indigenous communities and lands.
Through the instruments of patriarchy, we are bound to a
rigid gender, sex, and sexual binary(vi). Historically, patriarchy
has centered around the policing and control of wombs and
reproduction, which has resulted in the policing and
controlling of femininity on all bodies, but its effects are felt
everywhere. Cisgender(vii) masculinity is afrmed and
privileged, while women, queer people, transgender people,
and gender non-conforming people are punished by the
threat of rape, violence, shame, and social and economic
subordination.
The state broadly understood as the institutions of
organized coercive power of ruling social groups enforces
authoritarianism in many aspects of our lives, from the family
and the school to the government and the courts. Power is
concentrated in the hands of a small group of elites (mostly
rich, white, straight, Christian men), and most people have
little say in the institutions that govern our lives.
We experience these systems as part of a whole, a totality of
oppressions, woven together both through societys
institutions and in personal interactions. These systems
divide us from each other by giving some relative privileges
over others, buying us off in order to obscure the systemic
implications of the totality of oppressions.

In understanding the U.S. experience today, it is

important to study the story we are taught about our
society. We are socialized not to name oppression as
systemic or interconnected. In what boils down to a
gendered and racialized class caste system, we are
taught in school that we live in a merit-based society.
This means that punishment and rewards are
presented as direct results of individuals behavior. In
this framework, oppressed people are blamed for
their oppression. We are told that labels like lazy,
stupid, dangerous and crazy are inherent in certain
groups of people and are the cause of their poverty,
rape, incarceration, pillaging or marginalization. A
persons position in a system of oppression and
privilege is erased behind the faade of a meritocracy,
in which anyone can achieve anything if they only try
hard enough. We are shown individual examples to
prove that oppressions are a thing of the past. While
President Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey are
examples of Black individuals who have power and
wealth, their existence is used to demonstrate that
racism is over.
Likewise, liberation movements do not go
unrecognized by the system. Rather, the system coopts the language and symbols of revolutionaries
and incorporates them. This phenomenon colonizes
dissent, maintaining that the system is working
amenable to change but never to revolution.
We learn these stories to justify the oppressive
treatment that we experience and witness. These
stories are delivered to us daily through sitcoms on
television, popular songs on the radio, the nightly
news, our churches and schools, our parents and
friends.
Using our analysis, we deconstruct aspects of our
system to understand its parts, but these parts all
comprise one coherent system of oppression. Race is
one of the ways in which class is expressed in the U.S.,
and the state not only enforces patriarchy but is
shaped by it. Ultimately, we wont win freedom unless
we take on the whole system, with all of its
manifestations, and the story that protects it. To that
end, we need our own vision, our own story, and a
strategy for winning.

Visions of the World We Want

Vision directs our work and guides what we build; it inspires us to continue working together
against all odds. In the words of the Mexican revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magon, If the
revolutionary lacks the guiding idea of their action, they will not be anything other than a ship
without a compass.
Vision is essential and it is something that all participants and organizations in a revolutionary
movement should evaluate for themselves and continually revise. A vision is not a blueprint,
but rather a thoughtfully articulated aspiration that is based consciously on a set of values.
When we imagine a free society, we think of values such as equity, solidarity, and selfmanagement. Based on these values and our vision, we work to build institutions to pregure
that society to the greatest extent possible workplace and neighborhood councils,
community boards, participatory socialist planning, democratic decision-making structures,
and more. We build these institutions because they can make peoples lives materially better
and in order to help us learn how to be productive members of a free society. In addition to
the immediate benets, the goal of pregurative institutions is to build power towards
destroying and replacing the oppressive institutions that prevent us from actualizing our
vision.
We envision a political system in which people have institutions (e.g. assemblies) that allow
them to participate in decision making to the extent that they are affected by the outcomes.
We envision a classless and participatory economy where workers and consumers use
councils to plan the economy democratically and to meet basic needs collectively. In this
economy, workers are compensated for effort, sacrice, and need. Jobs are balanced so that
empowering and undesirable types of work are distributed fairly.
We envision a liberated and egalitarian kinship in which women and transgender people
have control over their own bodies, youth have institutions that allow them to practice selfmanagement, and all people have the freedom to dene their genders, sexualities, and
family relations in ways that are liberating, consensual and healthy. We envision an
intercommunalist(viii) framework in which historically oppressed peoples have the space and
resources to achieve self-determination and cultural autonomy.
We envision a dynamic in which human civilization and its structures synchronize with
natures diversity, fertility, and creativity. We believe that humans are entirely capable of
utilizing the wealth of the earth in a way that leaves intact more than what is needed for the
generations to come. With all this in mind, we envision a society that draws on the wisdom
and sensible practices of our ancestors who were the original organic farmers, who invented
sustainable shing, and who used creativity to maximize natural resources. At the same time,
we understand that it is crucial to continually integrate useful technology that improves
quality of life and reduces undesirable work for all people. We envision sustainably run
metropolises that rely on smart design: public transportation, green infrastructure,
subsistence gardening, and urban-rural partnership.
The vision we put forward is based on our view of history and the needs and potential of
human beings. We are committed to an open, participatory, and continual process of
discovery and deliberation on the essence of the free society we are struggling to create. Our
vision is not dogmatic. We do not know the future and our vision will transform itself through
struggle and experimentation.

A Strategy from Here to There

Revolution is not a singular event, but a process made up of overlapping stages: movement
building, counterpower(ix), confrontation, and transformation.
In the movement building stage, the task of revolutionaries is to raise consciousness among
large groups of people, challenge the dominant narrative, create channels through which
people can join the movement and develop as revolutionaries, and lay the groundwork for
collective long-term struggle. To build a movement, we encourage people to grow and
transform from allies and supporters to movement leaders and revolutionaries, both through
collective action and through participatory educational processes. We ght for concrete
victories that meet peoples needs and change the narrative about what is possible, and for
long-term victories that demonstrate the power of collective action and put us in the position
to achieve even more.
We work to build a movement that can eventually become a counterpower. A counterpower is
a united bloc of institutions that are popularly regarded as viable, functional and legitimate
alternatives to the institutions of the status quo, and which actively ght to replace them. Its
not enough to create our own alternatives within a corrupt world, nor is it enough to ght
exclusively within or against the systems of that corrupt world without creating alternatives.
We need to simultaneously ght oppressive systems and pregure the free society we
envision.
We understand that ruling groups do not give up their power without a ght and that
revolution also means confrontation. At crucial moments through the course of a struggle,
peoples movements must confront elites and take power from them, or defend themselves
after they achieve power. Such moments of uprising are not the revolution in itself, but part
of the enormous project of transformation, which takes lifetimes. While it may be necessary,
we do not glorify this stage of struggle any more than any other.
At the foundation of our conception of the revolutionary process is a radical transformation of
the institutions that govern our lives and of the values that drive them. As we work to build a
movement, develop into a counterpower, and topple the institutions of the status quo, we
must also work to transform ourselves, so that what we build does not replicate exploitative,
oppressive, hierarchical values. Revolutionary communities must engage in the process of
healing from the oppressions that we seek to overturn as they inevitably arise in our very own
organizer circles, in our friend groups and in our relationships. OFS seeks diverse methods of
overcoming internalized oppression and its manifestations within our organization through
internal group work. Revolution is a matter of life and death, a struggle for human life on
Earth, and for the enormous amounts of human potential still to be actualized.

III. Here and Now

The Political Moment
We are in a unique period of history, a time of both incredible turmoil and immense
possibility.
We are in the midst of an ecological crisis that threatens all living things on the planet through
climate change, pollution, corporate agriculture, water shortage and the extinction of many
species of plants and animals. We are deep in an economic crisis that takes our homes and
jobs while forcing working families and students further into debt. Our criminal justice system
promotes racist policing that has swelled the U.S. prison population to an unprecedented size;
the system strips its subjects primarily Black and Latino men of rights to full participation in
society, through incarceration and a stigma that affects access to housing, jobs, child care and
voting rights. This system further exploits and polices people on the basis of immigration
status, and we have seen ever-increasing threats, harassment and deportation in
undocumented and immigrant communities.
We see a dangerous shift to the right in our dysfunctional political system. We face a rising
proto-fascist conservative movement that hypocritically uses the Constitution to promote
division and deny rights to immigrants, people of color, women, queer and transgender
people, and low- and middle-income workers. The new right uses increasingly nationalist
rhetoric, eerily reminiscent of 20th century fascist movements across the globe, to divide poor
and working white people from others in order to promote an ultra-conservative agenda.
Meanwhile, their liberal counterparts are unwilling or unable to stop the right from moving
policy in their direction.
While the system of oppression works to keep us down, there are moments of heightened
crisis that reveal the core characteristics of that system and open up possibilities for revolution
and freedom. We may be entering one of these historic moments. In the past few years, we
have seen uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Mexico, India, Greece, Spain, Nepal, and
countless other places around the world. In North America in 2011, we saw resistance in
Madison, Wisconsin to defend collective bargaining rights, worker and student occupations,
and the rise of the Occupy Movement across the U.S. Throughout 2012, we have seen the rise
of the First Nations Idle No More campaign, weve seen workers striking, homeowners
resisting foreclosure, communities resisting disaster capitalism, and weve seen countless
other examples of a movement being born. All over the world, people are declaring that
amidst the crisis, another world is possible.

