Toward the Logistization of Politics: Rethinking Contemporary Protest Practices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In an era where the seamless movement of goods, people, and information is fundamental to economic efficiency, supply chains have emerged as critical infrastructures of the contemporary world. No longer merely operational mechanisms, they now function as decisive strategic levers in evolving power dynamics. Logistical concerns have thus transcended their traditional status as technical matters, becoming central to the strategic repertoire of social movements. From the roundabout occupations of the Yellow Vests in France to the mobile blockades organized by Canadian truckers, recent mobilizations underscore a significant shift: logistics is no longer a passive backdrop to protest but a principal site of political contestation. In a global economy predicated on uninterrupted circulation, the disruption of these flows constitutes a direct challenge to the structural foundations of power. This article investigates how self-organized encampments, activist supply chains, and targeted disruptions of infrastructure are more than mere tactical responses—they embody a form of logistical intelligence mobilized for political purposes. The analysis reframes logistics not simply as a domain concerned with the efficient management of flows, but as a political language through which counter-power is formulated and enacted. By drawing on the concept of the “logistization of politics,” the article offers a novel interpretive framework for understanding protest as a form of engineered resistance. From this perspective, the occupation of strategic spaces and the obstruction of circulation systems are not incidental, but deliberate and potent instruments of political confrontation. The significance of this research lies in its ability to bridge supply chain studies and political sociology, illuminating how logistical infrastructures are not only arenas of economic value creation but also terrains of political struggle. In doing so, it contributes to a growing body of work that rethinks contemporary activism in terms of its spatial, material, and infrastructural dimensions—shifting the focus from symbolic resistance to operational disruption. Keywords: Blockade, Critical infrastructure, Disruption, Protest practices, Social movements, Supply chains DOI: 10.7176/JCSD/74-06 Publication date: July 30th 2025
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.077 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".