# RESISTIVE OPERATIONS /// Creative Oppositions in Makeshift

Once again, I would like to apologize for a long absence of new posts on this blog, I am hoping to find back a daily rhythm very soon.

The third issue of the journal Makeshift is entitled Resistance and explores how “creative oppositions” are occurring in the various political struggles that are currently on going in the world. From Egypt to Haiti and from Mexico to Libya, this issue describes through short texts (sometimes too short) various resistive operations often registering themselves against the politico-economical and legal power in place. Often, when we need to address examples of political resistance, we uses one that can gain a large consensus, i.e. non violent ones or ancient ones. In this issue however, Makeshift also explored a garage of Misrata (Libya) in which agricultural mechanics changed their job during the civil war against Muammar Gaddafi’s administration, army and militias, and set up heavy weaponry on trucks for the rebels. Violence is usually something we having trouble to look at in the Western world while in other places, it becomes the inevitable mean to resist. In this regard, the sabotages operations organized by the ANC (African National Congress) in South Africa during the Apartheid is helpful to look at – for French speakers, see the current remarkable series of broadcasts on France Culture about Nelson Mandela. Non-violence is not necessarily motivated by an intrinsic aversion for violence but often considered as the appropriate weapon to fight a given establishment.

To go back to the entire issue of Makeshift, what is remarkable is that the latter focuses exclusively on the production and/or the creation involved in a process of resistance. Bracelets are made from bomb metal in Laos, antennas and routers are set-up on New York rooftops to put occupiers in communication, objects are being rethought, refabricated and used for different functions than their prior ones in Cuba etc. processes of resistance and processes of creation are presented as interchangeable. In both cases, it involves imagination, of course, but also work and effort of bodies dedicated to an individual or collective ethics.

Libya / Charla Jones / Former agricultural mechanics turn to making weapons during civil war.

Laos /Article 22 / Artisans in Laos, the most bombed country per capita in history, craft bracelets out of scrap bomb metal.

United States / Matt Yoka // An engineer erects his Freedom Tower, part of a private Internet network established to connect Occupy protesters.

Afghanistan / Massoud Hassani // Equipped with a GPS receiver, Hassani’s “Mine Kafon” rolls over Afghanistan’s most dangerous tracts of land. With 10 million mines and a specialist killed for every 5,000 removed, the homemade device could be a life saver. (see previous article)

Kenya / Jennifer Huxta // The Mighty Jambo Circus Academy gets kids out of the slums and into its training school. Here, a young trainee fights gravity atop an extended unicycle.