Dialectical Resistance: Violently Producing Change

I focus on Mandela's autobiography Long Walk to Freedom (Reference Mandela2013) and speeches and writings published in The Struggle Is My Life (Reference Mandela1990) to identify his position regarding resistance and violence. My engagement with his writing is not intended to be an exegesis of his complete views over the years. I take Mandela as he, consistently throughout these texts, represents his views, specifically those that are relevant to the conversation I am setting up.Footnote ⁹

The objective of realizing a state where racial oppression will have ended and where white supremacy will have been overthrown guides Mandela's resistance and activism. To achieve this end, Mandela maintains that the means must be adapted to the circumstances and be assessed considering their efficiency. His writing reveals that he was both contextualist and pragmatist regarding the appropriate means to adopt to pursue freedom.

He was contextualist to the extent that he considered the circumstances in which oppression takes place to be determinative in deciding the appropriate means to resist.Footnote ¹⁰ Activists and freedom fighters must consider the nature of the state, political order, or system in which they find themselves to determine the right course of action. In explaining his progressive turn to violent struggle, Mandela often refers to the nature of the apartheid regime and how its violence rendered nonviolent resistance contextually inappropriate:

In his opinion, the violence of the state and its commitment to respond with violence to peaceful protest left the oppressed no choice but to respond in kind. This can also be seen in his comparison of the South African freedom movement and the civil rights movement in the United States:

Beyond the institutional context, he argues that the actions of other political actors must be considered to determine the appropriate form of resistance. In the face of increasing unorganized political violence, Mandela argued that it would be desirable and prudent for the African National Congress (ANC) to harness, organize and direct this violence: “I mentioned again that people on their own had taken up arms. Violence would begin whether we initiated it or not. Would it not be better to guide this violence ourselves, according to principles where we saved lived by attacking symbols of oppression, and not people?” (Reference Kelley2013: 322; Reference Mandela1990: 162).

Second, Mandela was a pragmatist regarding the means of resistance. The efficacy of a mode of resistance, given a specific context, mattered (Reference Mandela1990: 69–70). Yet he did not regard all means to be equivalent or see no issue with violence. For one thing, his move to violence was progressive. It became necessary because other means had been ineffective at bringing change: “In the end, we had no alternative to armed and violent resistance. Over and over again, we had used all the non-violent weapons in our arsenal—speeches, deputations, threats, marches, strikes, stay-aways, voluntary imprisonment—all to no avail, for whatever we did was met by an iron hand” (Reference Kelley2013: 194); and: “I countered by saying that in fact non-violence had failed us, for it had done nothing to stem the violence of the state or change the heart of our oppressors” (Reference Kelley2013: 323). Thus, Mandela does not maintain a principled commitment to violence or to nonviolence; political means should be assessed in light of their efficacy. As Mandela writes: “For me, non-violence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon” (Reference Kelley2013: 183). It would even be “wrong and immoral to subject our people to armed attacks by the state without offering them some kind of alternative” (Reference Kelley2013: 322). Ultimately, although nonviolence could be useful, desirable and praiseworthy in some contexts, for Mandela, it was “a tactic that should be abandoned when it no longer worked” (Reference Kelley2013: 322; Reference Mandela1990: 166).

Mandela's concern for the context of oppression and for the efficacy of means of resistance points toward what I call a dialectical view of resistance. Following this view, resistant political agency is conceived as oppositional and as seeking change through contradictory forces and actions. I believe this to be at the core of his understanding of the relationship between oppression and resistance, and it is a position he consistently refers to throughout Long Walk to Freedom and The Struggle Is My Life. For Mandela, how the oppressed should resist is dictated by the nature of oppression and by the actions of the oppressor. As he explains: “A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a certain point, one can only fight fire with fire” (Reference Kelley2013: 194); and elsewhere:

This position is dialectical in the sense that it is not merely the contextual efficacy of the means of resistance that must be considered. One must consider, and oppose, the agency of the oppressor. It is correct to affirm that the oppressed should resist in ways that are efficient to terminate oppression; but what is efficient to terminate oppression is greatly determined by how the oppressor acts. In significant ways, the agency of the oppressed is then directed, in response and in opposition to that of the oppressor. This does not mean that the oppressed are merely reacting; it rather means that liberation requires addressing the oppressor, and it is the oppressor that sets the terms of the address. This is why, when Mandela was asked to renounce violence before being liberated from prison, his response was: “If I emerged from prison into the same circumstances under which I was arrested, I would be forced to resume the same activities for which I was arrested” (Reference Kelley2013: 621). The oppressed cannot simply change their mode of resistance if the oppressor does not change first; the oppressed should not turn to nonviolence unless the oppressor has already turned to nonviolence.

