INTRODUCTION Opposition, political identities and spaces of resistance

Abstract

A place on the map is also a place in history. (Rich, 1984: 212)1 Costumes and witchcraft are precisely what people need to walk happily on the uncertain edge of blurred boundaries. (Castells, 1983: 162) Perhaps the first images that spring to mind when we hear the word 'resistance' are of French men and women of the resistance fighting the Nazi occupation, 1939-1945, secretly carrying weapons on bicycles, or listening intently to coded messages on imperfect wirelesses, or lying in wait to blow up armoured trains carrying German troops and weaponry to the front. Then again, these heroics remind us of the barbarity with which the German forces of occupation attempted to suppress the resistance - by massacring villagers, by sending people to the concentration camps, by using vicious forms of torture on prisoners and by intimidating people into informing on friends, relatives, lovers. Or maybe other kinds of resistance are more prominent in our minds, perhaps we think of unemployed people marching to demonstrate their plight, or of the riots that take place in inner cities, or of people tying peace symbols to the barbed wire of military bases, or of a lone man standing in front of a tank as it rolls onwards to Tiananmen Square. Clearly, in these cases, 'resistance' stands in implacable opposition to 'power': so, 'power' is held by an elite, who use oppressive, injurious and contemptible means to secure their control;2 meanwhile, 'resistance' is the people fighting back in defence of freedom, democracy and humanity. Since resistance opposes power, it hardly seems worth mentioning that acts of resistance take place through specific geographies: in the spaces under the noses of the oppressor, on the streets, outside military bases, and so on; or, further, around specific geographical entities such as the nation, or 'our land', or world peace, or the rainforests; or, over other kinds of geographies, such as riots in urban places or revolts by peasants in the countryside or jamming government web sites in cyberspace. There are, somewhat plainly, geographies ofresistance.

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