Slow dissent and the emotional geographies of resistance

Abstract

Anger, grief, regret and shame are some of the myriad ways that people narrate a decade of life along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline. These stories reveal a perceptive and collective socio-political awareness situated within multifaceted emotional geographies of resistance. In spite of resistance narratives, explicit and collective resistance practices remain uncommon. As people struggle and live within composite landscapes of structural violence along the pipeline, particular processes and mechanisms of uneven power influence the tendency for resistance struggles to be slow, impromptu or labour based. In this comparative ethnographic analysis, I consider the political environment that shapes socio-political emotional ties in Nanga, particularly its socio-political positioning as 'the village of the First Lady'. In this case, people in proximate positions vis-à-vis the ruling family experience heightened oppression(s) and dispossession(s), at the same time that they report feeling little political recourse. In Kribi, on the other hand, responses to the pipeline can be described as defiant withdrawals, demonstrated through a series of unconnected refusals. Although resistance practices along the pipeline have not been visible or successful in an established sense, emotional geographies of resistance elucidate long-term struggles to survive (i.e., slow dissent), including the accumulation of a collective emotional consciousness grounded in an awareness of historical patterns of injustice.

WITHDRAWN – Administrative Duplicate Publication: Critical political geographies of slow violence and resistance

“…The same is true of resistance to slow violence (see De Heredia, 2017;Federici, 2019;Mama, 2014;Piedalue, 2019). In Murrey's (2016) work on structural violence connected to the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline, for example, she describes protracted and subvisible processes of 'slow dissent': the ways that collective emotional practices of survival and resistance persist in the face of multi-faceted power.…”

Singularity. A manifesto for incomparable geographies

“…My point here is not to suggest that as researchers we do not already try our hardest to dwell in and with the communities and places on and with which we work (see Murrey, , for example). Rather, it is to query just how compatible this patient attention to the singular is, where not much may change over long stretches of time, with the temporality and scale of the large grant funded research projects that promotion and reputation are increasingly dependent on in the corporate university today?…”

Between appropriation and assassination

“…Sabaratnam, 2017; Hickel, 2017; de Jong et al , 2019; Kothari et al , 2019), including direct protests by dissatisfied people against development projects in their communities. Other responses have included quiet or slow dissent (Murrey, 2016) or begrudged acquiescence (Li, 2014). While there is no singular story of development, what we know of as “international development” writ large has been criticised as being ideologically and epistemologically informed by Eurocentric norms, priorities, “expert knowledge”, “fantasy” and “seductive logics” (Escobar, 1995; Hickel, 2017; Kothari et al , 2019).…”