Research

These questions have long been considered exclusively human. However, in the Anthropocene, the age of humankind’s defining influence on the Earth, they are increasingly revealed as more than human. Wars are being declared on viruses. Alliances are cultivated with the beaver to retain water in the landscape. Livestock running wild are tracked and traced to help or prevent their escape from farms and slaughterhouses. “Weeds” or “pests” like the bark beetle are made into heroic conservationists as well as enemies of the Republic. The concept of “rights of nature” is being reconsidered, along with new ways of understanding and valuing non-human labour and property owned by a place or the Earth itself.

How to make sense of similar situations, in which other-than-human beings or materials become more often conceived of as not only food, resources or symbols but as allies or enemies in more-than-human struggles? How to comprehend the chaotic battles in which the Earth, in its multiplicity of processes and forms, is no longer just a chessboard in the background of human struggles, but one of its sides? And why, after all, is it important to understand it?  

The ResisTerra collective, based in the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, in Prague, focuses on exploring similar forms of so-called more-than-human resistance or more-than-human politics.

The project's goal is two-fold:

1. Resistance has been a tricky, even controversial concept in anthropology. It was overused in the 1980s and heavily criticised in the 1990s, to the point of almost dying out. By affiliating more closely with organised protest and activism, the concept slowly found a resurgence in the last decade as the “new anthropology of resistance” while keeping its original human-centred focus. However, we argue that such a uniquely turbulent intellectual history has become an advantage nowadays due to its accumulated and rich index of related critiques, debates and sensitivities. It is from precisely this robust and plentiful equipment—tools, warnings and analytics of the older anthropology of human-centred resistance—that we mobilise and reconnect with reworking resistance as more-than-human resistance. Retooled by such a move, we argue, the concept of more-than-human resistance becomes well suited for sharpening our understanding of messy Anthropocenic conflicts. 

2. Whereas most of the existing literature scrutinises the topic using examples from the tropics and sub-tropics entangled in post-colonial and colonial histories within the Global North and South divide, this project focuses on the temperate region of Central and Eastern Europe as it enables and explores more-than-human resistance within an inter-imperial context. Unlike situations in which one empire dominates its colonies, Central and Eastern Europe has been formed by its semi-peripheral relation to the West and a region “in-between” four empires: Turkish, Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian. This unique condition of multiple heterogeneities becomes particularly suitable for elaborating the more-than-human resistance concept by creating a robust and diverse empirical basis for discussing its validity or invalidity. Moreover, the whole region continues to be excluded from debates regarding conceptual innovations. Thus, this project’s contribution is not only international, by developing a new concept, but national, by introducing the topic within Central and Eastern Europe and including data and scholars from the region in international debates. 

Although it asks and answers mainly scientifically, behind the collective self-questioning it admits to a desire to seek new avenues for environmental politics and to analyse its promises and perils.  Gathering evidence on forms of more-than-human resistance is fuelling debates on the hopes and threats of recasting non-humans from passive resources of extraction or objects of protection to active “subjects”, be it enemies or allies, in confronting the challenges of the Anthropocene. In doing so, ResisTerra seeks to contribute to the debate on possible ways out of a turbulent time of converging multiple crises, led by the climate crisis.