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Social Movement Studies: Journal of

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Counter-conducts: A Foucauldian
Analytics of Protest
a
Carl Death
a
Department of International Politics , Aberystwyth University ,
Aberystwyth, Wales, UK
Published online: 30 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: Carl Death (2010) Counter-conducts: A Foucauldian Analytics of Protest,
Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest, 9:3, 235-251, DOI:
10.1080/14742837.2010.493655

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 Social Movement Studies,
Vol. 9, No. 3, 235–251, August 2010

Counter-conducts: A Foucauldian Analytics

of Protest
CARL DEATH
Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, Wales, UK
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ABSTRACT The influence of Foucault on studies of social movements, dissent and protest is not as
direct as might be imagined. He is generally regarded as focusing more on the analysis of power and
government than forms of resistance. This is reflected in the governmentality literature, which tends
to treat dissent and protest as an afterthought, or failure of government. However, Foucault’s notion
of ‘counter-conducts’ has much to offer the study of dispersed, heterogeneous and variegated forms
of resistance in contemporary global politics. Using the protests that have accompanied summits
including Seattle, Johannesburg, Prague, London and Copenhagen to illustrate an analytics of
protest in operation, this article shows how a Foucauldian perspective can map the close
interrelationship between regimes of government and practices of resistance. By adopting a
practices and mentalities focus, rather than an actor-centric approach, and by seeking to destabilize
the binaries of power and resistance, and government and freedom, that have structured much of
political thought, an analytics of protest approach illuminates the mutually constitutive relationship
between dominant power relationships and counter-conducts, and shows how protests both disrupt
and reinforce the status quo, at the same time.
KEY WORDS : Foucault, counter-conducts, protest, summits, resistance, governmentality

Introduction
The protests against major international summits in Seattle, Genoa, Prague, Johannesburg,
London, Copenhagen and elsewhere are claimed to have signalled a ‘return to the streets’
in contemporary global politics (Della Porta & Tarrow, 2005, p. 12). These protests
provide a number of challenges to social movement theory. A particular obstacle to their
conceptualization is the continuing dominance of classic binaries of political thought:
power and resistance, government and freedom, and dissent and collaboration. These
binaries have resulted in a tendency to see social movements as either co-opted or
revolutionary. Yet the contours of recent protests, with their jet-setting intellectuals
wearing Banksy T-shirts, indigenous activists wielding Sony Handycams, solicitors and
publicists on quick dial, private foundation funding and often ambiguous relationship to
the state and international institutions, belie such framings. Making sense of the rhizome
networks of global governance, power, protest and resistance is one of the primary
challenges for contemporary social movement theory (St John, 2008, p. 184).

Correspondence Address: Dr Carl Death, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, Penglais,
Aberystwyth, Wales, SY23 3FE, UK. Email: [email protected]
1474-2837 Print/1474-2829 Online/10/030235-17 q 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14742837.2010.493655
 236 C. Death

I argue that Foucauldian political thought has more to contribute to these questions, and
the study of the relationship between power and protest, than is often imagined. Of course,
Michel Foucault has had a profound influence on the study of power, resistance and
contentious politics. His influence on a number of theorists of resistance is evident, and the
broader influence of concepts like power/knowledge, discourse, and disciplinary and bio-
power have set down deep roots in the way in which we think about non-state and
adversarial forms of politics (Bleiker, 2000; Barry, 2001; Amoore, 2005). Despite this, the
direct influence of Foucault’s work on contemporary social movement studies is more
limited than one might expect. This may well stem from the commonly held belief that
Foucault had more to say about regimes of power than he did about forms of resistance or
alternative politics (Simons, 1995, p. 82). However the possibility, indeed inevitability, of
dissent and resistance are nevertheless at the heart of Foucault’s philosophy, and his
relevance for the study of contentious politics can be made far more explicit.
To this end, this article elaborates the Foucauldian notion of counter-conducts,
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described as ‘the will not to be governed thusly, like that, by these people, at this price’
(Foucault, 2007b, p. 75). The idea of the counter-conduct was developed by Foucault in
the context of his work on governmentality – rationalities or mentalities of government –
and captures the close interrelationship between protests and the forms of government they
oppose. As such it builds on and develops one of the fundamental Foucauldian insights:
that power is relational, rather than being possessed or located (Foucault, 2000a).
I argue that the idea of counter-conducts can be used to develop an analytics of protest for
the study of contentious politics. Such an approach, drawing closely on Mitchell Dean’s
‘analytics of government’ (1999, p. 20) – developed for studying regimes of governmentality
– has two major strengths. First, it approaches protests and contentious politics not from an
actor-centric perspective, but rather orientates itself toward specific practices and rationalities
of protest, which themselves work to constitute particular identities and subjectivities through
the performance of dissent. Secondly, by destabilizing conventional binaries between power
and resistance, government and freedom, an analytics of protest is specifically designed to
show how protest and government are mutually constitutive, and thus how forms of resistance
have the potential to reinforce and bolster, as well as and at the same time as, undermining
and challenging dominant forms of global governance.
The following sections briefly contrast existing approaches to the study of resistance
and protest with a Foucauldian analytics of protest based on resistance as counter-conduct.
This is not intended to replace or refute existing approaches, merely to illuminate an
alternative, and perhaps in some ways complementary, approach to the study of protest.
Illustrations of such an approach are drawn from the protests that have accompanied major
global summits, the ‘Battle of Seattle’ at the WTO Ministerial Conference in 1999, the
Genoa G8 clashes in 2001, the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development
in 2002, the London meeting of the G20 and the COP15 Copenhagen Climate Change
Conference, both in 2009. As a framework, however, this analytics of protest is not limited
to the summit, and can provide a Foucauldian-informed approach to the study of
contentious politics and protest in a far broader range of contexts.