Today and Tomorrow

We must confront the acute crises before us and build a movement united in a common
analysis, vision and strategy one that can overcome these crises and push forward, through
the deepest layers of oppression in our society and ourselves, for a free society. Our task is to
help build this movement. We must popularize the story of people struggling throughout
history and the stories of the people struggling today. We must educate ourselves and those
around us, deepen our politics and sharpen our skills. We must engage in collective action so
that we can grow from it in order to win tangible, signicant gains today. We must build
institutions that belong to us, enable us to struggle over the long term, and embody the world
we are ghting for.
Moving Forward with OFS
Members of OFS are required to participate in the life and direction of the organization, be
involved in grassroots work, attend meetings, and pay monthly dues on a sliding scale.
Our organization values the needs of the movement over growing our own numbers, and we
do not recruit paper members. We are in touch with prospective members through our work
alongside others in the movement and in shared discussion spaces. Because we expect a high
degree of unity around values, vision and strategy, and commitment to the organization,
when we recruit we ask people to ll out an interest form so that we can know them better,
work with them, and make collective decisions about bringing them on. Organizers we bring
on are then invited to a three-month trial membership, during which they have a chance to
ask questions about our politics and participate in and explore the organization from the
inside. This period also gives the rest of the organization time to get to know trial members as
we work and learn together. We bring people in as part of a group, or class, which offers trial
members a support system inside the organization, allows us to balance the class and
prioritize oppressed peoples in our internal makeup, and helps us carry out orientation and
internal education for new members in a collective process.
We want to continue building branches and forming partnerships with other revolutionaries
around the country and the world, and we are committed to building sustainably. We are
committed to building an organization that reects the realities of the society around us and
which is led by oppressed groups, so we actively prioritize people of color, women, queer
people, and working-class people in our recruitment. We think it is important to grow, so that
more and more of us have this type of framework to build movements, organizations, and
political unity.
We want to work with you, whether you are someone new to the struggle and looking for
guidance, an experienced organizer looking for partners to work with, a revolutionary looking
for an organization to join, another organization seeking to collaborate, or a movement
veteran with wisdom to share.

Footnotes
i We use the term participatory socialism to describe our political orientation.
We do not mean it economistically, but as a way to describe liberation in all
areas of social life. The concept is discussed further in Section II.
ii When we use the term the movement, we mean the collection of
movements of the oppressed (workers, women, people of color, LGBTQ
people, disabled people, etc.), pregurative institutions (cooperatives,
communes, schools, etc.), third-party electoral campaigns and progressive
institutions, and organizations of revolutionaries, all pushing together towards
a free society. We could also call this a movement of movements.
iii We use the term grassroots struggle to refer to bottom-up struggles that
impact oppressed groups and include the participation and leadership of
oppressed people.
iv While racism is the oppressive concept that one racial or ethnic group is
superior (or inferior) to others, white supremacy is the type of racism that, due
to Western European colonialism, is most prominent in the world. White
supremacy is also the dominant form of community oppression in the U.S.,
from where we are writing.
v By coordinator class, we mean an economic class a group of people with a
dened collective relationship to the means of production whose
responsibility it is to manage and coordinate work on behalf of the capitalist
class and at the expense of the working class. The coordinator class is made up
of professionals who play key decision-making roles in the economy, prot
materially, manage themselves and large sectors of the working class, and
engage in empowering work. Understanding the role of the coordinator class
is essential to our analysis of capitalism, our rejection of central planning as a
desirable alternative, and our vision for a participatory socialist economy.
vi The gender/sex/sexual binary is an institutionalized ideology that creates a
strict binary of woman/man, female/male, gay/straight, and which is enforced
through common-sense assumptions about nature and biology. This system
treats gender and sexuality as xed and inicts shame and violence onto
those whose bodies and gender performance escape this binary. It restricts
their access to resources as well as social recognition and afrmation. In turn, it
upholds heterosexual, cisgender, monogamous identities and relationships
as natural, legitimate, and the only viable option. We consider this binary to be
one of the fundamental building blocks of patriarchy.
vii The term cisgender refers to someone whose gender identity corresponds
to the gender they were assigned at birth, someone who isnt transgender.
viii We use the term intercommunalism to describe our vision for relations
within and across communities, nations, and cultural/religious groups.
Intercommunalism pushes past multiculturalism or separatism toward a
vision of society in which people have the right to communal
self-determination and autonomy (as well as the institutional foundations
necessary to carry out those various identities and cultures), but in solidarity
with one another as part of a whole based on shared principles such as equity,
freedom of movement, diversity, and active consent.
ix The term counterpower can be used to describe both a vehicle of popular
power a new power emerging to embody an alternative and threaten the
institutions of the status quo as well as a situation in which a counterpower
confronts the status quo. The term is often used interchangeably with the term
dual power. As revolutionaries, we seek to transform grassroots organizations
and institutions into a network of counterpowers to undermine the hegemony
of the oppressors system, and to topple the institutional power of the old
order on the path to revolution and social transformation.

A DRAWING FROM THE FIELD:

ANTHROPOLOGICAL
REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE
AND CONFLICT IN SYRIA
Mia Sung Kjaergaard

We cant imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Cant understand, cant imagine.
- Susan Sontag 2003
Destabilizing concepts of violence

Death tolls and news reports from Syria remind us

that the conict tragically continues to unfold. Brutal
and graphic photos often accompany headlines like
these: Dozens die in explosion in Homs, or Deadly
car bomb strikes north of Damascus. The absence of
an effective international response to the Syrian crisis
suggests we might have become numb to these
depictions of violence. The image fatigue poses
difcult questions for researchers, aid workers,
friends and outsiders alike, who come in touch with
people who are directly affected by the war: Should
we attempt to represent Syrian peoples horrifying
experiences? And if so, how? After all, we have the
privilege and choice to leave when we want with our
notepads, cameras and NGO projects. I reect on
these questions based on my recent experience
working with Syrian refugees in Istanbul. My
response is embedded in an epistemological project
including personal, ethical, theoretical and
methodological considerations.

In 2014 UNCHR states that there are more than 2,8 million Syrian refugees,
while the average rate of refugees registering every month continues to
exceed 100.000 (UNHCR June 2014), and since 2011 more than 160.000
people have lost their lives. The devastating numbers are just the ofcial
counts, and the United Nation stopped updating the death toll in January
because conditions on the ground made it impossible to make accurate
estimates (Reuters, 1 April 2014). The problem of presenting reliable facts
highlights the chaotic circumstances of war that statistics and geopolitical
analyses from above often fail to capture. These factual approaches leave
little room for uncertainty, everyday stories from below, and limits
understandings of violence to physical damage and bodily suffering. In
contrast, anthropologists have approached violence as a social
phenomenal, which enters peoples everyday lives and escapes simple
explanations.
The danger lies in making definitions of violence appear too polished and
finished for the reality will never be.
(Nordstrom and Robben 1995: 4)
Peoples experiences in war and violence are negotiated, chaotic, social and
inconclusive. This in turn affects how war can be studied: lived experience of
those studied, those who study and ways of knowing is not separate (ibid:
3). Unpredictable situations and intense emotional experiences are just a
few of the special circumstances impacting studies of conict. With this
perspective we are invited to rethink how our positions and context impact
the data and knowledge we present.

Mia Sung Kjaergaard received her MA in Anthropology of Development from School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London. She has lived one year in Damascus, and since 2006 regularly visited Syria and neighbouring countries.

24

Blurred lines and positions

For many of us who become involved more
long-term with specic places and people; the
lines become increasingly blurred between
when we are aid workers, scholars engaged in
research or just friends. I have been working on
capacity building and intercultural dialogue
NGO projects in the Middle East. As an academic
I am interested in narratives, belonging and how
identity is formed in politically changing
environments. But an important reason why I
have stayed involved is the friendships I formed
while living in Damascus. The people I used to
listen to Fairuz with in the morning, and drinking
juice with in Old Damascus, are the people I stay
in contact with and worry for. Unlike some of my
colleagues and friends, who bravely have been
working under re inside Syria, I have not
visited Syria since 2011 a few weeks before the
uprisings broke out. My work with refugees and
Syrians in the diaspora is inuenced by previous
experiences, and also my position as a woman, a
non-Syrian etc. Not only our intersectional
positions, but also practical circumstances impact
our work such as whether our next funding or
salary will come from a research grant, a NGO
etc. The knowledge we produce and the work
we do is also inuenced by how well we speak
the language, and nally how much are we
willing to risk? Are we prepared to move away
from our safe homes and families and for how
long? Often there is a great deal of arbitrariness
and coincidences that shape the work we do
which is rarely mentioned in research, reports or
job descriptions. As this conference has
illustrated, our position as researchers are never
just neutral or objective, but colored by our
previous experiences and social relations our
work is embedded in past times, current
engagements and future potential projects. I
think we need to be more transparent about
how these factors inuence projects and actions,
and to dare to engage with the selfs
entanglement with knowledge, facts and theory.