For Mandela, the choice between violent and nonviolent resistance is dictated by the oppressor. In the case of South Africa, Mandela held that it was the violent and authoritarian nature of the apartheid regime that dictated the need for violent resistance: “I was candid and explained why I believed we had no choice but to turn to violence. I used an old African expression: ‘Sebatana ha se bokwe ka diatla’ (‘The attacks of the wild beast cannot be averted with only bare hands’)” (Reference Kelley2013: 321; Reference Mandela1990: 123). In a different context, nonviolence might have been appropriate.

Mandela was conscious of the associated risks of violent struggle. Resistance is not about destroying the oppressor, but about bringing about the end of oppression. Violence, as a means, can be used for both purposes, and the line between seeking to destroy and seeking to change needs to be treaded carefully. Furthermore, there is an inherent risk in resorting to violent resistance in that it can create resentment, harden the oppressor and lead to a cycle of vengeance and retaliation that is far from conducive to a lasting peace. In Mandela's views, violence is a means on the long walk to freedom, but it cannot by itself lead to it. This requires a transformation of the relationship with the oppressor: “Violence could never be the ultimate solution to the situation in South Africa. . . . Men and women by their very nature required some kind of negotiated understanding” (Reference Kelley2013: 630). As such, one should use violence in ways that do not make it impossible to transform the relationship with the oppressor.Footnote ¹¹ This is why, for instance, when Mandela is reflecting on the precise modes of violent resistance that should be adopted, he writes: “Because it [sabotage] did not involve loss of life, it offered the best hope for reconciliation among the races afterwards. We did not want to start a blood-feud between white and black. . . . What would race relations be like between white and black if we provoked a civil war?” (Reference Kelley2013: 336; Reference Mandela1990: 167). Although he was prepared to turn to guerrilla warfare, terrorism and revolution (Reference Kelley2013: 336; 1990: 167), these were not his first choices, since they were not conducive to a negotiated peace. Yet these more extreme forms of violent resistance remained distinct possibilities whose propriety depended on the actions of the oppressor.

Furthermore, violence, in his view, had the potential to change the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed not only by forcing the oppressor to reconsider their actions but by requiring them to engage with the oppressed to put an end to violence. This position can be seen in his claim that “to make peace with an enemy, one must work with that enemy, and that enemy becomes your partner” (Reference Kelley2013: 734–35). We can interpret this claim as affirming that violence opens the possibility of the oppressor and the oppressed engaging as free agents in determining how they can move to peaceful interactions. This is because achieving peace requires that all parties come to a common understanding and agree to cease violence, such that the action of negotiating peace is itself the recognition that the other cannot be fully controlled and pushed about by mere force. To make peace and end violence, the other must be acknowledged, to some extent, as free and independent from your power. In a context like that of apartheid or settler colonialism, such a process of negotiating peace is transformative because it turns opponents into participants in a joint endeavour, that of making peace, and thus transcends the oppressor/oppressed dichotomies (Ndlovu-Gatshen, Reference Ndlovu-Gatshen, Obadare and Adebanwi2016: 33).Footnote ¹² In the end, this also shows that Mandela's turn to violence was not merely about replacing who was in power while retaining the old structures of domination; it was also informed by a theory of change where the “future reconciliation of races was envisioned from the beginning” and which targeted “symbols of white supremacy and racist oppression” (Ndlovu-Gatshen, Reference Ndlovu-Gatshen, Obadare and Adebanwi2016: 38).

In sum, Mandela gives a central role to the context of oppression and to the efficacy of means of resistance. He holds a dialectical view of resistance where the oppressor dictates the terms of resistance and where the agency of the oppressed must be directed in response to that of the oppressor. Despite supporting violence as an appropriate means of resistance, Mandela holds that a negotiated, transformative peace is the ultimate aim. Considering this objective, he sees violence as an appropriate means of resistance, since it opens the possibility for the oppressed to become free partners in the process of peacemaking and to transcend the colonial oppressed/oppressor dichotomy.