Studying Social Movements, Resistance and Protest

Much of the social movement literature has tended to conceptualize resistance as the act of
opposing power (Chatterjee & Finger, 1994; Taylor, 1995; Tarrow, 1998; Aronowitz &
 Counter-conducts: A Foucauldian Analytics of Protest 237

Gautney, 2003; Della Porta & Tarrow, 2005; Bond & Desai, 2008). This binary between
power and resistance is even more pronounced in the literature on protests. Protests are
performative, one-off demonstrations, and are usually seen as merely one form of
resistance within larger cycles of contention (Tarrow, 1998; Della Porta & Diani, 2006,
p. 165). They are often imagined as standing apart from, and in direct confrontation with,
the power they oppose. Even Hardt and Negri, who otherwise have radically critiqued
existing notions of power and resistance with their polycentric and diffuse concepts of
empire and multitude, still reify this power versus resistance binary when they claim that
‘the magic of Seattle was to show that these many grievances were not just a random,
haphazard collection, a cacophony of different voices, but a chorus that spoke in common
against the global system’ (2004, p. 288).
The implication often drawn from this assumption of binary opposition is that
movements themselves can therefore be categorized as either revolutionary or
collaborative, on the side of either governors or the governed. Doherty and Doyle, for
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example, make a general and normative ‘distinction between emancipatory environmental

groups and governance environmental groups’, the former who challenge dominant
cultural codes or social and political values, and the latter who ‘offer no challenge to
environmental injustice and are in general reproducing forms of inequality through their
participation with governments, financial institutions and transnational corporations in
transnational structures of governance’ (2006, p. 705). This actor-centric approach is a
common feature of many existing analyses of protest (as shown by O’Neill, 2004, p. 234
and Blühdorn, 2006, p. 26), which tend to address the origins, motivations, successes and
failures of particular groups, often primarily informed by activist testimonies (for
example, Taylor, 1995; Keck & Sikkink, 1998; Tarrow, 1998; O’Brien et al., 2000).
Whilst this is a rich and valuable literature, and is essential for understanding movement
mobilization and dynamics, taking such groups as starting points unduly narrows the scope
of analysis when trying to comprehend contemporary contours of power and government.
It is these two dimensions of prevailing approaches to protests – the implied theoretical
binary between power and resistance, and the methodological actor-centric approach –
that can be supplemented through a Foucauldian perspective on power and resistance.

Foucault on Power and Resistance

Foucault’s primary influence on the study of politics has been his re-conceptualization of
power – yet his notion of resistance has been regarded as ‘drastically under-theorized’,
‘maddeningly indistinct’, and politically ‘troubling’ (Simons, 1995, p. 83; Kulynych,
1997, p. 328; Pickett, 1996, p. 466). Cohen and Arato argue that, despite the
persuasiveness of Foucault’s analysis, he ‘has deprived the modern rebel of any
institutional, normative, or personal resources for constituting herself in terms other than
those made available by the forces that already control her’ (1994, p. 294). Sveinung
Sandberg states even more directly that, ‘in Foucault, deliberate resistance, struggle and
change seem impossible’ (2006, p. 213).
Whilst a Foucauldian perspective is certainly politically troubling, his approach to
power can provide a basis for a more systematic analysis of protest and resistance. His
emphasis on the productive, relational, inescapable nature of power is well known
(Foucault, 1998, pp. 92 – 97, 2000a), as is his scepticism toward the idea of a pure form of
resistance against power. In one of his later essays he reflected that
 238 C. Death

I have always been somewhat suspicious of the notion of liberation, because if it is

not treated with precautions and with certain limits, one runs the risk of falling back
on the idea that there exists a human nature or base that, as a consequence of certain
historical, economic, and social processes, has been concealed, alienated, or
imprisoned in and by mechanisms of repression. (Foucault, 1997, p. 282)

A Foucauldian perspective is not, therefore, emancipatory; although neither does he argue

that resistance is impossible. On the contrary he was very clear that ‘where there is power,
there is resistance’ (Foucault, 1998, p. 95). Indeed, ‘there is no power without potential
refusal or revolt’ (Foucault, 2000a, p. 324). However, rather than social revolution or
wars of movement, resistance is identified at the micro-level, ‘in the transgression and
contestation of societal norms; in the disruption of metanarratives of humanism; . . . in the
“re-appearance” of “local popular”, “disqualified”, and “subjugated knowledges”; and in
the aesthetic of self-creation’ (Kulynych, 1997, p. 328). As Foucault states: ‘Hence there is
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no single locus of great refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the
revolutionary’ (1998, p. 96).
Such a perspective captures much of the messiness and complexity of contemporary
politics far more satisfactorily than an idealized binary between domination and freedom.
Recent studies which have drawn on Foucauldian political theory explore, for example,
the contradictions and ironies thrown up by video footage of a Seattle ‘anti-globalization’
protestor kicking a Nike sign whilst wearing Nike shoes, and consumer activist
campaigners on the steps of Niketown in Seattle assisting the police in the identification
and arrest of anarchists (Amoore & Langley, 2004, pp. 106 –107). Environmental protests
against a nuclear development in South Africa found that, despite contesting the
environmental impact assessment through the courts, their engagement was legitimating a
process bound up with modernist and developmental power relations (Death, 2006).
Graham St John explores the ways in which carnivalesque protests and Global Action
Days are simultaneously transgressive, as well as acting as societal ‘safety-valve’ release
mechanisms (2008, p. 168). Whereas many conventional analyses might read these
struggles as anomalies or lamentable lapses from pure resistance, from a Foucauldian
perspective they reflect the inevitable interrelationship between relations of power and
resistance in rhizomatic global politics. Such a verdict is not to praise or condemn this
mutual interrelationship, but merely to observe that it is an inevitable implication of
Foucault’s stance on power.
This tight interrelationship between power and freedom is captured by the concept
of governmentality. Governmental forms of power are attempts to regulate the ‘conduct
of conduct’ and ensure ‘the right disposition of things’ going far beyond an equation of
power with the state or formal institutions (Dean, 1999; Lemke, 2001; Foucault, 2007a,
pp. 87 – 110; Miller & Rose, 2008). The conduct of conduct covers the shaping or guiding
of possible actions and norms by a diverse range of actors and institutions; and in advanced
liberal societies these include political parties, schools, prisons, hospitals, charities,
non-governmental organizations (NGOs), local community groups and many others. As
such the distinction between governmental and non-governmental actors holds little
analytical value: actors on both sides of this purported divide are implicated in networks of
governmentality and the conduct of conduct ‘at a distance’ (Rose, 1999, p. 49). Freedom is
therefore not in opposition to modern government, but is rather an essential technique, or
product, of power. The free citizen and the free market, for example, are cornerstones of
 Counter-conducts: A Foucauldian Analytics of Protest 239

