For scholars with an abiding interest in the subject of resistance – its enactment, forms, promises, even dystopias – recent global events could not have occurred at a more opportune moment. Across North Africa and the entire ‘Muslim World’, concerted popular action culminated in the unexpected demise of entrenched dictatorships. In the United States, the Occupy Wall Street movement both epitomised and canalised wide-spread antipathy toward not just the country's ‘one percent’, but more significantly the global financial system. Outside the country, ‘Occupy’, proved a timely banner for those seeking to redress a wide array of local injustices. In Nigeria, to take just one African example, the unlikely coalition of civil society organisations, politicians, professional and interest associations, and student and human rights groups which stormed the streets in January 2012 to protest a sudden hike in the pump price of petroleum christened itself ‘Occupy Nigeria’, (Obadare and Adebanwi 2013).

That these are instances of resistance is beyond any serious disputation. Less obvious are what kinds of resistance they are, and the specific lessons to be drawn from them, not only about resistance qua resistance, but also about politics and political action, oppositional politics, popular empowerment, civic agency, citizenship, subjectivity, and the state.