The History of Disruption: Social Struggle in the Atlantic World

(Paperback)

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Why do we think of social struggles as movements Have struggles been practiced otherwise Not as motion but as, interruption, occupation, disturbance, arrest If so, what are struggles trying to stop Looking at 300 years of Atlantic social struggle kinetically, Mehmet Dsemeci questions the axiomatic association that academics and activists have made between modern social struggles and the category of movement. Dsemeci argues how this movement politics has privileged some forms of historical struggle while obscuring others and, perhaps more damningly, reveals the complicity of social movements in the very forces they have struggled against. Challenging this association, Dsemeci begins the story with the18th century establishment of a transatlantic regime of movement that coerced goods and bodies into a violent and ceaseless motion. He then details the resistance to this regime over the next three centuries, interweaving disparate social struggles such as food riots, Caribbean maroon communities, Atlantic pirates, secret societies and syndicalism, the student New Left, Black Power, radical feminism, operaismo, and the Zapatistas into a history of politics as disruption. Dsemeci convincingly argues that their stories are both key to understanding the resurgence of disruptive politics in the 21st century and offer valuable guidance for future struggles seeking to overturn an ever-intensifying regime of movement.

Author Bio

Mehmet Dsemeci is an anarchist, activist, and associate professor of history at Bucknell University (USA). The author of two books and numerous academic articles, his writings on the meaning and significance of radical democracy and the uprisings, occupations, and riots of the 21st century have appeared in Al Jazeera, RoarMag, Open Democracy, and Common Dreams. In his spare time, he runs a website on the past and present of social disruption www.disruptnow.org