Civic Citizenship: Nonviolently Changing the Rules of the Game

While change can indeed be pursued by responding to oppression and domination through direct oppositional confrontation, Tully offers a theoretical outlook on political agency that enables us to appreciate forms of resistance that do not directly respond to the oppressor and to situate Mandela's—and, as we will see later, Indigenous theorists’ disjunctive views—on a spectrum. To understand Tully's views about resistance and violence, I first turn to his account of civic citizenship before engaging with how this manifests in his engagement with Indigenous resistance to colonialism.

For Tully (Reference Tully and Tully2014a), civic citizenship centres the agency, as opposed to the belonging, of political actors. It relies on his view of freedom as an activity—where to be free is to enact freedom (Tully, Reference Tully1999)—to conceptualize citizenship as the mode of governance in which political actors exercise control over the terms of their governance. Specifically, civic citizenship should be understood as a practice organized around the logic of negotiating terms of governance and bringing them under the shared control of those subject to them. This can be achieved in diverse ways, from formal political participation to extra-institutional political mobilizations. This logic thus informs the behaviour and virtues that political actors should exemplify, within any governance relationship, to enact citizenship.

While civic citizenship is not a categorical imperative—such that freedom may be pursued in other ways—it nevertheless articulates for Tully a normatively attractive mode of governance. Thus, following the logic of civic governance, we can also understand limitations placed on the diverse actions that actors may engage in to bring terms of governance under their shared control. As Tully explains, civic citizens should not engage in violent struggle to the extent that violence is inconsistent with the logic of civic governance:

Civic governance forsakes command and compliance as the primary mode of interaction between political actors. It seeks instead to create a civic world where power is exercised together, without unilateral impositions. Any practice of governance that seeks to rely on coercion, command and compliance, instead of collective engagements, is inconsistent with civic governance. As Tully writes:

In sum, civic citizenship is a practice governed by the logic of bringing terms of governance under the shared control of those subject to them in diverse ways, to the extent that these ways are consistent with the logic of “power-with.” On this view, coercive violence is essentially uncivic.

Tully notes that civic governance requires both the governed and the governors to act in ways consistent with the logic of this mode of governance. Yet this is not always the case (Tully, Reference Tully and Tully2014a: 50–51). For instance, governors may behave as “unaccountable ‘tyrants’” (51) when they do not respect the civic agency of those they govern. In those circumstances, the governed may seek to resist and change the relationship of governance—to “civicize” it by bringing it under their joint control. I explore what theory of change this offers by turning to Tully's engagement with Indigenous resistance to colonialism.Footnote ¹³

In his work on the struggle of Indigenous peoples against internal colonialism—that is, settler colonial contexts where Indigenous peoples and colonizers are considered part of the same state—Tully (Reference Tully2008) highlights the importance of paying close attention to the nature of oppression in order to adequately understand the agency of any resisting actors and how they seek to bring terms of governance under their control. As he explains, internal colonialism orients the relationship between the settler states and Indigenous peoples toward “the appropriation of the land, resources and jurisdiction of the Indigenous peoples, not only for the sake of resettlement and exploitation . . . but for the territorial foundation of the dominant society itself” (Reference Tully2008: 262). This internal structure of domination dictates various strategies and techniques of governance, including extinguishment and assimilation, that “make up the dominant side of the complex agonistic relation of colonial governance vis-à-vis Indigenous resistance” (264). What is being resisted is then a broad structure of domination, of which governance is part, and its manifestations.

