Dr Chris Rossdale

My research explores the politics of militarism, policing, dissent, and rebellion, with a particular focus on how state violence is exercised and resisted in everyday political life.

My earlier work focused on militarism and policing, examining the histories and practices of anti-militarist struggle in the UK and beyond. This research explored how opposition to war and the arms trade takes shape through direct action, civil disobedience, and everyday forms of refusal, and what these struggles reveal about the politics of state violence. It paid particular attention to how militarism and policing are structured through racial capitalism. Key publications include my 2019 book Resisting Militarism: Direct Action and the Politics of Subversion; a 2021 article co-authored with Nivi Manchanda on the anti-militarist politics of the Black Panther Party; and a 2025 article examining the international arms trade as a component of global police power.

A central strand of my current research focuses on the criminalisation of dissent. This work examines how protest movements and dissenting lives are constrained and governed through policing, law, and public discourse, and how movements organise to resist these processes. With colleagues at the University of Bristol, I am involved in a project examining the global criminalisation of climate and environmental protest, which has produced a public report and a 2025 article mapping the processes through which states and other actors repress and criminalise protest. I am also co-editing the forthcoming Bristol University Press volume Resisting Criminalisation: Tactics of Repression, Tactics of Struggle, which brings together testimony and analysis on how movements around the world experience and respond to criminalisation.

Alongside this, I am developing a new project on the politics of rebellion. This research examines how the language, imagery, and affective force of rebellion circulate across contemporary politics, including their mobilisation by reactionary movements, commercial branding, and state actors, and asks what challenges this mutability poses for radical and emancipatory political projects. I outlined some of the thinking behind the project in an Anarchist Essays podcast; other publications are on their way!

All my work is informed by the idea of ‘struggle as method’: the recognition that we gain unique insights about systems of power by examining and thinking with movements organising to challenge them. I develop this approach in a 2021 article on the Black Panther Party, reading their political struggle as a form of radical pedagogy. More broadly, my work is in ongoing conversation with anarchist, abolitionist, queer, feminist, anti-colonial and Black radical movements and theoretical traditions.