modern techniques of rule. By extension, resistance, commonly seen as an assertion of

freedom, is itself bound up within networks of governmentality; and liberal democracy’s
toleration of dissent and protest within certain limits works, paradoxically, to reinforce
as well as challenge dominant power relations. As Jessica Kulynych notes, ‘yearly
Washington marches, for example, may actually diffuse discontent by providing a
legitimate outlet for protest; at the same time they verify system legitimacy by focusing
protest toward the formal legal structures of government’ (1997, p. 342; see also St John,
2008, p. 168). Thus there is no grand refusal, only dispersed and shifting points of
resistance, or forms of counter-conduct.

Counter-conducts
The mutual interdependence of power, freedom and resistance is therefore at the heart of a
governmentality approach. Yet the broader governmentality literature has made little
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contribution to the study of social movements, protests, and contentious politics. O’Malley
et al. note that such studies have been seemingly reluctant to address ‘contestations,
resistances and social antagonisms’, and that resistance only appears as a failure, or
obstacle to government (1997, p. 510; see also Barry, 2001, p. 6). Indeed in the key
governmentality texts there is very little space given to social movements, dissent and
protest (for example, Barry et al., 1996; Dean, 1999; Lemke, 2001; Miller & Rose, 2008).
Nikolas Rose is typical here, since whilst he aims to ‘strengthen the resources available to
those who, because of their constitution as subjects of government, have the right to
contest the practices that govern them in the name of their freedom’ (1999, p. 60), an
explicit focus on the ‘minor politics’ of resistance and contestation is left until his
conclusion where he discusses alternatives and resistance ‘beyond government’ (p. 281).
The work of John Barry goes much further, especially in Political Machines where the
penultimate chapter discusses ‘the materiality of political conflict’ (2001, p. 176) through
UK anti-roads protestors in the 1990s. He shows how protestors sought to politicize
ostensibly apolitical sites, through their campaigns for media visibility ‘not at the centre of
public administration but at the place where others are seeking to act or which others own
or control’ (p. 182). Through building on Barry’s work, linking it more directly to a
governmentality framework of analysis, and drawing upon the recent publication in
English of Foucault’s lecture courses, the relatively scant attention to protest and
resistance within the governmentality literature can be redressed.
In the series Security, Territory, Population, delivered at the Collège de France in 1978,
Foucault discussed how we might describe resistance to processes of governmentality, as
distinct from revolts against political sovereignty or economic exploitation. In the context
of discussing the early Christian pastorate, he observes that ‘if the objective of the pastorate
is men’s conduct, I think equally specific movements of resistance and insubordination
appeared in correlation with this that could be called specific revolts of conduct’ (2007a,
p. 194). He also discusses military desertion, Freemasonry and medical dissenters as
political rather than religious forms of counter-conduct: the appeal ‘to be led differently, by
other men, and towards other objectives than those proposed by the apparent and official
and visible governmentality of society’ (pp. 198– 200). The terminology used to describe
these forms of action is dwelt on by Foucault, and he eventually rejects terming them revolts
as too precise and too strong; moreover ‘disobedience’, ‘insubordination’, and ‘dissidence’
are also considered and rejected (p. 200). He settles on the term ‘counter-conduct’
 240 C. Death

[French: contre-conduite]; namely a ‘struggle against the processes implemented for

conducting others’ (p. 201). He later clarified that

I do not mean by that that governmentalization would be opposed by a kind of face-

off by the opposite affirmation, ‘we do not want to be governed and we do not want
to be governed at all’. I mean that, in this great preoccupation about the way to
govern and the search for the ways to govern, we identify a perpetual question which
would be: ‘how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles,
with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like
that, not for that, not by them’. (Foucault, 2007b, p. 44; emphasis in original)

