Dr Jack Joy

Jack's research explores the strategies of control that underlie Hizbullah’s performative politics, arguing that the assemblage of practices and discourses through which it seeks to bring in to being an idealised ‘culture of Resistance’ helps to account for the durability of its power. It contends that in spite of its internal contradictions, particularly those that have become even more acute as a result of its involvement in the Syrian civil war, the successful mobilisation of spectacular narratives and dramaturgies has long enabled the ‘Party of God’ to flatten out its incoherence, suppress the emergence of alternative webs of solidarity, and to activate its Lebanese-Shi’a base within its dispositif. In one regard these are foundational to the organisation’s efforts to structure the social imaginary of its constituents and to situate them within a particular perceptual regime that renders intelligible complex social realities. Yet such forms of political theatre also shed light on disciplinary technologies that are intrinsic to Resistance as an identity and a ‘methodology’, as Hizbullah seeks to cultivate subjects who through their everyday comportment further naturalise its domination.