In different states of indifference: movement, friction, and resistance

Abstract

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This article critically engages with the question of mobility in the study of international politics by centering the concept of resistance. It starts with the example of the Canadian Government blocking the Roxham Road irregular border crossing in March 2023 and Canadian officials arguing in favour of normalizing movement between the US/Canada. In general, the paper challenges the global state centric project of normalizing movement by arguing that resistance always comes first. As such, this challenge does not only ask who/what gets to move freely and when; it is centers the very resistances to normalizing movement that emerges from within and without movement itself. The paper has three sections: the first acknowledges that celebrating movement is important because it loosens the state centric study of international politics and sets borders, states, and migrants adrift in a sea of irregular movements. It creates a differential analysis of movement which I refer to as “differential encounters”. In the context of this article, recasting the state in the context of movement demands an engagement with Indigenous and migrant histories beyond the modern categories of immigrant or settler. It requires going beyond merely placing Indigenous peoples into other non-Indigenous migrations stories since it reproduces the colonial efforts to exceptionalize the immigrant experience in and through its universalization/provincialization. Such practical efforts to normalize movement allow the Canadian state to present itself as the apolitical and fixed arbiter of different movements and thereby displace the unceded mediating role inherent to Indigenous relationships to the land and its peoples. The second section shifts to an epistemological register of movements to recognize that celebrating movement can also depoliticize movements differences. Therefore, movement is not simply given; it is itself treated as diagnostic and productive by attending to the function of friction inside and between movements. Following the work of Anna Tsing, frictions are not only the product of movement but also the shapers and materializers of movement(s). They are the encounters that actualize, materialize, and define movements. They occur when movements interact, and they produce something new within the specific place-based context of differential encounters. Friction is becoming movement because nothing moves or matters without friction. This section “matters” the nine individuals, including two children, who lost their lives while being smuggled through the Akwesasne district of the St. Lawrence River, which straddles the US/Canada border. Their lives are mattered in and through the materialization of movements. Yet, in differential encounters, there can be no sovereign, disciplinary, or biopolitical accounting of bodies and lives: only frictions, movements, and resistances. These frictions both materialize and are material. They are historical and immediate. From macro to micro: the decision to deploy a particular technology is as significant as the reliability of an operation, machine, or equipment in the day to day.

The political frictions between movements, as such, become the focus of studies which centre movement. To find politics one must move with resistance. To move with resistance is to open untoward frictions. Moving with resistance politicizes those very movements and frictions that have become regularized and/or normalized. The final section argues that despite the emancipatory narrative attached to privileging ontological and epistemological approaches, resistance should always be situated as a generative force that comes first. This section uses the four-part documentary series Thunder Bay (2023), by Ryan McMahonm, the award winning Anishinaabe journalist, to investigates forms of resistance in Thunder Bay, Ontario, which sits at the head of Lake Superior. The history of Thunder Bay is defined by Indigenous/settler relations —a complex of trade, employment, governance, policing, and personal frictions —and amass into the colonial frictions of the city. Thunder Bay’s purpose has not changed. It continues to exist in order to control, extract and extinguish Indigenous futures. While the documentary challenges the audience to see Thunder Bay as both an exceptional crisis in policing and as an exemplar case of continued Canadian colonialism, McMahon’s series also helps the effort in this paper to rethink the concept of resistance in the context of movement and friction. To think about resistance as coming first, the concept of resistance itself must be redefined, not as opposition or reaction, but as an enduring medium of escalation and indifference. Resisting colonialism cannot erase its constitutive frictions; colonialism is a movement responding to already existing resistance, friction and movement. As such, the colonial project remains intact, and escalation adds new opportunities for the state to escalate in turn. Thunder Bay laments that, despite the inspiring efforts of individuals and movements, Indigenous resistance is reduced to new and further instances of friction that keep the wheels of the Canadian state turning. Resistance in movement is a prior interplay of indifferently releasing one movement and politically escalating other emergent movements that resurface in the wake. The article puts special attention to the concept of indifference since “to indiffer” break or turn away from the modern state form, is to actively dismantle those escalatory forces of resistance and friction captured by the state’s ambition to appear static. However, just as resistance has come to mean opposition to movement and lost its political value, indifference has also been cast as a static apolitical form of being. Again, just as resistance escalates, it also indiffers. To indiffer evokes differing, but not in ways that contribute to a particular movement’s escalation or friction. Instead, indiffering releases, liberates, suspends both escalation and friction. This does not mean that indifference has no relationship with escalation or friction in the abstract. To indiffer is an active unattending to a movement’s particular escalation and friction. It is resisting, releasing, and forgetting and generating new frictions and movements. Yet indifference is not innocent —it is not only a weapon of the weak. The state also practices indifference. The indifferent state actively uncares about Indigenous lives because its own future requires unmaking of Indigenous future horizons. This article suggests that if resistance is no longer believed to be a willful action of the liberal subject, and resistance always comes in advance, then the frictions that unfold as movements inevitably unmap geographies of the state and open untoward irregular movements and futures.