This is ‘the art of not being governed quite so much’ (p. 45), or ‘the will not to be governed
thusly, like that, by these people, at this price’ (p. 75), rather than a complete or total
rejection of government. Returning to the example of counter-conducts to early forms of
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pastoral Christianity, he notes how they did not use completely foreign strategies, but
‘border-elements’ which had nevertheless been marginalized by the early Church, such as
asceticism, mysticism, the formation of closed holy communities, the return to Scripture
and eschatological beliefs (Foucault, 2007a, pp. 204 –215). These were ‘movements
whose objective is a different form of conduct, that is to say: wanting to be conducted
differently, by other conducteurs and other shepherds, towards other objectives and forms
of salvation, and through other procedures and methods’ (pp. 194– 195). Rather than, in
Rose’s terminology, looking ‘beyond government’ (1999, p. 281), a counter-conducts
approach looks within government to see how forms of resistance rely upon, and are even
implicated within, the strategies, techniques and power relationships they oppose. As
Foucault makes clear, ‘the history of the governmental ratio, and the history of the
counter-conducts opposed to it, are inseparable from each other’ (2007a, p. 357).
It is in this way that a Foucauldian perspective can usefully supplement and challenge
existing approaches to social movements and protests. A counter-conducts approach
focuses on practices and mentalities of resistance, rather than movements, and also seeks
to show how power and resistance, government and dissent, are mutually constitutive. The
form protests take are closely linked to the regimes of power against which they are
opposed – and simultaneously practices of government themselves are shaped by the
manner in which they are resisted.

An Analytics of Protest
In order to show how the idea of counter-conducts can be translated into a framework for
analysing protests, Mitchell Dean’s ‘analytics of government’ approach is drawn upon
(1999, p. 20). Dean draws attention to four dimensions of government: the fields of
visibility it creates and the ends to which it aims; the forms of knowledge it relies upon; the
particular technologies and apparatuses it mobilizes; and the subjectivities or identities it
produces. These categories can also be applied to the study of protests.
First, ‘to govern, it is necessary to render visible the space over which government is to
be exercised’, and to conceptualize the ends of government (Rose, 1999, p. 36). The same
can be said for counter-conducts, as protests make visible particular vistas or discursive
horizons and obscure others. Protest can be directed against the policies of a particular
state or organization, a social group or even an individual, or against a system or set of
 Counter-conducts: A Foucauldian Analytics of Protest 241

values – as well as being performed for the benefit of various potential audiences ranging
from the state, the media, supporters, fellow activists, the international community or even
individual consciences. Many protests are explicitly transnational, global, or what Roland
Bleiker describes as transversal, which ‘not only transgresses national boundaries, but also
questions the spatial logic through which these boundaries have come to constitute and
frame the conduct of international relations’ (2000, p. 2). The appeal of ecological
protestors to transgenerational and trans-species perspectives can be similarly read as a
disruption of conventional state-centric, humanist, temporally limited forms of politics.
Secondly, protests, just as much as regimes of government, presume or reify certain
regimes of knowledge. Analysis of these veridical discourses involves asking ‘what forms
of thought, knowledge, expertise, strategies, means of calculation, or rationality are
employed’, and which are marginalized or excluded (Dean, 1999, p. 31). Whereas the rise
of the state has been intimately associated with the development of statistics – literally the
‘science of the state’ (Foucault, 2007a, pp. 101, 274) – protestors have often invoked
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alternative, subaltern or marginalized forms of knowledge. Others, as Barry shows, have

prided themselves on the ‘scientificity’ of their claims (2001, p. 167). These forms of
rationality need to be systematically critiqued, as Foucault urges:

those who resist or rebel against a form of power cannot merely be content to
denounce violence or criticize an institution. Nor is it enough to cast the blame on
reason in general. What has to be questioned is the form of rationality at stake.
(Foucault, 2000a, p. 324)

Thirdly, protests and contentious forms of politics invoke particular practices,

techniques and technologies: the mass march, the placard, the podium speaker, the
emblazoned T-shirt, mask or costume, the barricade, and so on. Political clashes and
counter-conducts are not simply a battle of ideologies or worldviews, but involve wars of
position and movement between particular forms of action. Repertoires of protest are
clearly invented, inherited, and learnt (Tarrow, 1998, p. 21; Della Porta & Diani, 2006, pp.
181 –185), however they are also produced and shaped by the forms of government they
confront. Tax returns, registers of property, electoral rolls, and censuses are confronted by
civil disobedience campaigns, songs, street theatre and banners; and technologies such as
hospitals, schools, prisons, and social welfare schemes are mirrored and subverted by
climate camps, teach-ins, and hunger strikes. Theatrical forms of protest – the carnival
and the circus – have often been adopted by activists and the media, and contrast markedly
with the seriousness of state realpolitik (O’Neill, 2004; St John, 2008).
Finally, just as government operates through ‘technologies of the self’ (Lemke, 2001,
p. 201) to create governable subjects, such as the liberal citizen, the infirm, the delinquent,
the poor, the dangerous and the terrorist (Foucault, 1998, 2007a), counter-conducts
subvert and reinvent these categories. An analytics of protest asks: what forms of person,
self and identity are presupposed by different forms of counter-conduct, and how do
protests bring new identities and subjectivities into being? Familiar categories such as the
working class, the poor, the nation, cosmopolitan citizens, anarchist individuals and the
postmodern multitude have all been imagined and performed at least in part through
marching, dissenting, demonstrating and resisting together (Kulynych, 1997, p. 331;
Casquete, 2006) – and protests have often acted as transgressive and carnivalesque
spaces in which normal social identities and codes of conduct are inverted and subverted.
 242 C. Death

Yet protests have their own discursive norms of behaviour – of conduct – such as
humility, imagination, patriotism, ecological sustainability or revolutionary fervour, and
employ ‘techniques of responsibilization’ (Rose, 1999, p. 74) in a similar way to regimes
of advanced liberal government.