In resisting wished-for elimination, Tully argues that Indigenous resistance takes the form of struggles for freedom and of freedom. It is for freedom when Indigenous peoples struggle to maintain their status as distinct self-determining peoples. It is of freedom when their struggle already expresses their freedom to negotiate and appropriate terms of governance, notably when it manifests itself in “quotidian acts of protecting, recovering, gathering together, keeping, revitalising, teaching and adapting entire forms of Indigenous life that were nearly destroyed” (Reference Tully2008: 288). The first focuses on the pursuit of a status denied by a structure of domination through a civic renegotiation and contestation of the terms of governance. While not necessarily oppositional, change is still pursued in a dialectical manner, in that political actions are directed toward the modification of the rules of the political gameFootnote ¹⁴ in order to synthesize conflicting modes of governance. The second points to what I later refer to as a disjunctive mode of resistance, in that it recognizes a multiplicity of acts that are not always oriented in obvious and direct ways toward modifying the behaviour of the oppressor but that nevertheless transgress and disrupt the logic constitutive of the structure of domination being resisted—extinguishment, in this case.

In both cases, however, the focus is placed on the freedom of political actors to resist and on the ways in which their civic freedom will bring about change by requiring the oppressor to act differently. As Tully writes: “It is a system established and continually modified in response to their two distinct types of arts of resistance and freedom: against the structure of domination as a whole, in the name of the freedom of self-determination, and within it, by compliance and internal contestation of the strategies and techniques, in the name of the freedom of insubordination and dissent” (Reference Tully2008: 264–65, italics added). In other words, it is political actors who, by their diverse acts of resistance for and of freedom, force the oppressor to respond and to seek to reassert the broader structure of domination. On Tully's account, it is the civic citizen who ultimately leads, since domineering governors “cannot completely eliminate the interactive and open-ended freedom of and in the relationship or the room to appear to conform to the public script while thinking and acting otherwise, without reducing the relationship to one of complete immobilization” (Reference Tully and Tully2014a: 46–47, italics in original). In leading, citizens should preferably act in ways that are consistent with civic citizenship. That is, they should seek to modify the relationship through agonic struggles that fall short of violence. This is required for them to play the game of civic citizenship; if they resort to violence, they are seeking to command and coerce their opponents and no longer engaged in seeking to realize “power-with.”

Unlike Mandela, Tully is not especially concerned with pragmatic or contextualist considerations. He rather focuses on the modality of political actions—civic citizenship—and its potential to change the relationship with governors and bring about a different world. For him, civic citizens should act in ways that already enact the relationship they seek to realize: if we seek to change a command/compliance relationship, we should adopt means that do not reproduce what we seek to eliminate. The means must prefigure the end, and therefore civic citizens should be strongly committed to nonviolence:

While this view is not strictly dialectical, in that it does not proceed through contradictory opposition, it nevertheless still focuses on acting in ways that can change the other side to achieve a synthetic mode of governance: by thinking and acting differently here and now, we can bring about a world where power-with will be realized. As such, nonviolent resistance still depends on the relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor, but who leads the relationship has changed.

In sum, the relationship that Tully sees between resistance and violence is governed by his view that “freedom is the practice of freedom” (Tully, Reference Tully1999: 162). As such, the focus of his approach is on the active agency of political actors in relationships of governance. Yet he is aware that structures, such as white supremacy and settler colonialism, configure relationships of governance and thus that changing these relationships can be pursued through the fundamental freedom of political actors to negotiate terms of governance. Political actors are thus able to lead and force the oppressor to modify their game.

Indigenous Resurgence: Enacting a Different World

While these theories of change capture aspects of Indigenous resistance, I suggest that the last decade or so of Indigenous resistance, and various movements of revitalization currently animating Indigenous peoples in Canada, disclose a mode of resistance that is not first directed toward changing the relationship with settlers. It rather seeks to enact an alternative that defies the settler colonial present (Veracini, Reference Veracini2015) and prefigures the conditions of a decolonized future.Footnote ¹⁵ As Michael Elliott explains: “Spaces of resurgence are structured not on but for the principle of reciprocity. They presuppose Indigenous centricity and authority, and in doing so figure settlers as guests: if they are to remain welcome, settlers are under requirement to adapt their behaviour to meet with conditions of hospitality that they have no say in determining” (Reference Asch, Borrows and Tully2018: 73). I refer to this mode of resistance as disjunctive since it is about enacting a transformative alternative rather than confronting the dominant terms of interactions between Indigenous peoples and settlers.

