Transformations of Civil Disobedience: Democratisation, Globalisation, Digitalisation
Keywords: civil disobedience, democracy, globalisation, Internet
activism, citizenship
This research project seeks to address three fundamental challenges the
predominant understanding of civil disobedience faces:
- How to rethink civil disobedience as not simply the protest of individual rights bearers against transgressive majorities, but as a genuinely democratic practice citizens engage in in order to address structural democratic deficits (subproject 1);
- how to rethink civil disobedience—often framed as protest citizens engage in against their national governments—in the face of the globalization of political and economic structures and the emergence of new forms of global protest (subproject 2);
- how to rethink civil disobedience in the face of the rise of the Internet as a tool of political action and as a contested space and the corresponding digitalisation of disobedience (subproject 3).
Partners: PhD researchers Natasha Basu (University of Amsterdam, subproject 2) and Bernardo Caycedo (University of Amsterdam, subproject 3)
Funding: NWO VIDI grant
Running Time: 2014-2019
Civil Disobedience beyond the State
Keywords: civil disobedience, democracy, globalisation, Internet
activism, citizenship
Contemporary forms of disobedience can only be adequately understood if we move
beyond the dominant liberal model according to which citizens of a country
publicly disobey in order to communicate to their government their disagreement
with a law or policy. In a series of three international and interdisciplinary
workshops, researchers from a variety of backgrounds discuss the impact of
globalisation and digitalisation on civil disobedience. The
first
workshop took place in Amsterdam in October 2014, the second will take place
in Berlin in May 2015 (with Gabriella Coleman, Bill Scheuerman, Jacob Appelbaum,
Geoffroy de Lagasnerie and others) and the third will take place in Oxford in
October 2015.
Partners: Annette Zimmermann (University of Oxford) and Theresa Züger (Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin)
Funding: ACGS, NWO, Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin and University of Oxford
Running Time: 2014-2015
