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This paper examines tactical performance – a creative and humorous form of protest - as a form of alter-geopolitical intervention that poses counter-hegemonic challenges in society. This paper extends the writing on humour in political geography through a consideration of the spatial use of humour in political protest. My analysis is informed by a scholar activist methodology rooted in collaboration with resisting others and an ethic of solidarity. The paper argues that the practice of tactical performance requires a narrative that is attentive to an ‘action logic’ that mobilises humour and requires both emotional and spatial registers understood as sites of intervention that articulate alternative geopolitical narratives and practices from below through various forms of material action. This approach to alter-geopolitical action is grounded in an empirical case study in which the author participated, namely the Dawn of the Debt zombie action during the 2004 May Day protests in Glasgow, Scotland. Drawing upon disposition theories of humour, and a Marxist understanding of the figure of the zombie in contemporary capitalism, the paper argues that while in engaging with particular action logics and sites of intervention, the use of humour in political protest remained ambiguous in its results. This poses challenges to the deployment of humour and tactical performance as forms of alter-geopolitics while at the same time opening up new avenues to activist engagement.

Possibilities for engendering sustainable and just futures are foundering in part because key resources are managed by elites through ‘top down’ environmental governance and management, and knowledge production regimes, largely committed to retaining the status quo, fail to pursue new ways of managing resource consumption and distribution. In this paper, we argue for an alternative climate justice agenda that is enabled through grassroots mobilisation in collaboration with state action. To do this we consider the state as a continued terrain of possibility for positive social, economic and environmental change, noting the imperative of historically attentive state-enabled redistribution along persistent axes of difference. In articulating an alternative understanding of the state, we emphasise the importance of social movements capable of cultivating networked militant particularisms that can be channeled through and beyond state governance processes. In order to ground these ideas, we provide two brief case studies, tracking food sovereignty and energy remunicipalization initiatives.

This paper analyses the conflict surrounding the construction of mega-dams along the Narmada river valley in central India. In particular, the paper examines various repertoires of resistance employed by the Narmada Bachao Andolan (save the Narmada movement, NBA) the principal protagonist resisting the Narmada valley development project. Various spaces of economic, cultural, ecological, and political erasure are engendered by the construction of the Narmada dams, and the NBA articulates resistance, and engages in constructive development alternatives, in each of these spaces. The discursive articulations of resistance provide a crucial counterpoint to material expressions of struggle. Discursive resistance takes the form of academic analyses, peasant testimonials and slogans. Utilising Warren’s concept of testimonios, the paper argues that movement identity articulates a unity that effaces internal difference, contradiction and ambiguity. The paper concludes with some thoughts on the role of academics in highlighting such ambiguities, in the context of collaboration with social movements.

This paper examines the contributions that can be made to critical geopolitics by the study of social movements. It argues that such a study would de(centre) analytical focus away from an exclusive concern with the machinations of the state and would investigate how social movements challenge state-centred notions of hegemony, consent and power and contest the colonization of the ‘political’ by the state. In particular, the paper argues for 1. (1) the location of social movements within a contested web of power/knowledge relations; 2. (2) the theoretical analysis of social movements as multiplicities explored through the concept of a terrain of resistance; and 3. (3) a critical identification with social movements which would include the privileging and understanding of the voices of social movements as understood from the perspectives of the participants and a critical engagement with oppositional forces to the state. To contextualize these arguments, the paper examines resistances articulated by some contemporary South Asian social movements.

Contemporary social movement research has focused primarily on the goals, organization and success of particular struggles, paying insufficient attention to how movement character and agency are mediated by place. This article explores this theme within the context of contemporary Indian society which has seen the recent emergence of place-specific, autonomous social movements. The article also considers the interplay between processes of domination and resistance within Indian civil society.