Ambiguities of representation

Muhammads drawing
In March 2014 I stayed in Turkey with Syrian friends of
mine who have ed the war and are beginning to
rebuild their lives. They are starting projects to help
fellow Syrians to nd work, educational and
rehabilitation programmes for families. The stories
they told me were about escape, fear and as one
woman said to me everyone has lost someone and
something in this conict. But I also saw strength,
creativity and relief when loved once were reunited. I
spent a lot of time with Syrian children, and as I was
jotting down thoughts in my notebook, which I always
bring with me, I discovered the childrens interest for
drawing.
One boy, Muhammad, gave me a drawing of himself
and his house. I saw he had printed his name
Muhammad and below the name Mahmoud. Who
is Mahmoud? I asked. Silence followed, and I looked
at Muhammads father who explained that that not
only did Muhammad loose his two legs the day a
rocket hit their house, he also lost his brother
Mahmoud, his mother and grandmother.
When you look at this drawing, we do not see the
same. The drawing reminds me of the thick air in
Muhammads house where I spent hours listening to
stories about violence and death, it reminds me of
how I felt shaky at the sight of Muhammads
amputated legs anthropologists talk about
existential shock and not just culture shock when
studying conict. I am also reminded about
Muhammads strength, when using his arms to
navigate through the house, and his laughter while
playing with other children. It makes me remember
how questions such as where do you come from? and
how many brothers and sisters do you have?
suddenly have become sensitive questions in the
context of conict.

There are many ways of telling the stories of human suffering that we come in
touch with. By using Muhammads drawing, I hope to literally shift the focus of
our gaze away from media photos, and ask how we can engage more ethically.
The drawing is open to interpretation; it does not provide conclusive suggestions
to how we should feel about Muhammads situation. Is it a drawing about
empowerment, willpower, struggle or pain? Is it a smile on his face or is it
unease? The most interesting stories are possibly outside the frame, beyond
what we can see and instead we have to contemplate, imagine and question .
This representation reects that there is no single agreed denition of violence;
instead it is contested, subjective and felt and interpreted individually
(Nordstrom 2002). Violence is chaotic and escapes easy denitions and enters
the most fundamental features of peoples lives (Michael Taussig 1987). The way
violence enters mundane life and is a subjective experience is captured: a
simple childrens drawing which does not pretend to give a professional or
objective account, but rather takes us to a particular place and moment in a
7-year-old boys life.
Methodologically, the use of Muhammads drawing enters classical
anthropological questions on representation, and the problem of whether we as
outsiders have the authority to represent other peoples stories (Clifford and
Marcus 1986). In a region where colonialism and hegemony has permeated
relations and representations these are particularly important considerations.
One of the ways in which anthropologists have experimented with overcoming
these challenges of representation, is by including informants voices directly in
academic publications . By letting the drawing speak for itself I hope to provide
a context and platform from which not only my, but also Muhammads, voice can
be heard.
Finally, drawings are not only a mode of representation, but also a tool for
unraveling and processing eld experience. As Michael Taussig argues, eld
drawings are linked to the imaginative logic of discovery rather than scientic
proof (Taussig 2011). It is between emotion, reasoning and the anthropologists
motivation for going on the journey in the rst place that research is produced
(ibid: xi). We are reminded that knowledge does not exist a priori or detached
from us as researchers. In this process drawings by the anthropologist, or the
people we meet, can serve as a method of engaging with eld experience with a
sense of immediacy and openness that edited text is often lacking. Notebooks
and drawings are credited with mysterious power no less than with childlike
ignorance and vulnerability (ibid: 144). Especially in times of conict the
boundaries between observation and participation become blurred and might
form a closer relation between researcher, events and subjects.
Drawings are potentially powerful because they tell the stories from a different
perspective refraining from exhibiting simplistic pictures of death and
destruction. It challenges absolute facts and one-sided analyses to let a personal
account, a childs perspective, inform our knowledge about conict. With
drawings we can paradoxically seek to render visible by obscuring images and
thus tell stories outside the usual framework.

Endnotes
The risk of simplifying complex realities and ongoing
suffering would be far too great by ending with a singular
conclusion. Instead I call these reection endnotes,
because they are very much in the making a journey of
unraveling. The grave Syrian crisis leaves little time for
what anthropologists call thick description (Geertz
1973), and my contribution is based on eld notes and
sketches that feel almost too fresh to analyse in short not
suitable for the ordinary academic audience or conference
setting. Instead, it has been encouraging to be part of
project where theory/ method, reection/ action and
interdisciplinary approaches come together. Returning to
the question of whether we should represent other
peoples suffering and how this can be attempted; I think
one place to start is by being more open about the
circumstances under which knowledge is produced in the
periphery of war zones. Especially in settings of conict
our positions, personal experiences, relations and
practical circumstances shape our interventions and
research. In times of war I strongly believe we must
continue to insist on engaging with diverse
understandings of violence. This should also inuence
how we choose to represent our knowledge and data.
Muhammads drawing is an attempt to offer a partial
ethnographic perspective from below that does not
provide a single answer or view on the conict. Hopefully,
by daring to engage with ambiguities and uncertainty we
might discover new paths for action.

References
Biehl, J. 2005. Vita: life in a zone of social abandonment.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. 1986. Writing culture: the poetics and
politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Geertz, C. 1973. The interpretation of cultures: selected essays.
New York: Basic Books.
Nordstrom, C. and Robben, A. C. G. M. ed. 1995. Fieldwork under
re: contemporary studies of violence and survival. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Nordstrom, C. 2002. Four ways to tell a story on violence. Reviews
in Anthropology. Vol. 31 pp. 1 -19.
Sontag, S. 2003. Regarding the pain of others. London: Penguin
books.
Taussig. (1987). Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A
Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Taussig, M. 2011. I swear I saw this drawings in eldwork
notebooks, namely my own. Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press.

Websites
Alfredo Jaar
http://www.blog.art21.org/texts/alfredo-jaar/interview-alfredo-jaar
-the-rwanda-project
Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/01/us-syria-crisis-toll-idU
SBREA300YX20140401
UNHCR
http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/regional.php

Challenges to
Political Expression in a
Changing Academic Landscape:
A Personal View
Anna Alekseyeva,
Elodie Negar Behzadi,
Anna Davidson,
Kelsi Nagy,
Victoria Wyllie de Echeverria
This article is a collaboration of ve different voices from Geography Ph.D.
students at Oxford who form part of a voices from the margins reading
group. We are women from diverse backgrounds and have different research
interests, but are all interested in giving voice to people and
more-than-human entities that could be considered marginalized in
academia and in dominant culture and media. The Power and Resistance
conference call for papers sparked conversations within our group about the
powers and precarities of our own voices. While being acutely aware of
speaking from a platform of relative privilege, we had a growing awareness of
how the pursuit of knowledge in academia is constrained by neoliberal
agendas and complicated relationships of power. In this paper we explore this
theme by interviewing a range of academics in three Geography departments
in the UK.
Recent public discourse about academia has increasingly highlighted the
growing neoliberal nature of the university in many western countries. This
neoliberalism has manifested in everything from the publish or perish
mentality and rising university fees, to the difculties that many young
academics face in nding and maintaining stable academic jobs. We want to
explore how academics experiences at universities have been transformed by
their institutions myopic focus on output-oriented metrics of success, such as
research output and prot margins. Specically, how do academics
experience political activism in this context, and how do they negotiate these
multiple changes to nd spaces of expression and commitment? In posing
this question, we wish to interrogate the conventional dichotomy between the
real world and the academic world. Leaving the denition of political activism
open, we draw on Foucaults work on knowledge and power as well as
theories that discuss types of academic engagement .1
1 Jane Wills, Engaging in The SAGE Handbook of Human Geography

28

(London: Sage, 2014).

It is important to contextualize this discussion within contemporary trends in

UK academia. It is commonly acknowledged that universities have been
increasingly moving from public to private funding over the last several
decades. This has implications for the kind of research that is funded and how
it is conducted. Along with this neo-liberal funding trend, some academics
have noted the de-politicising trends in the social sciences since the 1970s2 .
We were curious to interrogate to what extent this trend played out in the lives
and careers of Geographers we spoke to. At the same time, we are aware that
geography researchers in the UK represent greater gender and racial diversity
and might, therefore, speak for more marginalized voices than they did forty
years ago. We were curious to explore, however, if these shifts only give the
appearance of change, or if they are allowing the voices of marginalized
groups to really inuence institutions and paradigms in meaningful ways.
Certain features of university education may limit the efcacy of researchers to
cross the so-called academic/real-world divide and engage with activist efforts.
As Ph.D. students in the UK eager to engage in broader forms of activism and
unsure about our future roles within academia, we approached this project
from a personal standpoint. Employing a feminist methodological framework,
we investigated the questions posed above through in-depth, semi-structured
interviews of six UK geographers (two men and four women) at different
stages of their careers, from post-doctoral level to a chaired professor, across
three different universities. Through acknowledging both our personal and
academic interests in the project and writing collaboratively, we hoped to
subvert some of the dominant assumptions of researchers as individualized
outsiders. We aim also to investigate the shape and trajectory of our own
potential career paths.
Our paper is divided into three broad sections. We rst employ the concept of
the panopticon (drawing on Foucault) to discuss how the neo-liberalisation of
the university might impact academic practices. We then move on to discuss
the various tactics of resistance that our interviewees employ to navigate the
contemporary academic environment. Finally, we conclude with a discussion
of reexivity, arguing for the importance of awareness in a context that can
sometimes feel disempowering.
2 (Swyngedouw 2002, Baeten 2002).

