In discussion: Chris Rossdale

BISA is run by a board of trustees who make up our Executive Committee. They have expertise and interests that represent the main areas of our activity and a breadth of experience from the wider world. We hope this interview series will help you get to know them a little better. This time it's the turn of Dr Chris Rossdale who is based at University of Bristol.

Tell us a bit about yourself and where you are from.  

I’m a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Bristol, based in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies. When I’m not teaching and researching and doing all the other things that come with an academic job, I’m usually found watching cricket, playing games, legal observing at protests and fawning over my cats. The ‘where I’m from question’ always stumps me. I was born in Essex; growing up I lived first near Maidenhead in Berkshire, and then moved to Grimsby in Lincolnshire. And then – in an experience that will be familiar to others – much of my early career involved moving through short-term contracts in different places. But I’ve been at Bristol for seven years now and feel very settled here. So, I guess I’m from Bristol.

Why did you want to be a BISA trustee? 

BISA has been there for me throughout my career – especially the working groups and conferences. This is where I’ve found intellectual community, benefitted from the warmth and collegiality of so many fantastic scholars, even met some of my closest friends. I’m keen to give something back, and I have a higher-than-average tolerance for committees. More broadly, this is obviously a difficult time for higher education in the UK – the funding system is in crisis, people are losing jobs or struggling to find them, and academic freedom is under attack. In this context, BISA has a really important role to play in creating spaces where we can come together and support one another. I hope I can contribute to that work as a trustee. 

What is your area of research and how did you get into it? What are you currently working on? 

My research spans two connected areas: the politics of the arms trade, policing, and other forms of state-market violence; and the social movements and resistance politics organised in opposition to these. I’m particularly interested in how we can better understand the former by thinking with the latter, recognising movements and struggles themselves as sites of political and theoretical insight rather than as objects to be explained from the outside. I started along this line of thought during my MA in International Security at the University of Warwick many years ago, when I realised that the anti-arms trade and anti-war movements I was involved with offered more subversive ways of thinking about militarism and security than much of the theoretical work I was encountering within the discipline. 

At the moment, I’m focusing on two broad projects. One is on the criminalisation of dissent. I’m working with a brilliant team at Bristol mapping how environmental and climate protest movements are being criminalised globally, and I’ve also been co-editing what I think is a really excellent forthcoming collection on how people around the world are resisting this criminalisation in all sorts of ways. 

The other project focuses on what I call ‘the symbolic life of rebellion’. Here I’m trying to make sense of how the language, imagery and affective force of rebellion circulates through contemporary political life. Right now, I’m focusing on how reactionary political movements have mobilised the ideas and feelings of rebellion, whether that’s through Farage’s ‘anti-establishment’ grift or how anti-trans activists use the imagery of punk and the Suffragettes. Rather than dismiss these as just ridiculous or insincere, I’m thinking about how these allow reactionary politics to make sense within liberalism, and to mediate feelings of injury and mastery. 

Your research often focuses on resistance and dissent. What are the trends or shifts that you are thinking about at the moment? 

I’m spending a lot of time thinking about the criminalisation of dissent in Britain. There are some really troubling developments: new laws that significantly increase sentence lengths for basic protest actions like blocking streets, new police powers to limit demonstrations, judges refusing to allow defendants to explain their actions in court. The proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation is obviously a big story here, as are the mass arrests of people who have done nothing more than express their support for the movement, but who now face prosecution under the Terrorism Act. That situation has significant academic freedom implications for me personally – much of my academic work focuses on precisely the kinds of direct-action tactics Palestine Action have used, and it has become challenging for me to discuss that work in this context. 

All of that said, I also think it’s worth being cautious about framings that position these shifts as completely unprecedented – even as they often feel new (and frightening) for people caught up in the repression. There have been escalations like this before. There have been lengthening sentences, curbs on juries, extensions of police discretionary powers to limit movements. Often these have been used against working class and oppressively racialised communities, or in colonial contexts. Some of what we’re witnessing now is the extension of these to movements more likely to be made up of white, middle-class activists. On the Terrorism Act specifically, other movements - notably Kurdish solidarity organisers - have been contending with it for years. I think that’s worth raising not to downplay the seriousness of what’s happening right now, but because there’s learning that can be done about how these measures work, how they have emerged, and how they can be challenged and subverted.  

Is there anything else we should know about you?

When I get stuck, I go and read Emma Goldman. For me she exemplifies what it means to combine careful theoretical work and practical political action – what Kathy Ferguson called ‘political thinking in the streets’. I published a short pamphlet on her work last year with Koshka Duff called What Would Emma Goldman Do, and have a tattoo of her riding a triceratops on my leg.