Abstract
"The past few years have witnessed many resistance movements outside organizations, emerging in response to precarization not only as a widespread feature of employment but also as a social condition resulting from the penetration of market dynamics in every dimension of life and the prevalence of principles of accumulation in governance relationships. These mobilizations have shed light on the permanence of public and oppositional collective resistance, despite the fragmentation of social forces and the exclusion of dissident voices from the political scene characteristic of the neoliberal regime. Yet, because actors in these movements have refused to self-discipline, they have also often unsurprisingly faced repression—actions from other groups meant to increase the costs of collectively protesting—deployed to preserve business interests, and, more broadly, neoliberal hegemonic assumptions. In fact, research showed that overtly opposing and disrupting the dominant system tend to go with retaliation and sanctions, whether economic, social, or physical. While an important body of literature has documented the effects of repression on mobilization and framed repression as a determining constraint for resistance movements, this dissertation takes another stand and concentrates on resisters' responses to repression. Building on a fifteen-month ethnography of the French yellow vest movement, this dissertation examines how, once they have publicized their dissent, people answer sanctions and pushback against their resistance and even sometimes can manage to seize backlashes in ways that serve and fuel their struggle. My contention is that protesters are not just recipients of repression with limited possibilities of action. Instead, I argue that they can counter, reappropriate, divert, and use some elements of repressive apparatuses to fuel their struggle. "