Neoliberalisation and academia: from ivory tower to panopticon?

Our interviews problematized the concept of an ivory tower - used to denounce
academics and their work as removed from everyday practicalities. We acknowledge
(as did some of our interviewees) that the work of reading, writing and teaching
provide relative freedom to follow research interests and a level of protection from
some of the risks of front-line activism. However, these supposed ivory tower
pursuits are increasingly impacted by very real-world political changes. Many of the
Geographers we interviewed mentioned increasing vulnerabilities due to
neo-liberalization of the university. Some of these vulnerabilities, which will be
discussed below, were also linked to a loss of possibilities for political expression.
First, many of the interviewees indicated that increasing zero hour contracts and the
need to be highly mobile in a globalized job market has created a casualised
academic labour force. This casualisation has been particularly salient to the
experiences of younger academics who frequently voiced a push towards security
that meant conceding on political expression in order to secure an academic
position. One of the post-docs we interviewed voiced her frustration at an academic
context that is increasingly risk-averse. She found this reected in her students
attitudes: A lot of my students now say: well I dont want to do anything political
cause it might...its hard enough to get a job and I have to work my fees off, and
also I think people seem to be more geared towards professionalisation than taking
risks.
Similar feelings of anxiety and discomfort appeared in relation to the publish or
perish mentality. The incompatibility of publishing in journals and of genuine
political expression came out as a particularly strong source of tension in one of our
interviews: If I want to write from the specic standpoint I want to write from, I
simply cannot do it in journal articles, it would not get published () most people
would reject them said one of the mid-career academics. According to her, editorial
committees and the peer review system hinder opportunities for political
expression as values of progressivism disappear from the academic landscape: It is
very difcult to nd people and journals who (in my discipline) I would consider as
progressive. () Progressive thought has shifted substantially, and with
neo-liberalism, I am not sure who is progressive anymore?.
Similarly, funding was described by some as being increasingly geared towards
apolitical topics. It is interesting to note that the two physical geographers we
interviewed indicated that there is more funding available in their elds, with one
mentioning that there was enough funding available that they could be selective
about what they accepted. In stark contrast to this, the human geographers we
interviewed noted a dearth of funding and an increasing necessity to self-fund
research. This divide echoes the idea that less commoditizable (e.g. theoretical or
in-depth qualitative) research tends to receive less funding. Funding pressures were
in turn perceived as reducing possibilities of engagement with the eld, preventing
the production of knowledge that stands outside the value framework of
neoliberalism, and consequently threatening the political content of research.

One of the most insidious consequences of

neoliberalisation was described by one
interviewee as the destruction of the academic.
This practice - of separating teaching and
research positions was described as being
prevalent in the US for some time. If you are
identied as a research star during your PhD, you
get a research position, explained one of our
interviewees, otherwise, you just teach with a
9-month contract and you are paid peanuts ().
In the States, they call them junk professors. This
practice corroborates a value system where
teaching is considered a second-class activity. The
creative tensions that result from research that is
tried, tested and informed by teaching - and
teaching that is led by research - are denied in
the drive towards specialisation, efciency and
maximum output.
This new managerialism stands as a key feature
of neoliberal ideology, occasionally cited in our
interviews as responsible for a loss of space for
political expression and action. One of our
interviewees in particular unravelled the
processes through which academics were
silenced. First, economic rewards, central to this
managerialist culture, were seen as partly
responsible for a loss of incentive in expressing
dissatisfaction - Why would older academics
protest against (the casualisation of labour for
their younger peers)? They are paid so well and
benet so enormously from the system. The
same interviewee also underlined the way
administrative positions formerly held by
academics were, in the same managerialist
fashion, increasingly lled by non academics
coming from the private sector - When I rst
joined the university, we thought we had a
common venture, we were involved; now my
department is ruled by elected executives who
decide on policy and we do not work together
anymore. This transformation, argued the
interviewee, has led to fragmentation,
individualism, lack of collegiality and has served
as an impediment to the formation of a
common political voice. Another interviewee
said that loyalty to a department or university
was more rare, as a lack of collegiality and
increasing mobility meant individual academics
would simply move if they were discontent.

The panopticon towards a neo-liberal

academia?

Tactics of resistance - navigating, negotiating

and conforming

So, most academics they dont care what the other

academics in the building do I dont particularly mind
what the other human geographers do [] In fact, the
amount of attention is absolutely minimal, so you have a
huge amount of freedom, and you end up policing
yourself. So its that Foucauldian thing of so you think
youre being watched or judged, but in fact, you have
much more freedom than you may realize, but you only
realize this once you get older.

Yet the academics we interviewed did not simply

passively internalise the characteristics of their
environment. Interviewees also discussed ways in which
they 'resisted' the contexts in which they work. Drawing
on the interviews and literatures on power, we see the
tactics used in resistance as a product of the disciplinary
mechanisms they are aiming to subvert, but also going
beyond and outliving them6. The tactics of resistance
varied amongst those we interviewed, but there were
common themes that aligned well with a distinction
Jane Wills7 has made between three types of academic
engagement: Didactic engagement or an application
of ideas to the world; epistemological or producing
ideas through their engagement with eldwork,
policy-makers and activists; and ontological
engagement based on the assumption that the way
we engage with the world (e.g. through research)
shapes the world itself.

The use of the Foucauldian image of the panopticon3

goes further to reveal the more subtle ways through
which neo-liberalism operates. In most of our
interviews, neo-liberal values and norms appeared or
were described as internalized, creating academics with
self-disciplined neo-liberal subjectivities. Neo-liberalism
in that sense governs behaviours and reaches, as
Foucault has written: into the very grain of individuals,
touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions
and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and
everyday lives"4
Specic examples of this self-disciplining were given
throughout our interviews. The Research Assessment
5
Exercise, and the new Research Excellence Framework
were explicitly described as control mechanisms, a form
of surveillance system which supervises and regulates It is a way to sort of monitor academics and keep them
in line said one of our interviewees. The result of this
threat of discipline is normalization and internalization
You do not want to rock the boat you do not want to
say anything that would rock the boat. A similar point
was raised with regards to unions - If you join, you are a
rebel, and most people do not want to be rebels. You are
an outcast almost! Unionists are seen as troublemakers.
And people do not like being seen as troublemakers.
Such internalized assumptions of the good academic
were particularly present in the younger academics
narratives. The image of an academic being innovative,
competitive, dynamic, productive, and individualistic -all of which are characteristics conventionally valued in
the neo-liberal ideological framework -- appeared as an
ideal to conform to. Some of our interviewees sense of
failure vis a vis this idealized perception of the
successful academic reveals the strength of neo-liberal
power in constructing a reality it assumes should already
exist.

Almost everyone we interviewed mentioned how

teaching and publishing practices were a way for their
research to have an impact. For one interviewee, for
example, teaching students to think critically was the
main reason he went into academia, and another
considered teaching their main form of activism. A
further interviewee explained how her teaching was
intrinsically political: I am teaching white British
students. There is no way I am going to do it in an
apolitical way. It is about me, as a migrant, my family
and my history. I talk to you as a migrant. I could not do
it in a scientic, neutral way. My objective is to bring
different perspectives and objectives when I teach.
Further, a postdoc interviewed described her sustained
commitment to her students long after she left that
teaching post. For her this was a way to maintain
networks of care and subvert the individualized and
competitive nature of academia.
3 The panoptic syle of prisons designed by Bentham in the late 18th century was used in
Foucaults Discipline and Punish (1977) as a metaphor to describe power relations. This style of
prison allows a single guard placed in the centre to observe all prisoners. Because the prisoners
never know if they are watched or not, they however control and self-disciplines their behaviour.
4 Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,
1972-1977. Trans. Colin Gordon et al. New York: Pantheon.(p. 30)
5The RAE is a process, in the UK that assesses the quality of research to enable the higher
education funding bodies to distribute public funds on the basis of research quality ratings / The
Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the new system for assessing the quality of research in
UK higher education institutions (HEIs). It will replace the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE)
and will be completed in 2014.
6Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, University of California
Press, Berkeley 1984.
7Jane Wills, Engaging in The SAGE Handbook of Human Geography (London: Sage, 2014).

