Embodied Resistance and Solidarity Activism in Contest to the US Security State

• In Event: 450 - Section on Political Economy of the World-System Paper Session. Human Rights and the Political Economy of the World System

Abstract

Few have considered how the embodiment of activism might operate for solidarity activists, those who are not directly targeted by the injustices they contest. In this paper, part of a larger project on bearing witness as a means of protesting the US security state, I examine the importance of embodied resistance among those who seek to enact solidarity with the targets of state violence. Original data are based on a comparative ethnography of three movement communities, broadly from the Christian Left: 1) School of the Americas Watch, which endeavors to close the military training facility at Ft. Benning, Georgia; 2) the Migrant Trail Walk, part of the US/Mexico border justice movement; and 3) Witness Against Torture, a grassroots effort to close the Guantánamo Prison. Through the embodiment of witness, these activists reach out to the targets of state violence in solidarity, confront the state itself in dissent, and appeal to the public with a political alternative and ethical imperative. By embodying their political intentions, they come to see, feel and understand state violence in ways that they could not otherwise. They share these felt experiences broadly, making the state’s targets, which the dominant culture abjects and disavows, harder to ignore and hold at a moral distance.

Author

• Chandra Russo, Colgate University