The Critical Classroom — “Dams, Diversions, and Development: Slow Resistance and Authoritarian Rule in the Salween River Basin”

Zali Fung (University of Melbourne and ETH Zurich) and Vanessa Lamb (York University)

“What does it mean to act together when the conditions for acting together are devastated or falling away?” — Judith Butler (2015, 23)

While time is often assumed to function as a neutral backdrop (Adam 1995), critical approaches reveal how time is key to shaping our lives in a changing climate and under capitalism. In human geography and related disciplines, work has focused on the impacts of “clock time” (Adam 1995), questioned who defines the “time” of the climate emergency (Anderson et al. 2020) and the Anthropocene (Yusoff 2008), and interrogated the “slow violence” (Nixon 2011) of uneven development and extraction. Our paper, “Dams, Diversions, and Development: Slow Resistance and Authoritarian Rule in the Salween River Basin” (published open access in 2023 in Antipode 55(6): 1662-1685) offers a more hopeful yet critical case study that positions time and temporal strategies as inherently political through a case of anti-dam activism in Southeast Asia, focusing on the range of ways that communities strategically mobilise time in resistance.

Our paper highlights temporal-political strategies of resistance enacted by those challenging long-proposed hydropower dams and water diversions under authoritarian conditions in the Thai–Myanmar borderlands. “Slow resistance” by impacted residents and civil society encompasses slow, strategic, and considered actions that are necessarily protracted over decades and generations. While these actions are not always overt or immediately visible, they are strategic and interconnected over time, and generate incremental change that slowly “chips away” at inequalities. Attending to time and temporality highlights a range of actions and strategies by diverse actors that might otherwise be overlooked.

In our paper, we ask: What might conceptualisations of resistance that do not take time and temporal-political strategies seriously, or situate resistance in historical context, overlook?

Our article provokes the reader to question how those working under authoritarian conditions organise and resist, given that protesting overtly can entail intimidation, repression, and state violence. This is crucial given that authoritarianism is on the rise in Southeast Asia and beyond. Rather than an absence of resistance, people organising under such conditions develop a range of strategies, which may be covert, satirical, creative (Chawalawan 2018), or, as we point out, “slow”, so as to stay under the radar and evade state repression.

The conceptual framing presented in this paper seeks to broaden conceptualisations of resistance to account for “the efforts of less visible actors in authoritarian contexts” (p.1681). In developing this conceptualisation, we were cautious not to romanticise resistance or draw definitive boundaries around what “counts”.

To think critically about resistance, whose voices and actors count, and in what contexts, students could draw on our paper and the resources outlined below to discuss the following questions:

  • What “counts” as resistance? Whose voices and actions are included or overlooked in this definition?
  • How can we expand conceptualisations of resistance to include a broader range of actors, actions, and temporal-political strategies? Why might doing so be useful?
  • How could conceptualising resistance in this way help us to build solidarity in the environmental movements we are engaged with?
  • Many students interested in these topics are both scholars and activists. What aspects of “slow resistance” are relevant to the movements you are engaged with, if any?
  • What are the political implications of designating an action as resistance (or not)?

Resources

Adam, B. 1995. Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time. Polity.

—This text introduces the concept of “clock time” and its impact; a foundational text for those interested in how time shapes our lives across multiple sites and scales.

Anderson, B., K. Grove, L. Rickards, and M. Kearnes. 2020. “Slow Emergencies: Temporality and the Racialized Biopolitics of Emergency Governance.” Progress in Human Geography 44, no. 4: 621-639. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132519849263.

—This paper builds on Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” (see below) to think about how the timeframes of “urgency” and “emergency” shape whose voices are included in defining and responding to the climate emergency.

Butler, J. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Harvard University Press.

—Butler takes her theory of performativity to critically analyse public assembly, examining who can appear and “in what forms”.

Chawalawan, A. 2018. “Sandwiches, 1984 and Wristwatches: Four Years of the NCPO, Four Tears of Creative Resistance—Part 1.” New Mandala, May 24. https://www.newmandala.org/sandwiches-1984-wristwatches-four-years-ncpo-four-years-creative-resistance-part-one/.

—This article documents creative and satirical strategies of resistance deployed by residents during military rule in Thailand to evade detection and repression. It is useful for understanding how people resist under authoritarian rule in ways that are strategically less visible and overt.

Nixon, R. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press.

—This text introduces the now-widely deployed concept of “slow violence”, which attends to gradual and insidious forms of environmental and social harm that accumulate over time, and are often less visible or perceptible. Nixon’s work has spurred geographic scholarship that is attentive to the multiple dimensions of time, temporality, and slowness.

Yusoff, K. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press.

—This book critiques the concept of the Anthropocene for the ways that it primarily relies on geology to define this new time period. Yusoff points to the ways that the origins or “grammar” of geology are connected to the erasures of Blackness and dispossession, thus perpetuating colonial histories and racial injustices.

Featured image: left—Ban Uun residents participate in a tree ordination ceremony (buat pa) on the 14 March 2020 International Day of Action Against Dams; right—A “No Nam [River] Yuam Dam” banner on a bamboo raft on the Yuam River on the 14 March 2020 International Day of Action for Rivers. Photos by a Salween youth activist. Source: https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12939.