Analysing Summit Protests

This analytics of protest can be used as a framework to examine and compare moments of
contentious politics, and to show how they both resist and reinforce regimes of power and
government. Protests at major world summits are a useful illustration of an analytics of
protest in practice, since they are increasingly visible manifestations of dissent (Della
Porta et al., 2006, p. 9; St John, 2008, p. 168). They also differ from Barry’s analysis in that
they are explicitly sited at what is constructed as the heart of political power, rather than its
point of implementation, thus highlighting even more directly the relationship between
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sovereign power, governmental rationalities and resistance. This section is not intended
to be a comprehensive or comparative analysis of the summit protests – but merely to
illustrate what an analytics of protest approach might illuminate.

Fields of Visibility
International summits claim to establish a panoramic and far-reaching view of global
politics. The summit metaphor is no accident, and as Costas Constantinou explains, it

fosters conventional ways of ordering the world, celebrates hierarchy and works
to shape the global imaginary by recollecting popular stories or images of
mountaineering, of high or noble objective, or control, of progress, of fortitude, and
of human mastery. (Constantinou, 1998, p. 24)

It was claimed in Johannesburg in 2002 that United Nations (UN) conferences since Rio
had ‘defined for the world a comprehensive vision for the future of humanity’ (UN, 2002,
para. 9). In advance of the G20 meeting in London in March 2009, the British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported that

sherpas have slogged through the foothills, established base camp and marked out a
route to the mountain top. It is now down to the G20 leaders to make the final push
and, ideally, stand together in agreement on the summit. (Pym, 2009, paras. 2– 3)

Such invocations of verticality and hierarchy imply that summits offer higher
perspectives, and greater objectivity, rising above day-to-day political divisions.
In contrast, protests at summits have disrupted these assertions by revealing how
dominant discourses actually reproduce partial and inherently political fields of vision.
Thus, protests and counter-summits in Rio, Seattle, Johannesburg and elsewhere have
sought to bring ‘international summits out of the shadowy world of reserved agreements
between diplomats and technocrats and into the media spotlight’ (Della Porta et al., 2006,
p. 9). In Johannesburg in 2002, at least 20,000 protestors marched from the deprived
environs of Alexandra Township to the conference centre in the northern suburbs. The
route was chosen to highlight the appalling conditions in which many South Africans still
 Counter-conducts: A Foucauldian Analytics of Protest 243

live, and to emphasize the difference between these conditions and the wealthy environs
of Sandton where summit delegates spent most of their time. March organizers from
the Social Movements Indaba (SMI) contrasted the ‘environmental degradation, and
generalized poverty that is present-day Alexandra’ with the ‘hideous wealth and
extravagance of Sandton where the W$$D is taking place’ (SMI, 2002, para. 3). Claims by
delegates to represent the global interest were contested by protestors who argued that
the ‘fat cat bureaucrats and politicians’ in Sandton did not represent them (SMI, 2002,
para. 3). They asserted their own, more global scales of visibility, illustrating the ways in
which, as Barry argues, ‘political demonstration [is] an exercise in publicity’ (2001, p.
191). As such, the logic of attempting to hold a global summit was not contested at the
protests; rather it was the specific viewpoints promoted at the summit which were resisted.
This is typical of ways in which counter-summits ‘exploit the window of visibility
offered by summits’ (Della Porta et al., 2006, p. 147), and thus both disrupt and reinforce
diplomatic discourses of verticality and superiority of vision. Protesting at summits can
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therefore paradoxically confirm their privileged location and viewpoint: they reinforce the
impression that this is where power is located. Chatterjee and Finger identified this in their
analysis of protests against the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, arguing that protestors in Brazil
‘became caught in what could be called the “UNCED visibility trap”’, where whatever
their campaign, they all worked to ‘increase the visibility of the UNCED process’ (1994,
p. 90). This ambiguous relationship between summitry and protest, with their shared fields
of vision but contrasting perspectives, illustrates how forms of resistance and government
can be simultaneously mutually constitutive as well as antagonistic.

Regimes of Knowledge
Protests invoke particular regimes of truth and knowledge. Summit counter-conducts often
negotiate a delicate balance between challenging the basis of scientific knowledge, for
example, and using that knowledge tactically in order to force action on certain issues.
Foucault noted how ecological protestors have often been opposed

to a science or, at least, to a technology underwritten by claims to truth. But this

same ecology articulated its own discourse of truth: criticism was authorized in the
name of a knowledge of nature, the balance of life processes, and so on. Thus, one
escaped from a domination of truth not by playing a game that was totally different
from the game of truth but by playing the same game differently, or playing another
game, another hand, with other trump cards. (Foucault, 1997, p. 295)

Some summit protests aim to pressure governments to fulfil their responsibilities and
govern markets, international institutions or the environment more intensely, often
invoking scientific discourses and arguments (Keck & Sikkink, 1998, pp. 133 – 135;
O’Brien et al., 2000, pp. 41, 114). Others take to the streets rejecting proposals for legal
treaties, targets, time frames and partnerships, and resisting instrumental and technocratic
discourses in favour of more emotive or creative appeals (Munnik & Wilson, 2003;
Donson et al., 2004; O’Neill, 2004).
Climate change camps have become a familiar part of summit protests, seen in both
London and Copenhagen during 2009. Such protests frequently demand that governments
pay more attention to the warnings of climate scientists and take greater action on
 244 C. Death

regulating carbon emissions. Yet climate protestors also invoke more holistic, eco-centric
and spiritual forms of knowledge, communicated in emotive and theatrical ways (Wapner,
1995; O’Neill, 2004). Similarly, campaigns against nuclear power have simultaneously
invoked scientific knowledge and discourses, whilst contesting scientifically induced
hazards (Death, 2006). This leads to what Ulrich Beck describes as a ‘Kafkaesque
experience of protest’, akin to arm wrestling oneself (1995, p. 60). By shifting debates into
the register of aesthetic, emotive or moral truths, protestors can subvert dominant regimes
of expert knowledge; yet escaping modernist, Enlightenment discourses of knowledge and
rationality is never completely possible – nor perhaps always desirable.