I refer to various Indigenous activists and scholars united by a commitment to a turn away from the state and to resurgence but who do not form a united or univocal movement as Indigenous theorists of resurgence (ITR). I identify broadly shared views while being conscious that the position I expound is not beyond disagreement. Further, I make no claim to represent the full array of Indigenous resistance movements and theories—others may focus more on reconciliation (Asch et al., Reference Asch, Borrows and Tully2018). My focus is dictated by the contrast their discourse offers in comparison with the previous discourses and by the relevance of this discourse to account for the nonviolence of diverse Indigenous movements of resistance. ITR offer a distinct view of resistance that decentres the dialectical logic present in Mandela and that radicalizes the struggle of freedom discussed by Tully.

As with Tully, ITR highlight the structural context that gives rise to Indigenous resistance. This structural context is settler colonialism, such that Indigenous resistance can be understood as resistance to erasure and dispossession, both of “lands and self-determining authority” (Coulthard, Reference Coulthard2014: 6–7). ITR thus articulate resistance as a reaffirmation of Indigenous existence as Indigenous peoples on Indigenous terms through, notably, distinct relationship to lands and through distinct entitlement to sui generis governance. This is called resurgence, and though it is not confrontational or oppositional, it remains a form of resistance, since it transgresses and disrupts settler colonialism with the ultimate aim of transcending it.

Nick Estes explains the logic of this resistance:

The essence of this position is that resisting settler colonialism primarily and principally requires a “decentering of the state and other colonial entities by consciously re-centering Indigenous nationhood and land-based governance” (Corntassel, Reference Corntassel2021: 75). Put differently, the “refusal” of the settler order is “generative” (Simpson, Reference Simpson2017: 35; Reference Simpson2021: 10–11): it centres, revitalizes and renews Indigenous ways of being, doing and knowing, on an individual and collective basis and contributes to “reconnecting with homelands, cultures, and communities” (Corntassel, Reference Corntassel2012: 97). Through resurgence, the settler state will be displaced and hopefully no longer play the role of defining and recognizing Indigenous rights, status, responsibilities and identities. This means that Indigenous political actors resist settler colonialism by turning away from the state (Coulthard, Reference Coulthard2014: 48) and from the settlers as a determinative factor of their political status and identity.

As a mode of resistance, resurgence is then not foremost directed to the oppressor or even concerned with acting to change the oppressor. It primarily transgresses the eliminatory logic of settler colonialism through work on the individual and collective selfFootnote ¹⁶ that leads to transformation in the community (Alfred and Corntassel, Reference Alfred and Corntassel2005: 612). As such, it “explicitly eschews the instrumental rationality central to the liberal politics of recognition”—and, I would add, the instrumental rationality concerned with efficiently pursuing change in the governor; it “instead demands that we enact or practice our political commitments to Indigenous national and women's liberation in the cultural form and content of our struggle itself” (Coulthard, Reference Coulthard2014: 159, italics in original).

This turn away is not, as Elliott explains, “the permanent or absolute cessation of discursive engagement with settler society” (2018: 62). As he describes it, resurgence has a secondary dimension that seeks to rearticulate the relationship between Indigenous peoples and settlers; otherwise it would be hard to see it as transformative. Drawing on Alfred, he explains that resurgence pursues such change by “showing alternatives to settler society, provoking reflection and motivating creative confrontation with existing social realities and dominant normativities” (italics in original). As such, Indigenous resurgence only provides “indirect” “guidance” for change (Elliott, Reference Elliott2018: 73). Despite this secondary dimension, Indigenous resurgence is still not fundamentally oppositional or directed to the oppressor. It rather remains a form of resistance that is transgressive, disruptive and disjunctive: it emphasizes the need to refuse the “death dance with the colonizer” (Simpson, Reference Simpson and Simpson2008: 16; Reference Simpson2017: 101, 115) and to transcend the existing order by bringing about the world it envisions, without reference to negotiating with the oppressor or wrestling with them for the order to come.