For some, publishing and talks were seen as a communication

of results which aligns with what Wills calls a didactic mode
of engagement. However, this engagement was done in
strategic ways in order to, as one interviewee put it; make a
difference in the context. As the same interviewee said [Ive]
put things where Ive wanted to put them, and where I feel
they will be read by those who need, or would nd it useful to
read them. Similarly others purposefully published
non-academic outputs like video, newspapers, magazines,
policy forums and books. Rather than only publishing in
academic journals, they saw this as a way of being accessible to
a wider public. One interviewee particularly highlighted how
writing and language itself was, () political activism. And it
might take different forms. () Some people will refuse to
write in a more complex manner so that their material will be
read by people whose life they want to shape, help shape, or
change. The other thing that you can do is to give voice to those
who do not have a voice in the public domain. To give voice to
the oppressed.
Beyond making their research more accessible outside
academia, for some of the academics we interviewed,
engagement also meant including those outside academic
institutions into the production of knowledge itself. One
postdoc, for instance, described how herself and other
academics forged links and opportunities for students from
non-traditional backgrounds to enter into academia. Another
interviewee felt that the very purpose of research and
knowledge production should be to engage with activities that
enhance social justice: () we have a duty as academics, as
researchers to promote activities, support activities, and write
about activities that will enhance the quality of life of human
beings, so social justice activities.
These last few quotes, express well what, according to Wills
schema, would be a form of ontological engagement. By
acknowledging that practices of engagement go beyond
simply disseminating research with political content, or
engaging with the outside world to produce knowledge
they acknowledge that the very ways in which academia is
practiced remakes the world in various ways. This allows for a
more fundamental blurring of the false distinction between
academia and the real world. This can be seen in the varying
ways in which academics teach, publish and engage with their
local communities, but also in the ways in which they engage
with theory. As one interviewee said: its partly how you frame
things as an academic there are certain theories that lend
themselves more to having the politics taken out () there is a
certain type of political thinking that is really harmless.

Attempting to do political work, however, was also associated

with a level of risk-taking and an additional burden of work:
academic ideas can translate and be meaningful to those
working in activism in the non-academic world. But it requires
extra work if you are willing to do that to reach out to those
people and put the energy into writing for a lay audience.
Another interviewee described how publishing in
policy-related avenues was met with some disdain: ...some
people in geography were relatively unhappy, and thought
people should be pulling your weight, you are seen as slightly
second class [if you dont publish peer reviewed papers], but
on the other hand () I know Ive made a difference, I know
my work has been looked at.
For others these risks were revealed in tales of failed interviews
and papers unpublished because as candidates or as
manuscripts they were deemed interesting but too risky for
the institutions. Even once hired, they could still be passed over
for further commendations if they did not t into the mold that
was deemed appropriate. This sense of risk was by no means
evenly distributed across our interviews (from a post-doc, to a
full professor) and it begs the question of who is in a position
to afford to take these risks. The costs of resisting and the
comforts of conforming seemed to accrue differently in
different career stages and institutional settings. Of course
these views are also only a reection of the six individuals we
spoke to, all of whom had made it in some capacity within a
university context. What perspectives would we hear from
those who ultimately had to sacrice their careers to follow
their politics?

Positionality and diversity

In this respect, the specic positionalities of those we interviewed is key to
unpacking the diversity of perspectives we heard. While a variety of
different factors shape the lens through which any academic views the
world, there was a noticeable difference in perspectives between the early
career and later career academics we spoke to.
Two of the later career academics pointed to positive developments that
have opened the eld of academia to an increasing variety of individuals.
When asked about how academia has changed over time, one of the full
professors who had been teaching for about 25 years, argued that there
may never have been a golden age of academia, and that it was actually
worse in the past to be female, young, black, left, gay. Another female full
professor pointed to greater gender equality in the academic hiring
process today compared to when she was hired over 20 years ago.
But, of course, just being on the inside of academia is not enough if one
cannot freely express their voice. While neoliberal sentimentality fetishizes
diversity and multiculturalism, we must question the depth and meaning
of this diversity. It is not sufcient, we would argue, to be of a marginal
identity if one does not have the ability to express a marginal point of
view. Several of the interviewees, particularly those in more precarious
and early career positions, indicated that it was not easy for them to
express their marginal views, which were either radical or fell outside of
their disciplinary norm. One of the post-docs spoke of being rejected from
certain academic positions and receiving emails stating: we needed
someone that is more boring and less controversial. In some
departments, she said, many political people are not hired or promoted.
Another early career lecturer, whose academic work focuses on
more-than-human geographies, explained that funding is limited and
tends to be available only for issues that are considered big problems.
Animals, which are the focus of her academic work, are not high up on
funders priorities: exploring the moral dimensions of human-animal
relationships subverts the dominant paradigms of their commodication.
In this sense, it could be argued that the diversity that has proliferated in
academia over the last several decades is in some ways supercial. At the
same time, however, we do not wish to denigrate the value that increased
diversity adds to the institutional and intellectual academic milieu. Having
a wider array of individuals and identities opens up a space of potentiality
to enact cultural change within academia. Furthermore, while a number of
interviewees conveyed frustration at not being able to express themselves
fully within the dominant academic paradigms and channels, at least one
of the interviewees talked about valuable collaborations that she had
formed with like-minded academics when she nally found [her]
people.

Reflexivity: what can come out of this?

Who you are matters in the way you teach and I think young academics
should think about these things
While the institutional forces of academia can seem overwhelmingly
discouraging for young academics as they certainly sometimes seem to
us we dont want to build a picture of academics as victims, rising up (if
they dare!) in heroic ways. Rather, we hope to show that despite nding
ourselves in increasingly neoliberal universities, we still have signicant
agency in the academic system. This agency can at times be positive, as
with the ability to pursue the tactics of resistance described above, but it
can also have negative consequences. One of the full professors we
interviewed stressed the role that all academics -- particularly young
academics -- have in disenfranchising undergraduate students; todays
undergraduates are not only compelled to go to university because of the
structure of the contemporary job market, but must also now pay student
fees and potentially go into signicant debt. The interviewee compared
the education bubble to the housing bubble, which led to the 2008
nancial crisis: just like an estate agent would do very well in the years up
to the bubbles crash, youre coming into this at just the right time []
Youre going to be surng the wave of rising necessity for people to go to
university.
We must recognise our own complicity in a system that can disenfranchise
others, and we must recognise the potential benets that we accrue from
this disenfranchisement. We come away from this project with the
recognition that our positions as young academics are complex: both
difcult and empowering, compromising and compromised. We must
reexively consider our own roles as academics through collaboration,
collective discussion and dialogue, recognising that we can use the spaces
and platforms we have to engage with the world and help remake and
reimagine it in less violent ways.

Mike ODonnell,

Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Westminster University.

The purpose of this article is a practical one. It seeks to establish how

activists can best use what power they have to achieve substantial change.
The focus is collective and political; on protest and party politics and the
relationship between the two. The underlying theme is how the exercise
and extension of democratic power can open up the way to greater
equality. There is an acutely generational dimension to this issue, however
to pose it in exclusively generational terms is problematic. Granted that
many young people, perhaps the majority, face particular difculties in
relation to work, housing and social mobility, other generations are also
confronted with similar problems and the main causes may not be
exclusively or even predominantly generational. The fundamental
underlying social division globally and in Britain, the emerging shape of
inequality, is between the elite and the rest.
There are three aspects to the argument in this article. First, I analyse key
features of the New Left in the United States of the nineteen sixties focusing
particularly on the most inuential student organisation, Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS). Second, I make some comparisons between that
movement and current activism in contemporary Britain. Third, I will argue
that activists and sympathisers in Britain are currently faced with a crucial
choice about the extent and nature of their involvement in party politics.

36

The american new left of the nineteen sixties

New social movements began in the post second world
war period in parallel decline to the power of organised
labour. Socialist and Marxist ideas were a powerful
inuence on the nineteen sixties New Left, particularly in
France, but other strands of thought and sentiment were
emerging. Given that the United States was by far the
most economically advanced society, it is unsurprising
that some of the most forward looking radical thinking
and action occurred there. Activists in the United States
were required to confront more fully the issues of
post-industrial, information-led society because the
United States was already the prime case of that form of
society. Of course things have since moved on,
particularly due to the rise of the Web but this has made
more possible the kind of widespread participation the
American radicals of the sixties aspired to.
In the context of the United States, the concept of
participatory democracy is more resonant with populism
than Marxism. The inuence of populism ideas is
apparent in the writings of the big daddy of the New
Left, Charles Wright Mills, and in the movement itself.
Populism can partly be understood as discontent and
protest at lack of power. It is invariably anti-elitist. The
logic of populism is to seek more participation, more
power to the people. A weakness of populism is that it is
often oriented to a single issue or cluster of related
issues, failing adequately to address the structural source
of inequality. An important current development in the
United States and Britain is the engagement of populist
parties of the right, respectively the Tea Party and UKIP,
with party politics. To borrow a phrase: this could be a
real game-changer, on the left as well as the right.
The American New Left emerged out of the civil rights
activities of black people, students and others in the
southern states in the late nineteen fties and early
sixties and gathered momentum from opposition to the
Vietnam War and the draft. It helps to distinguish
between the New Left and the Counterculture, the former
referring to political orientation and the latter to cultural.
The capitalised term Movement is inclusive of both the
new political and cultural radicalism of the period.

