Between discipline and dissent: situated resistance and global order

In this article we contextualise the Disciplining Dissent project through a series of observations about the ways in which the papers collected here contribute to existing perspectives on global resistance, and make a broader argument in favour of situated approaches to studying the interplay between global discipline and dissent. After outlining the concerns that led us initially to formulate the project, we offer a series of reflections about the contribution of this special issue to existing debates about (i) the place of resistance in global order and (ii) the ways in which global discipline and dissent can be known. We suggest that the papers collected in this special issue, through their attention to concrete and specific practices of discipline and dissent, prompt reflection on the particular forms of visibility associated with different methodologies, and on the politically charged knowledges these methodologies engender. Attention to the interplay between context-specific practices of discipline and dissent opens up space, we argue, to examine whose and what knowledges count in the theory and practice of global ordering and resistance. It also invites consideration of the ways in which self-consciously situated approaches to researching and theorising might help open up and decolonise this terrain of enquiry. We conclude with some reflections on the interplay of discipline and dissent at work in our own immediate context of the British university.