Building Resistance Infrastructure: Mechanisms of Resilience in the Stop Cop City Movement

• In Event: Resistance and Disruption

Abstract

Despite extensive scholarship on coalitions, existing frameworks often fail to explain how increasingly repressed contemporary movements sustain resilience under intensifying police militarization, state repression, and internal strain. Drawing on ethnographic observation and 59 in-depth interviews with activists, this study introduces the concept of Resistance Infrastructure to analyze how the decentralized Stop Cop City coalition in Atlanta, Georgia, continued to mobilize amid criminalization and an increasingly hostile political environment. I identify three mechanisms that together constitute this infrastructure: (1) movement spillover (from Black Lives Matter; (2) the formation of organizational praxis clusters; and (3) the tactical use of digital communication technologies. Resistance infrastructure refers to—rather than a summation—the interaction of these three movement mechanisms. Findings shows the movement continual abjure of abeyance despite internal and external threats, as well as a shifting of attention from concrete success or failure paradigms towards processes of adaptation within hostile political environments. By conceptualizing resistance as an infrastructure, this research contributes to growing social movement theory by offering insight into the purpose of coalitions within the evolving architecture of U.S. policing and racial governance.

Author

• Cody Joseph Jackson, University of Notre Dame