Social movements and resistance

Although social movements are concerned with resistance, there has been a surprisingly little effort towards conceptualizing and problematising resistance within social movement studies. This chapter aims to address such a gap. It shows how a deeper understanding of resistance can in turn allow to better grasp diverse social movements. I give an overview of the social movement studies field, scrutinizing how various currents have been dealing with resistance. Then I show how different intellectual sources outside of the field (e.g. Gramsci, Polanyi, Scott, Foucault, De Certeau) have contributed to fertilize social movement studies literature and conceptualizations of resistance, providing examples of their legacies and limitations. I argue that the dividing line between resistance and alternatives is at best blurring. The new conceptual framework that I draw is able to tackle with diverse “environmental movements” broadly conceived that cannot be fully comprehended through the tools of conventional social movement studies, such as the transition movements, political consumerism or sustainable community movement, and ‘autonomous geographies’, which require a more expansive understanding of what counts are resistance.