Editorial: RSMag.org and Resistance Studies in an era of Internet surveillance

by Christopher Kullenberg

In May this year, a 22 year old student at Nottingham University, Rizwaan Sabir, was arrested by the police and kept in prison for six days. He had downloaded and printed a number of terrorist training manuals from a US government web site, intending to do research on terrorist tactics. However, according to the UK Terrorist Act (2000), such use is forbidden. It seems that academic freedom has its limits, and the consequences for stepping across the line may be devastating.

Sabir’s research topic, an inquiry into terrorist tactics, could very well have been the subject for an article in the Resistance Studies Magazine. If there is something like forbidden knowledge, this would be the perfect example.

This is however not an isolated event, but has become a reality for academics and scholars. About a year ago German sociologist Andrej Holm was arrested because he was researching activism in the urban landscape.

How can we make sense of this slightly paranoid attitude towards inquiries into the often violent, morally questionable, and disruptive types of resistance? First of all, it shows that the “war on terrorism” is playing a major role in shaping new forms of policing, intelligence and surveillance. Terrorism is said to be a networked phenomenon operating in cell-like structures, which may threat society from a multitude of points. Economic transfers, Internet based communication, international travels and “fundamentalist” social communities must thus be monitored with great detail to prevent attacks. It seems that critical research at times also will be included in the category of suspects.

The primary problem for Resistance Studies is, however, not the imprisonment of colleagues. Rather it is the possibility of self-censorship among academics, as well as limitations in the choice of research topics. If we arrive at a point where we no longer conduct interviews with certain groups, no longer do field work in certain areas, or even stop reading certain web pages, we have induced a virtual panopticon on ourselves.

What is at stake is not only the policies of certain governments, but also the material circumstances of our everyday research tools. Only a few months ago the Swedish parliament passed a law allowing the National Defence Radio Establisment (FRA) to monitor all Internet traffic leaving and entering the country. A type of technology developed during the cold war, often referred to as signal intelligence, has been transferred to monitor the most important tools used by journalists, academics and in the homes of millions. In an era of globalisation it seems that the panoptic social institutions do not suffice, but surveillance has instead become panspectric, as Manuel Delanda^[1] puts it. Instead of relying on obedient national populations, the new perceived threats may appear everywhere, thus everything must be monitored through intelligent filters and search robots^[2]. Every submission to the Resistance Studies Magazine will pass through this filter, and since articles often deal with political extremes, terrorism and even violence, there is a chance that a pseudo-military government agency will read it.

But the best way of dealing with this new order of surveillance is probably to embrace the Internet with even more openness. With this new issue we launch an independent web site for the magazine: http://rsmag.org. This way we can publish each article separately as well as part of a whole issue, making it easier to link to us and search inside each piece. Also, statistics show that we are already having about a thousand visitors every month. Monitored or not, there seems to be an interest in reading about resistance studies, and as long as readers think it is important, there is no need to fear a little surveillance. The third issue thus contains five articles from many different areas, all relating to resistance in interesting ways.

Drawing on a theoretical combination of James Scott's conception of everyday resistance and Erwin Goffman's symbolic interactionism, Carol Jo Evans develops an interesting case study of resistance within a North American Appalachian community. Shane Gunderson discusses how resistance movements may gain momentum, as "popular intellectuals" facilitate and combine ideological work with political initiative. Gunderson shows, through a case-study, that structuring resistance in a more strategic fashion, through sequential actions, will increase the possibility of social change. Femke Kaulingfreks writes about the May 2008 riots in Copenhagen, and how such events, when taken seriously, seem to grow politics from the middle, thus shaping grounds for important political agency. What falls outside of normalisation, is not necessary disruptive in a counter-productive way, but may reveal inequalities and open up debates. Thomas Riegler analyses the film The Battle of Algiers and how it has been caught up in debates on whether it has influenced resistance like an instruction manual in asymmetric warfare and guerrilla tactics, or not. Finally, Adrian Bua deals with the problems of pluralism and democracy, and proposes how class analysis can contribute to a more sustainable alternative called pluralist socialism.

As usual, articles may be downloaded and shared for free. More readers are not only the merrier, but make the debates more critical and multifaceted.