Resistance and the International: The Challenge of the Everyday

The tryptic constituted by resistance, the everyday and the international does not readily fit the idealized images of the international: the realm of exceptional events conducted by states and statesmen, or their proxies (see Crane-Seeber in this forum). The international, as commonly conceptualized, was, and largely remains, not too distant from the ludic images conveyed by popular board games such as Risk or Diplomacy (see Salter in this forum). Yet, this tryptic has been at the center of a major shift in how some within the field of international studies have come to think about the international beyond reified delimitations such as inside/outside, low politics/high politics, unremarkable/remarkable, and the like. Yet, by looking at how the everyday works as a context of mobilization and as a locus of revendication and contestation in globalized domestic discursive or political economies (see Bleiker 2000; as well as Enloe and Seabrooke in this forum), scholars have put to the fore that the international should not solely be conceptualized and understood as an (artificially) delimited space, but as a processual phenomenon (Guillaume 2007).