Techniques and Technologies

Closely related to the regimes of knowledge invoked are the tactics and techniques adopted
during protests. Della Porta and Diani identify three logics of protest – numbers, damage
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and bearing witness (2006, pp. 171– 178) – and these provide a useful starting point for
analysing the means, techniques and techne [Greek: meaning craft] of protest. A counter-
conducts perspective emphasizes, moreover, how these techniques are related to, and
implicated in, the forms of power to which they are opposed; this is one of the key
contributions that a governmentality framework can make to the study of protest, an aspect
somewhat neglected even by Barry (2001). As Amoore and Langley point out in the course
of making a rather different argument, ‘trade unions, universities, the media, and church
organizations are all historical sites of civil society uprising, but they are simultaneously
spaces of representation, exclusion and control’ (2004, p. 105).
The mass march is an enduring technique of protest. The legitimacy, constituency and
mandate that tens or hundreds of thousands of people on the street can convey is a hotly
contested resource – such as during the Johannesburg Summit in 2002 when the official
civil society march led by the African National Congress (ANC) numbered less than
5,000, whilst the more confrontational social movements mobilized over four times as
many (Munnik & Wilson, 2003, p. 3). For a political party which still sees itself as a
grassroots, mass-mobilized organization the defeat on the streets was humiliating, and
activists claimed triumphantly that ‘on 31 August 2002 the map of the South African
political landscape was fundamentally transformed’ (Appolis, 2002, p. 7). Yet this was
less a challenge to established models of politics than a demand to be heard and included:
the logic of numbers also underpins democratic politics through elections, straw polls and
referenda, and populist parties like the ANC and their trade union allies have built their
reputations and struggles through putting bodies on the street.
Secondly, the logic of damage relies upon direct attacks on the property, symbols, or
even bodies of the protest targets. Violence can be both an end in itself (obstruction of
delegates entering the WTO meeting in Seattle, for example) and a publicity tactic which
‘attracts far more media attention than nonviolence does’ (Bleiker, 2002, p. 204). As
Bleiker points out in the context of the Seattle protests, ‘a Molotov cocktail or a street fight
between protesters and police offers far more spectacular and attractive “news” material
than does a peaceful protest march’ (p. 204), although on the other hand, this attention has
its price. Moreover, rather than transforming the nature of politics, violent counter-
conducts adopt and invoke the tactics of government. States are of course no stranger to
the logic of damage, and in such struggles the odds are stacked against protestors, not only
in terms of coercive power, but also in the way that the threat of violence and the response
 Counter-conducts: A Foucauldian Analytics of Protest 245

of state repression work to legitimate and reaffirm the raison d’etre of the Hobbesian
state. Sovereign and authoritarian forms of power have not been abandoned within
governmental rationalities of rule (Dean, 1999, pp. 134– 135), but rather inserted within
the ‘triangle’ of modern government: ‘sovereignty, discipline, and governmental
management, which has population as its main target and apparatuses of security as its
essential mechanism’ (Foucault, 2007a, pp. 107 – 108).
Thirdly, the tactic of ‘bearing witness’ is where protestors seek ‘to demonstrate a strong
commitment to an objective deemed vital for humanity’s future’ (Della Porta & Diani,
2006, p. 176). Hunger strikes, sit-ins, civil disobedience, candlelit vigils and banner-
hanging are all classic examples of bearing witness, as is the street theatre of recent
protests (Wapner, 1995). In Seattle in 1999, for example, activists dressed as turtles
roamed the crowds, trying to ensure the protests remained non-violent (Della Porta et al.,
2006, p. 2), and the media pointedly contrasted the black-suited police with the ‘mix of
Monarch butterflies, giant tomatoes, and bare-breasted women in the parades’ (O’Neill,
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2004, p. 240). As with the logics of numbers and damage however, such appeals to
morality or the public good are familiar techniques of rule for various rationalities of
government from crude populism to liberal democracy.
These logics do not exhaust the techniques of protest, but merely provide one way to
illustrate some of the specific practices involved in summit protests and the logics on
which they rest. They also show how counter-conducts both subvert and invert techniques
of government. The reappropriation of familiar tactics is a central feature of the way
counter-conducts both reinforce and destabilize prevailing practices of government.

Political Identities and Subjectivities

The tactics and techniques mobilized are not merely instrumental. Through the act of protest
and demonstrating, new identities and subjectivities are performatively constituted
(Casquete, 2006), and protest is itself a very powerful site ‘through which the self is
constructed or modified by himself’ (Foucault, quoted in Lemke, 2001, p. 204). High-profile
protests can have a foundational, constitutive importance for the mythology of movements:
as references to the Seattle movement, or the movement of 31 August in South Africa imply.
Elias Canetti famously described this, observing that the attraction of a crowd lies

in that density, where there is scarcely any space between, and body presses against
body, each man is as near the other as he is to himself; and an immense feeling of
relief ensues. It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no one is greater or
better than another, that people become a crowd. (Canetti, 1973, p. 19)

In the aftermath of Seattle, for example, enthusiastic commentators proclaimed that

‘global public opinion’ had emerged as a new superpower to rival the USA (quoted in
Hardt & Negri, 2004, p. 258). In 2002 many saw the fundamental objective of the
Johannesburg march as being to draw the political lines in South Africa more clearly, and
building ‘the “base” of a movement that could in the long term challenge the ANC at the
polls’ (Misbach, 2002). Similar claims were made in London and Copenhagen in 2009.
Yet, as Canetti observed, this moment is transitory and rarely lasts. Often the political
subjectivities performed through protests are exaggerated or momentary. This is not to
claim, however, that they are unimportant or insignificant.
 246 C. Death

