Deleuze & Guattari on protest weakness in Iraq

Ben Robin-D'Cruz

Publikation: Bidrag til tidsskrift/Konferencebidrag i tidsskrift /Bidrag til avisTidsskriftartikelForskningpeer review

Abstract

Diverse forms of protest in contemporary Iraq have not altered the country’s political system and in some respects have reinforced it. This paper argues that the existing literature has not fully explained this protest weakness, due in part to a division between an agency-focused protest literature emphasising discourse, symbolic politics, and the micro-politics of protests, where less attention has been paid to the material and structural elements; and a literature focused on the political system which has typically adopted more macro and structural models. By contrast, this paper uses concepts from Deleuze and Guattari to explore empirical case studies of the encounter between protests and political power in Iraq. It finds the notion of social assemblage useful for drawing the expressive and the material, the micro and the macro, back together on the same ontological plane. Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between the behaviours of rhizomatic (decentred) and arborescent (hierarchic) structures can also clarify a key source of protest weakness in Iraq as the rhizomatic tendencies of the country’s political system. This refers primarily to the tendency for destabilisations of the system engendered by protests to function as a mechanism for the expansion of its political power over new social territory.

OriginalsprogEngelsk
TidsskriftThird World Quarterly
Vol/bind45
Nummer10
Sider (fra-til)1589-1607
Antal sider19
ISSN0143-6597
DOI
StatusUdgivet - 2024

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