Reconceptualizing Resistance in Light of the End and Failure of Hong Kong’s 2014 Protest

Kaletsch, Paul-Otto Yorck

Abstract

Contemporary social movement studies critique evaluations of failure as lacking causality and precision. Concept analysis stresses the need for a theoretical examination of core concepts that most empirical and theoretical approaches in the academic field of politics and international relations deploy but often do not explicate. This dissertation, however, proposes that the need for a reconceptualization of resistance in the face of end and failure, on the one hand, results from the recurrence of both resistance and its end and failure in global politics. For instance, between 2011 and 2015 a wave of occupations unfolded across the globe. In Hong Kong, the pro-democratic protests occupied the city center for over two months. And yet, this protest failed to achieve democracy and, eventually, the government cleared the occupation. On the other hand, epistemologies of resistance often conflate the historical outcomes of end and failure with the phenomenon of resistance itself. Therefore, this dissertation proposes the analytical strength of the Deleuzian concept of the event because it locates the historical outcomes of end and failure and the productive becoming of resistance on two different planes and ascribes them two different logics. Moreover, the concept of the event allows us to think of the end and failure not only as outcomes but as external processes that operate on a manifestation of resistance and impact it differently. Since Deleuze never performed an empirical analysis of resistance with this concept, I ontologically redescribe Hong Kong’s 2014 protests in the face of end and failure as an event in order to reconceptualize failed and ended resistance as both a productive and politically frustrating event in order to intervene against the predominant reductive conceptualizations of resistance.

Citation

Kaletsch, P.-O. Y. Reconceptualizing Resistance in Light of the End and Failure of Hong Kong’s 2014 Protest. (Thesis). SOAS University of London

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Jun 25, 2025
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.25501/SOAS.00506960
• Additional Information: 382 pages
• Award Date: 2025