Moreover, for the duration of the summit identities can be starkly polarized and often
confrontational. In 2002 radical protestors accused the South African state of being ‘the
local and continental agent of imperialism’ (Appolis, 2002, p. 10), and there were calls
to shut down the Summit, blockade motorways and ‘take Sandton’ (Misbach, 2002).
Authoritarian state policing of summits exacerbates this antagonism, and ANC policing
tactics in 2002 reminded many of the Apartheid era repression (Duguid, 2002), whilst the
apparent brutality of the police – resulting in the death of an innocent bystander – during
the 2009 G20 Summit in London was widely criticized (Monbiot, 2009), as was the Danish
policing of Copenhagen (BBC, 2009). The vigorous assertion of sovereign power has been
a general feature of summit policing, where ‘the risk of real threats to the lives of foreign
governors is combined with the symbolic need for the host government to appear, in the
eyes of international public opinion, to be able to assert the monopoly of force in its own
territory as corollary to its own sovereignty’ (Della Porta et al., 2006, p. 138). This has led
to an increased police and military presence at protests, the use of kettling tactics, water
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cannons, tear gas, baton charges and rubber bullets. Della Porta et al. note that

the fortification of the summit sites produces effects that tend to be dangerous;
concentrating police efforts of defending it greatly restricts the kinds of protest that
can be peaceful but visible and increases the distance between the rulers and the
population. (Della Porta et al., 2006, p. 167)

Protestors have adroitly manipulated such polarization – and actively invoked outlaw or
folk hero stereotypes – as in the Prague protests against the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and World Bank in 2001. Donson et al. show how ‘the confrontation between the
white overalls of Ya Basta! and the black riot uniforms of the police conjured up the
classic binary opposition of black/white that has symbolically denoted good and evil’
(2004, p. 22). Movement identities and solidarities are forged even, or perhaps especially,
through violent confrontations (Casquete, 2006).
The constitutive effects of protests are not merely confined to social movements; protests
are also formative moments for state institutions (St John, 2008, p. 183). O’Neill draws
attention to how ‘countries are increasingly attempting to coordinate strategies and share
information about transnational activists’, and this has led to ‘increased interstate cooperation
around public order practices and surveillance and monitoring between protests’ (2004,
p. 245). During the G20 protests in London, the Metropolitan police described their policing
plan as ‘one of the largest, most challenging and complicated public order operations it has
ever devised’, involving 84,000 police man-hours, the cooperation of six police forces, and a
£7.5m security plan (Casciani, 2009, paragraph 4). Boyle and Haggerty argue that this sort of
summit policing works to ‘foster the production and circulation of sophisticated and
specialized security knowledges’ (2009, p. 267), and that ‘proliferating security routines
characteristic of mega-events fosters a security-infused pedagogy of acceptable comport-
ment, dress and documentation, as small lessons in security are inflated and played out before
a global audience’ (p. 270). The vital importance of urban architectures to both police and
protestors in the government and contestation of summitry is one way of bringing the
neglected dimensions of territoriality and spatiality back into the governmentality literature
(Elden, 2007, p. 32).
These highly contested summit protests have tended to both reinforce coercive state
practices, as well as forging transnational and public-private linkages. Rather than social
 Counter-conducts: A Foucauldian Analytics of Protest 247

movement activism eroding the power of the state (Taylor, 1995, p. 1; Keck & Sikkink,
1998, p. 36), states are instead being reshaped through the policing of global summit
protests. Protests therefore have the effect of reifying both states and their critics in the
polarized atmosphere of the summit.
As Canetti implied however, this apparently stark clash between states and protestors at
the summit is not as profound, or as long-lasting, as it appears at the time. The temporary
clash between policeman and protestor does not exhaust the complex and polycentric ways
in which rule is exercised in contemporary global politics. Many of those who marched in
Johannesburg in 2002, for example, had their roots in organizations linked or allied to the
ANC (Bond & Desai, 2008). Many of those protesting in Denmark in 2009 would have
been negotiating or lobbying inside had the capacity of the venue been greater (BBC,
2009). Rather than a binary conflict between North and South, or the governed against the
governors, many of those who participate within, and protest against, global summits are
bound together in rhizome networks of global governmentality.
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If this is the case, and protests/counter-conducts do not represent the drawing up of

new lines of conflict between the governed and the governors, then what is their functional
role in contemporary politics? A provocative answer is provided by Ingolfur Blühdorn,
who suggests that protest events at summits post-Seattle fulfil an essentially expressive
function, and that

the significance of social movement politics lies not so much in the demonstration of
protest and opposition for the purpose of political change, but in the demonstration,
performance and experience of something that is desperately needed in the late-
modern condition but that has no place in the established socio-economic system:
autonomy, identity, and agency. (Blühdorn, 2006, p. 36)

Whereas, he clarifies, it would be demonstrably false to claim that protestors aim to

stabilize the status quo, he does suggest that ‘social movements do indeed have a system-
stabilizing effect in that they reassert the autonomy and agency of the Self vis-à-vis the
system’ (p. 37). Such an assessment echoes at least part of my argument: which is that
such acts of protest can both challenge and reinforce hegemonic power relations, at
the same time. Indeed, it is in the very appearance of challenging power relations,
of claiming agency and demonstrating – literally to demonstrate, to make evident
(Barry, 2001, p. 178) – that such protests can provide reassurance, a semblance of
control and agency, and thereby re-legitimize established (often liberal democratic) forms
of politics.