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was founded in this climate of

political idealism and cultural experimentation. Its founding document.
The Port Huron Statement reects this mood.
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed
now in universities looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit
As we grew our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to
dismiss First racial bigotry Second the enclosing fact of the Cold
War
(Various Authors, The Port Huron Statement (orig. 1962), reprinted in M.
Teodori, The New Left: A Documentary History (Jonathan Cape, 1970):
163-4).
Increasingly a third issue was tabled one that resonates today poverty
and inequality.
More than fty years later, many young people again appear to be looking
uncomfortably to the world they inherit.
A commitment to participatory democracy is the most notable feature of
The Port Huron Statement. This was not merely a positional statement but
indicates necessary organisational change (in the sexist language of the
time for which apologies).
As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual
participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in the
quality and direction of his life; that society encourage independence in
men and provide the media for their common participation politics has
the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community. (In
Teodori: 167).
Activists were successful in establishing as a norm, student participation on
university committees. This has been substantially rolled back, particularly
since the imposition of a neo-liberal form of the corporate model for
managing higher education.

SDS carried the concept of participation beyond higher education into society. In the
summer of 1963 SDS established twelve community action projects under the general
heading of Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). The principle and method
underlying the projects was participatory: poor people in the project areas were encouraged
to locate and respond to the social and political issues that affected their everyday lives. The
process was enabling rather than didactic. The typical achievements of the projects may
seem minor the winning of a play area, successfully pressuring for trafc lights to be set up
in a dangerous zone. However, the more realistic activists saw the projects as a learning
process for all involved. While the concept of community remained a recurrent New Left
theme the limitations of the projects added to the emerging sense that inequality could not
be effectively dealt with solely at the level of local community.
As the student movement gathered momentum a more general critique of the university
system and of its relationship to the rest of society developed. The Free Speech Movement
(F.S.M.) at Berkeley involving hundreds of students. The initial issue arose as a result of an
attempt by the university to stop student political societies from organising and raising
funds on campus. However, the debate between the student activists and administration
soon took on a wider dimension focusing particularly on the purpose of higher education. As
it happened Berkeley was the perfect instance for this debate. Its president, Clark Kerr, was a
leading exponent of what he termed the multiversity which he envisaged as providing
expertise for government and business, in his words to respond to the expanding claims of
national service: to merge its activity with industry as never before (Quoted in Teodori:
153). In an article titled A Deeper Disenchantment, Sol Stern, a postgraduate activist,
commented as follows: The Managerial Revolution has come to the campus; now the most
important stratum of the university is not the faculty, nor the students, nor any single
education Idea but rather the manager and the administrator. The multiversity is a
mechanism held together by administrative rules and powered by money. (In Teodori:
153) (Note: from reading the text the words in quotation marks appear to be those of Clark
Kerr).
FSM activists believed that a functionalist view of the universities was crushing an educational view, a debate that remains in play today.
From 1964 onwards SDS and the New Left as a whole increasingly grappled with the
problem of dening the wider system of inequality. In a speech in 1965 titled Trapped in a
System, Carl Oglesby, then the president of SDS gave it a name, corporate liberalism
(Teodori: 187). He identied corporate liberalism as the interlocking system of government,
business and the military that had routinely exploited less powerful societies. Oglesbys
appeal was to an alternative liberal tradition, humanistic liberalism.
Oglesbys plea to shape the future in a more humanistic way, was only one voice from the
New Left and not the loudest. From the mid-sixties the Movement began to splinter into
separate and sometimes conicting groups. The escalation of the Vietnam War persuaded
some to adopt more confrontational ideologies and practices. The following were among
the various strands; a grouping favouring a coalitionist approach, supportive of the
Democratic Party; an urban guerrilla group the Weather People; a hippie/ower power
strand, and the Jesus movement. I will address what can be learned from this debacle later.

Nineteen sixties and contemporary activism

compared
To echo The Port Huron Statement, many young people
today also look uncomfortably to the world they inherit.
Some, though not all, the issues they face are different
from those of the nineteen sixties. Today, major festering
issues for students are crippling fees and widespread
closure or limitation of opportunity. Activist groups such
as 38 Degrees tend to respond iteratively to issues as they
arise. In neither period has a widely accepted meta-narrative developed that convincingly knits together analysis
and action.
Nevertheless, in both periods activists were motivated by
a sense of lack of power - of elites acting in their own
interests rather than that of wider constituencies or the
people as a whole. Participatory democracy or, more
radically, democratic institutional control, is likely to be a
central part of a new or reworked ideology of the left.
A revolution in the means of communication will have
fundamental effects, including on protest and politics in
general. The term participatory democracy may now be
less often used nevertheless the Web offers huge
potential for participation. In Britain 38 Degrees is one
among many activist groups that has ourished through
use of the Web. It claims 2.5 million members and has
campaigned on issues ranging from the hospital closure
clause to registering new voters (the current target is
100,000). Recently 38 Degrees has been able to appoint
ve paid interns on the back of voluntary contributions.
According to one intern a group of MPs recently asked
David Babbs, the Executive Director of 38 Degrees: Do
you recognise how much inuence you as an organisation have on the way people think about politics and
politicians (Source, email to the author). It remains to be
seen whether 38 Degrees and other activist groups will
seek or be able to bridge the gap between issue oriented
politics and the politics of systemic change: a challenge
that ultimately nineteen sixties radicalism failed to meet.
The above examples indicate the potential of the Web to
extend democratic protest. There are caveats. The Web is
as open to others as it is to activists and more so to certain
government agencies. That makes it even more crucial
that the left effectively represents itself. A second
cautionary point is that protest on the Web may be easily
ignored if not linked to action in public spaces.

Web-linked action extends from physical protest of the

kind UK-Uncut has used and meetings with politicians
that are a regular part of 38 Degrees activities.
Marx argued that a change in the means of production
leads to a change in social relations. In an information-led
society a revolution in the means of communication is an
instance of Marxs point. Among the global and national
power elites there has been a shift in power to the
techno-nancial sub-elite in relation to the political and
military sub-elites. This shift is perhaps indicative of the
terrain on which the struggle for reform will take place.
The Web is an important tool in that struggle but no more
than that.
Although nineteen sixties and contemporary activism
were conceived in broadly the same historical period, one
major difference is notable. The radicals of the early sixties
were more inclined to optimism. In fact they were
frequently criticised as utopian, a term many were glad
to accept although they were inclined to dene utopia in
what they saw as achievable, realistic terms. Their
optimism was based on the condent belief that the
problem of scarcity was solvable and could provide an
adequate material base for human liberation. As
contemporary young people are aware, it has not quite
turned out that way. Across the globe states are in hoc to
neo-liberal wealth and power. The world is much richer
than in the nineteen sixties but the struggle for greater
democracy and equality is as pressing as ever. Utopia will
have to wait.

Short and long term strategies for change

The current challenge is to translate the pervasive mood of discontent
into action. To an extent this has already happened in the protest and
campaigns indicated above. Long may this continue! Protest is an
essential part of democracy. In Britain the existing level of democracy
would not have been achieved or would have been much delayed
without protest. However, protest alone is not sufcient to achieve
systemic change. At some point the state is required. In the debate
about among activists about whether change is best pursued through
a long-term grass roots strategy or requires a more formalised
combination of grassroots activity with action targeted at the state
level, specically with the support of a political party, I take the latter
view. The choice then becomes whether to form a new party or to
negotiate with an existing one. These options need to be assessed
pragmatically and either may be the better choice at a given time.
The option of forming a new political party has powerful appeal. There
is widespread disillusionment on the left with the record of recent
Labour governments. As yet there are only tentative indications that a
new Labour government would be substantially different. A poll
taken in May 2014 shows a signicant drop in voter identication
with Labour as well as with the Conservatives (www.ipsos-mori.com,
May 14 2014). This suggests that an opportunity might have been
missed. Much of the discontent that Labour has failed adequately to
articulate might have been tapped by a new party of the left.
However, while the Labour Party itself was founded as the representative of a clear constituency, the industrial working class, today there is
no sharply dened constituency that a new party of the left can target.
Yet, terms such as the rest, the dispossessed and the 99% illustrate
the potential for a bold political initiative.
Ironically it is the radical right in the form of UKIP that has demonstrated that a party other than the established ones can gain mass
support and inuence government policy on major issues. Whether
UKIP can establish a foothold in the British Parliament as well as the
European remains to be seen. This may be an instance of who dares
wins with UKIP stealing a march over the left. However a new party
of the left, Left Unity was formed in November 2013. It is currently
establishing its core support (almost 2,000 in March 2014) and
ideology and it is early to comment on its prospects. The issue of
timing is important. Arguably, Left Unity was founded too late for the
general election of 2015 and too early for the election of 2020. If this
sounds contradictory the point is simply that if Left Unity merely ends
up taking votes from Labour in 2015 it will be counterproductive.
However, if a Labour government of 2015-20 fails the test of radical
reform in its rst year or two in power, then a new party of the left
might have the time to make an impact in 2020. Left Unity could be
that party but it needs to square its principles with electoral realities.