Similar to the way that Tully sees nonviolent resistance as the present actualization of a different future, Indigenous resurgence sees in the turn to Indigenous lifeways a manner of bringing into existence a desired renewed political world through prefigurative practices: “Such practices constitute the ends they seek to bring about; they bring into effect the decolonial forms of life sought in the process of decolonization itself by enacting them” (Aguirre, Reference Aguirre and Coburn2015: 197). This mode of resistance seeks to sidestep the oppressor and to transcend the embedding structure of oppression by reducing the oppressor to insignificance in the life of Indigenous peoples. Resisting colonialism, in this view, is disjunctive because it consists in acting in ways that displace the oppressor from the determinative position in the dialectic of resistance. As Adam Dahl explains, refusal “destabilizes the very ground of sovereign legitimacy claimed by the settler state” (Reference Dahl2018: 160). Indeed, the Indigenous resistance literature brings to light how structures of oppression may set up a dialectic between the oppressor and the oppressed but that political actors retain their agency to act differently to (1) refuse this dialectic and transcend it in (2) prefiguring a different world where their actions are neither determined nor oriented to the oppressor. This discloses that resistance can be disjunctive, as opposed to dialectical, when political actors seek to not only rearticulate the terms of governance but also terminate and refuse the oppositional relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed by centring prefigurative practices.

Consequently, violence does not predominantly figure as a strategy in the theories of change of the authors associated with this discourse.Footnote ¹⁷ This is because their focus is not on the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed but on Indigenous political actors and the work they must do on themselves to disempower and dissolve oppression. Although the resistance of the oppressed consists in a refusal of the oppressor and of the system of oppression with which the oppressor is associated, the actions and responses of the oppressor are not what first concern those who resist. As Leanne Simpson puts it: “There is no demand upon the state or its citizens other than to get out of the way and respect Indigenous self-determination and nationhood” (Reference Fitzgerald and Schwartz2017: 237). In sum, since resistance is not dialectical, the effectiveness of violent actions directed to the oppressor as a means for bringing about change is beside the point.

Yet as Corntassel (Reference Corntassel2021: 75, 80) explains, resurgence does not entail a “complete disengagement” or denial of the need to act “in contention with settler colonialism.” Turning away from the state does not mean that actions may never be oriented toward the oppressor or that violence may not be resorted to; but if they are, they should be grounded on and expressing Indigenous lifeways. For this to be the case, resurgence has a kind of lexical priority in that it is the first and essential step that needs to ground any further oppositional contention. As Alfred explains, the struggle will lead nowhere if it is not grounded in Indigenous lifeways: “We must do it our way, or risk being transformed by the fight into that (and those) which we are struggling against” (Reference Alfred2005: 131, italics in original). Hence, even oppositional and confrontational manifestations of Indigenous resistance should not be read as necessarily engaging Indigenous peoples in a dialectic with the oppressor; they may themselves be setting and reasserting the Indigenous terms of the debate. As Estes explains regarding the resistance at Standing Rock: “For the Oceti Sakowin, the affirmation Mni Wiconi, ‘water is life,’ related to Wotakuye, or ‘being good relative.’ Indigenous resistance to the trespass of settlers, pipelines, and dams is part of being a good relative to the water, land, and animals, not to mention the human world” (Reference Estes2019: 21). On this view, then, Indigenous blockades and active resistance to occupation of their lands do not emerge “in the space between subsistence and proletarianization,” as if Indigenous political actors were resisting to address the oppressor to get, for instance, more equitable distribution of resources or access to land, “but from the social and legal orders maintained through Indigenous peoples’ connection to the land and to their cultures” (Pasternak, Reference Pasternak2017: 76). In other words, such acts of resistance are generative refusals (Simpson, Reference Simpson2017). They refuse the terms of the confrontation set by settlers and affirm a distinct Indigenous world that does not need the settlers as referent or to validate the contention: “Through these actions we physically say ‘no’ to the degradation of our communities and to exploitation of the lands upon which we depend. But they also have ingrained within in them a resounding ‘yes’: that are the affirmative enactment of another modality of being, a different way of relating to and with the world” (Coulthard, Reference Coulthard2014: 169, italics in original). Again, this form of resistance is disjunctive rather than dialectical: it flips the debate in an entirely distinct register and reveals the fundamental antinomies present in the confrontation.

ITR add a disjunctive perspective regarding the relationship between resistance and violence to the dialectical ones identified earlier. They illustrate how resistance can be carried out by flipping the terms of the confrontation and disengaging from the oppressor. As such, the means of resistance are not those that force a change in the oppressor or seek to synthetize contradictions in the relationship but those that transform the oppressed, transgress the relationship of governance and transcend the broader structure of oppression.