An Ethics of Continual Criticism

The analytics of protest set out here has been focused on mapping the relationship between
rationalities of protest, and mentalities of government. Rather than assuming protests
represent out-and-out resistance to power, a counter-conducts approach shows how they
bring new visibilities, knowledges, techniques and identities into being, whilst reinforcing
existing practices and mentalities of government. As such this approach aims to analyse,
diagnose and critique rationalities and practices of protest, and it is not primarily
normative or prescriptive, in terms of advocating specific forms of dissent. Yet it might be
read as being somewhat negative or pessimistic about the point or function of protest.
 248 C. Death

This is not my aim, and this final section locates the analytics of protest in terms of an
ethos of continual criticism and politicization (Foucault, 2000b, p. 457).
Foucault believed that ‘the work of a deep transformation can be done in the open and
always turbulent atmosphere of a continual criticism’ (2000b, p. 457). For Dean, ‘an
analytics of government attempts to show that our taken-for-granted ways of doing things
and how we think about and question them are not entirely self-evident or necessary’
(1999, p. 21). This stance is directly applicable to an analytics of protest, which tasks itself
with ‘making conflicts more visible, or making them more essential than mere clashes of
interest or mere institutional blockages’ (Foucault, 2000b, p. 457), and emphasizing the
conflictual and contestable dimensions of modern government.
Protests, or counter-conducts, are themselves forms of continual criticism and
politicization. Although they may never represent ‘pure’ resistance, they are still
important for a vibrant and radical democratic politics. Indeed, hoping or searching for an
impossibly pure resistance is probably more politically debilitating than Foucault’s hyper
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and pessimistic activism. Counter-conducts are political acts, in that for Foucault, ‘politics
is no more or less than that which is born with resistance to governmentality, the first
uprising, the first confrontation’ (2007a, p. 390). For Barry, ‘an action is political . . . to the
degree to which it opens up new sites and objects of contestation. And it is anti-political to
the extent that is closes down the space of contestation’ (2001, p. 194, emphasis in
original). Therefore, drawing attention to relations of power and resistance, as well as
relations of government and counter-conduct, is itself inherently political and part of ‘an
ethic of permanent resistance’ (Simons, 1995, p. 87).
Such an attitude is not sufficient for a comprehensive analysis of social movements,
nor does it provide a prescription for a radically democratic or progressive politics.
Approaches which analyse the motivations, successes, linkages and mobilizations of
specific movements are of great value; just as are considerations of the democratic norms
of deliberation, compromise and consensus. However, an ethic of permanent resistance
and continual criticism, and an orientation to the destabilizing and creative potential of
counter-conducts is, I argue, a necessary and currently underemphasized dimension of
both social movement studies and radically democratic politics.

Conclusion
A counter-conducts approach has much to offer the study of protest and resistance. It is not
an attempt to undermine the actual struggles of activists and movements, nor is it a
rejection of political engagement and struggle. In fact, it aims at the opposite: the
introduction of a serious focus upon dissent and protest into the governmentality literature.
Theorists of governmentality have argued that

the political vocabulary structured by oppositions between state and civil society,
public and private, government and market, coercion and consent, sovereignty
and autonomy, and the like, does not adequately characterize the diverse
ways in which rule is exercised in advanced liberal democracies. (Miller & Rose,
2008, p. 53)

It is through pursuing the implications of the Foucauldian destabilizing of these

oppositions, that an analytics of protest can be most useful.
 Counter-conducts: A Foucauldian Analytics of Protest 249

I have argued that Foucault’s conceptualization of resistance as an integral and

inseparable element of modern regimes of power and government, and his description of
counter-conducts as ‘the will not to be governed thusly, like that, by these people, at this
price’ (Foucault, 2007b, p. 75), enables a new orientation in the study of social
movements, dissent and protest. An analytics of protest, focusing on the visibilities
established, knowledges invoked, techniques adopted and identities produced, provides
new theoretical tools for analysing protests and their relationship to global power relations
and governmentalities. The major advantages of such an approach are twofold. By
focusing on practices and mentalities, rather than actors, it shows how moments of protest
bring new identities, subjectivities and collectivities into being – including civic,
movement, state and governmental actors. Secondly, by destabilizing binaries including
power and resistance, government and freedom, national and international, and public
and private, such an approach enables a more complex and nuanced analysis of the
overlapping, multi-centric, variegated and rhizomatic networks of global power relations.
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Such an approach can reveal much about, for example, the ways in which summit protests
such as in Seattle, Johannesburg, Prague, London and Copenhagen both subvert and
simultaneously reinforce structures of global governance. Conceiving protest in these
terms militates against searching for a pure form of revolutionary resistance, or outright
condemnation of the apparent collaborator. As Foucault made clear,

we need to escape the dilemma of being either for or against. One can, after all, be
face to face, and upright [debout et en face]. Working with a government doesn’t
imply either a subjection or a blanket acceptance. One can work with and be
intransigent at the same time. I would even say that the two things go together.
(Foucault, 2000b, pp. 455 –456)

A critically important task is therefore to interrogate the degree to which acts of resistance
destabilize or reinforce existing power relations, and ultimately ‘to enhance the
contestability of regimes of authority that seek to govern us in the name of our own good’
(Rose, 1999, p. 60).

Acknowledgements
The support of the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) [award PTA031200400008] and Dublin City
University’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Research Travel Programme for this research is
acknowledged, as is the guidance and insight of Rita Abrahamsen, two anonymous referees and feedback from the
2009 ECPR Joint Sessions workshop on Civil Society, Democracy and Global Governance, and the 2010
Aberystwyth Cultural and Critical Politics Research Group.

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Carl Death lectures in environmental politics, sustainable development and African

politics at Aberystwyth University.