Those who nd no signicant difference between the two major

parties are forgetting 1979, among other instances. Had the Labour
party succeeded in negotiating a progressive social contract with the
unions and been elected in 1979 the future of Britain might have
been that of a genuinely social democratic society, optimistically
along the lines of the Nordic model. Instead neo-liberalism became
so embedded that it engulfed the Labour governments of Blair and
Brown. In contrast, Miliband appears to see the state as a countervailing force to corporate power. It is a question of judgement whether
he will deliver or should be given the opportunity to do so. We are
familiar with the alternatives.
I now return to what can be derived from the nineteen sixties of
current relevance. The fragmentation and factionalism of the New Left
from the mid-late sixties resulted in its demise as a constructive force
in American politics. In particular, the violent tactics of the Weather
People repelled public opinion. In the context of a stable liberal
democracy violent tactics have little or no chance of playing a major
role in bringing about large-scale change. That is as true in contemporary Britain as it was in 1968 America although, of course, this does
not constitute a general argument against protest and activism,
including non-violent civil disobedience. In the late nineteen sixties
many activists did support left-leaning anti-war candidates, rst
Robert Kennedy and then Eugene McCarthy. In particular had
Kennedy not been assassinated he might have negotiated an end to
the war and introduced a second period of reform following
Johnsons of the mid-sixties tragically losing momentum as his
administration and the country got bogged down in the Vietnam
War.
Despite underlying similarities the challenge for activists now is
somewhat different than in the nineteen sixties. The elites are more
rmly and more globally embedded. Ultimately the only way to
counter their power may be through a democratically constituted
global government. That may be decades away assuming that the
struggle to achieve it is successful. More immediately it is realistic to
seek to extend democratic institutional participation and the
redistribution of wealth at the national level. If another world is
possible so is another Britain.

Warning!
Your brain
is being
hacked.
Mark R. Leiser1

There are been several parliamentary responses by the

European Union to the revelations made by former
National Security Agency Edward Snowden that reveal the
level of surveillance citizens may be under at any given
moment. Furthermore, the European Court of Justice
recently ruled that the Data Retention Directive was
incompatible with our fundamental rights, stating that
the accumulation and retention of data by telecoms and
Internet Service Providers amounted to personal data and
disproportionate to what was necessary in a free and
democratic society. Regardless of ones propensity to
view Snowden as a hero or turncoat, the NSA and GCHQ
les he turned over to the mainstream press have kindled
a discourse on how to restrain the surveillance state and
have led to a renewed dialogue on privacy. In the
aftermath of the Snowden revelations, the EU made it
policy to create a market for safe and secure data storage
away from the prying eyes of the security services, and the
Courts have mandated some restraints on the surveillance
state.

42

1Mark Leiser is a PhD student at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. His
PhD is supervised by Professor Andrew Murray at the London School of Economics.

Most journalists and commentators have focussed their attention on

aspects relating to surveillance and its ever creeping encroachment on
our civil liberties; however, within the les made available by Edward
Snowden, was evidence that our security and intelligence services are
attempting, with success, to use Information Ops to bring about
outcomes that could not have come about without some sort of
inltration and deception.2 GCHQ describes the purpose of the Joint
Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) in starkly clear terms: using
online techniques to make something happen in the real or cyber
world, including information ops (inuence or disruption). 3 Thus,
the balance of this article focuses on a different element: the
Persuasion State.
Recent discourse has focused on the traditional relationships between
the user (netizens) and the state in cyberspace, painting (incorrectly) a
picture of united citizens circumventing authoritarian controls in the
name of Internet freedom. For example, Han argues that the Chinese
state approach is dedicated to fabricating grassroots support for a
pro-government agenda by establishing an army of state-paid online
commentators that would engage online discussions anonymously to
promote a pro-government discourse. 4 The Fifty Cents Army is
arguably successful in increasing the States PR effectiveness on certain
issues but at the same time it, increases netizens distrust of the state.
This process, known as AstroTurng, is employed by numerous public
and private actors in China, ranging from online crises management
companies (weiji gongguan gongsi), water armies (shuijun) and
internet pushers (wangluo tuishou).5 AstroTurng is normally used as
part of a larger, mixed propaganda/commercial model usually with the
backing of the Chinese state.
In the West, AstroTurng is a largely regulated activity and is normally
considered deceptive in commercial contexts.6 It can be dened as a
grassroots movement appearing to grow through word-of-mouth
public support, but which in fact is run by a puppet master behind the
scenes who ultimately reaps the benet of the movement. The Chinese
and the Western models of AstroTurng can be distinguished by the
states role in its regulation, with agencies such as the Federal Trade
Commission in the US and the UKs Advertising Standards Agency both
emphasising the need for transparency in commercial campaigns.

2 Glenn Greenwald, How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
Accessed 07/05/2014
3The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/02/24/art-deception-training-new-generation-online-covert-operations/ Accessed 07/05/2014
4Han, Rongbin, "Adaptive Persuasion in Cyberspace: Fifty Cents Army" (2013).
5Ibid
6In the United Kingdom, AstroTurfing is outlawed under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations. In practice, the authorities may direct the complainant to the
Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). After 1 March 2011, the ASAs remit extended to include marketing communications on companies or traders own websites or in other
non-paid-for space online under their control, that are directly connected with the supply of goods or services. If an organisation posts a positive promotional review about its
products (pretending to be a consumer) this will amount to a marketing communication. For example, research assessing the influence of online reviews on the number of hotel
room bookings shows a significant relationship between online consumer reviews and business performance of hotels. Travel operators often use deception to promote their
reputation or tarnish that of competitors taking advantage of two features of the Internets architecture anonymity and its ease of use. This practice is also contrary to the UK Code
of non-broadcast Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing (CAP Code). AstroTurfing breaches the CAP Code because this type of marketing is not fair, legal, decent, honest
and truthful - the key principles of the self-regulatory nature of the CAP Code.

AstroTurng tends to be successful in inuencing our

decision making process as it plays to certain cognitive
techniques (or heuristics) which have been recently
discovered. The latter part of the 20th Century saw a
signicant amount of research dedicated to the way our
mind operates. We are both intuitive and impulsive at the
same time. According to Nobel Prize winning economist
Daniel Kahneman, who is one of the pioneers of this new
eld, our minds use two systems of processing
information; Kahneman unimaginatively calls them,
System 1 and System 2.7 Kahnemans Dual Process
Theory splits our decision-making processes into two
systems: System One is our impulse, routine, and
reactionary part of the brain. If I ask you to calculate 11 +
11, you probably will have answered 22 long before
reading the end of this sentence. System Two is the slow,
methodical, and calculating part of the brain. Both
systems operate fairly well relative to the different
environments they are asked to perform a task, but are
subject to biases and errors.
A learner driver will uneasily be forced to use System 2
during the rst few driving lessons as a lack of experience
means that for them every movement will have to be
calculated and formulated; while a seasoned driver can
almost seamlessly drive from Point A to Point B.
Gigerenzer refers to this as our adaptive toolbox, that is
our ability to make decisions comes from our evolved
ability to make judgements called heuristics, types of
mental shortcuts on which our mind rely in place of more
complicated and time-consuming calculations.8 Some of
these heuristics are fast and frugal, and are usually quite
reliable.9 We can calculate how fast to stop by judging the
distance between our car and the trafc light ahead
without calculation. We can catch balls thrown toward us
by using the gaze heuristic, and we rely on the recall
heuristic to make judgements about people when we
cant place them immediately. The fast and frugal school
of heuristics offer a positive interpretation about the ways
our minds make judgements.

However, the Heuristics and Biases school of judgements

led by the pioneering work of Daniel Kahneman and
Amos Tversky, view heuristics sceptically and argue that
relying on heuristics often results in systemic biases and
errors in judgement.10 Often the way questions are
framed, for example, leads to signicantly different
outcomes. Tell a person that needs surgery to rectify an
ailment that they have a 90% chance of living will result in
signicantly different reactions than telling the same
person that they have a 10% chance of dying.11
Kahneman and Tverskys initial work categorised three
main types of heuristics: Availability, representativeness,
and anchoring and adjustment. All are rooted in the fact
that our minds recall information through mental
shortcuts and are therefore prone to errors.
We tend to judge things as being more frequent based
upon how easily it is to come to mind. When asked which
is more frequent, people tend to look for examples
through illustrations. When asked which causes more
deaths, shark attacks or death by horses, people will tend
to recall how often they hear media reports about shark
attacks and lacking any other information to contradict
their intuition will come to a conclusion based on how
available the information was for them to retrieve.
Moreover, the availability heuristic can cause signicant
mistakes about the probability of an outcome, as it often
manifests itself in excessive fear or unjustied
complacency.12 We use a signicant number of these
mental shortcuts in our day-to-day life, and while they
might serve us well in different environments, each is
prone to error and biases.

7Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan, 2011.

8Girgerenzer & Selten Eds, 2001 Bounded Rationality: the adaptive toolbox. MIT Press; Gigerenzer, Hertwig, and Pachur Eds. 2011. Heuristics: The foundations of

adaptive behaviour, OUP

9Gerd Gigerenzer et al., Simple Heuristics that make us smarter 27-28 (1999).
10Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. "Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases." science 185.4157 (1974): 1124-1131.
11Sunstein, Cass. Why Nudge? The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism, Pp.29-30
12Kuran, Timur, and Sunstein, Cass, Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation, Stanford Law Review, Vol. 51, No. 4 (1999)

Normally, these individual errors can be mitigated by the crowd.

We use phrases like the marketplace of ideas and collective
knowledge. The assumption for rationalists is that these errors will
be pushed down and/or marginalised by better informed
decision-making. Rationality assumes that actors will maximise the
expected utility in their decision making; however, as the H&B
School has posited, our reliance on heuristics often lead to less
than optimal decision making either semi-rational or irrational
decision making leads to errors and/or biases. However, the
Internet is providing a platform for herd mentality to rule the roost.
And when these individual errors use social media to help spread
disinformation, an information cascade can help to gather speed
spreading the collective error. These cascades normally form
when four conditions have been met: Research has been shown
that we make decisions in order. We also try and make rational
decisions based on information available. However, researchers
have identied several instances where users do not conrm to the
traditional model. The most formal attempt to integrate these
departures into some sort of formal model is usually called
prospect theory. 13 Because we dont have access to the private
information of others nor their reasons for targeting us with
information, we can be said to have limited abilities to respond to a
communication: we either adopt or reject the decision.
Informational cascades occur when external information obtained
from previous participants in an event overrides ones own private
signal, irrespective of the accuracy of the former over the latter.
Users forward on messages, like posts, and re-tweet status
updates often without checking the validity of the message. A
sort-of reex communication (emanating from System One)
comes about in a large part due to a reputational heuristic a user
sees the number of followers a social node has, retweets the
communication, without giving any thought or calculation to the
validity of the message. The social node is often targeted by
propagators (or to use Sunsteins term availability entrepreneurs)
seeking to bring about an outcome that would not have been
possible without some sort of deception. This type of social
hacking comes about by targeting the very heuristics that we rely
on to make judgements in the online environment. These types of
propagators are not unique to cyberspace, but my argument
(discussed further below) is that there are specic cyber-heuristics
that rely on the architecture of the online environment for success.
In the alternative, our reliance on heuristics is exacerbated by the
architecture found in social media platforms.

Likes and endorsements, shares and retweets all intrinsic

design features of social media; therefore, our reliance on System
One is an intrinsic part of the social network architecture. A
propagator targets several social nodes with a deceptive message
designed to stimulate a System One response, and if successful
hope to start an availability cascade. The social node spreads the
message without checking the validity of the message, and the
message gains rapid currency in a large part due to its simplicity
and insightfulness. The message is validated through a
reputational heuristic, where people trust the truthfulness of the
message because it emanates from an account with a large
number of followers, or it has already been liked and retweeted
by numerous other users already. In the online environment, this is
a type of community heuristic. The message is validated by the
number of retweets and/or likes received.
But as Kahneman and Tversky have demonstrated, the mental
shortcuts of heuristics and in particular System One processing
often lead to the wrong decision. Propagators are relying on a
series of heuristics that may make people to alter their normal
decision making process. For example, the consensus heuristic is
best summed up in the expression, if other people believe it then
it must be true. Someone interested in promoting a deceptive
message wants to establish a false sense of group consensus
about a particular idea. This bias is commonly present in a group
setting where one thinks the collective opinion of their own group
matches that of the larger population. Since the members of a
group reach a consensus and rarely encounter those who dispute
it, they tend to believe that everybody thinks the same way. As an
extension, when confronted with evidence that a consensus does
not exist, people often assume that the others who do not agree
with them are defective in some way. There is no single cause for
this cognitive bias; the availability heuristic and self-serving bias
has been suggested as at least partial underlying factors. Related
to this process is the fact that users are more likely to believe a
message that they perceive as coming from several independent
sources, or from an acquaintance.14 Individuals who process
messages through heuristic processing routes of persuasion, likely
formulate decisions based on experts opinion and what the
consensus believes opposed to fully processing the message in its
entirety.

13Consumer Policy Toolkit (OECD) Available at http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/governance/consumer-policy-toolkit_9789264079663-en#page44 Accessed on 15/05/2014

14Eagly, A.H. & Chaiken, S. (1993). Process theories of attitude formation and change: The elaboration likelihood and heuristic-systematic models. In A.H.
Eagly & S. Chaiken, (Eds.), The psychology of attitudes. Orlando: Harcourt Brace: pp. 303-350.

A case study in the 2009 special election in Massachusetts describes

a concerted, deceitful attempt to cause a specic URL to rise to
prominence on Twitter through the use of a network of nine fake user
accounts.15 The initiators sought not just to expose a nite audience
to a specic URL, but to trigger an information cascade that would
lend a sense of credibility and grassroots enthusiasm to a specic
political message. Within hours, a substantial portion of the targeted
users retweeted the link, resulting in a rapid spread detected by
Googles real-time search engine. This caused the URL in question to
be promoted to the top of the Google results page for a query on the
candidates name. This strategy has earned the moniker: a Twitter
bomb.16 The success of this strategy relies on targeting users that will
likely retweet the message. Research showed that in little over two
hours nine separate accounts sent 929 tweets to 573 unique users.
After 24 hours thanks to retweeting the audience size amounted to
61,732 Twitter users.17 This led the authors of the study to conclude
that using social hacking in this way makes possible to hijack the
trustworthiness of a search engine and propagate their messages to
a huge audience for free, with little effort, and without trace.
Rational choice theory has dominated policy design throughout the
latter part of the 20th Century.18 Kelam has argued that rational
choice theory domination of policy design and evaluation needs to
be re-thought and moderated. There are plenty of valid examples: (i)
providing more information about the cost-benets of consequences
fails to change behaviour; (ii) where changing direct incentives
(consequences) fails to change behaviour; (iii) where self-control, not
choice, is the critical determinant of behaviour.19 In recent years,
rationality as the primer for legal and economic policy making has
been affected by developments in social science research. Law has
begun to recognize the limits of human rationality. As Richard
Epstein wrote, there is little doubt that the major new theoretical
approach to law and economics in the past two decades does not
come from either of those two elds. Instead it comes from the
adjacent discipline of cognitive psychology, which has now morphed
into behavioural economics.20

15These accounts produced 929 tweets over the course of 138 minutes, all of which included a link to a website smearing one of the candidates in the 2009
Massachusetts special election. The tweets injecting this meme mentioned users who had previously expressed interest in the election.
16Mustafaraj, Eni and Metaxas, Panagiotis (2010). "From Obscurity to Prominence in Minutes: Political Speech and Real-Time Search." In: Proceedings of
the WebSci10: Extending the Frontiers of Society On-Line, April 26-27th, 2010, Raleigh, NC: US.
17Ibid, Pp. 6
18Baldwin, Cave, and Lodge. Understanding Regulation, Pp. 9.
19Bikhchandani, Sushil. Learning from the behavior of others: Conformity, fads, and informational cascades. Diss. University of Michigan, 1998; Devenow,
Andrea, and Ivo Welch. "Rational herding in financial economics." European Economic Review 40.3 (1996): 603-615; Hirshleifer, David. "The blind leading
the blind: social influence, fads and informational cascades." (1995): 24-93.
20Richard A. Epstein, The Neoclassical Economics of Consumer Contracts, 92 Minn. L. Rev. 803, 803 (2008).

Moreover, the insight of behavioural economists has provided

tools for regulators to consider when developing regulation for
various environments. This is an important development as
System One biases which emanate from our automatic systems
and System Two biases, which stem from our reexive and intuitive
processes, should be distinguished. System Two biases and errors
are meant to override our automatic responses and there is
signicant evidence that cognitive errors are more readily corrected
through policy when sourced in System One biases. However, in
the online environment, architecture is often designed to
encourage System One responses. This is why we need a
third-way mode of regulatory intervention somewhere
between command-and-control and deregulation and unique to
cyberspace. This regulatory framework should have two features to
it: unlike Really Responsive Regulation21, which focuses on the
detecting undesirable or non-compliant behaviour and then
developing tools and strategies for responding to that behaviour
regulators should analyse how the architecture inuences
behaviour a priori to the regulatory intervention. If Gigerenzer is
correct in stating that fast and frugal heuristics are accurate when
they appear in the proper environment, then the regulator should
be encouraging more cognitively secure environments to ensure
deception is not used to bring about outcomes that could not have
otherwise be achieved. This is because, as GCHQ correctly states,
people make decisions as part of groups. People make decisions
for emotional reasons, not rational ones. 22

21Baldwin, Robert, and Julia Black. "Really responsive regulation." The Modern Law Review 71.1 (2008): 59-94.
22Note 3, Supra at Slide 31.

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