Civil Disobedience and Punishment: (Mis)reading Justification and Strategy from SNCC to Snowden

Constituent power beyond exceptionalism: Irregular migration, disobedience, and (re-)constitution

“…Instead of discussing the many limitations of this normatively loaded and overly restrictive liberal conception (for an extended critique, see Brownlee, 2012;Celikates, 2016aCelikates, , 2016bSmith, 2013), I here want to suggest a significantly less constrained, defensive, and idealized understanding that is anchored in the actual practice of disobedience and corresponds better to its complex history, including the paradigm cases of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr, which are often subjected to one-sided and domesticating misrepresentations in the current debate (for critiques of these misrepresentations, see, for example, Livingston, 2018;Lyons, 1998;Pineda, 2015). On this revised understanding, civil disobedience is a principled collective act of protest that involves breaking the law and aims at politicizing or changing laws, policies, or institutions in ways that can be seen as civil-as opposed to organized and conducted in a militarized way and aiming at the destruction of the "enemy."…”

Democratizing civil disobedience

“…Moreover, while an appeal to the conscience of the community was certainly one aim of enduring voluntary imprisonment, it was not the only one, nor perhaps the most important. 16 Given that the questions raised here about the standard liberal definition show that its elements are far from unproblematic and uncontested, it seems appropriate to define civil disobedience in a way that is less normatively demanding and therefore less restrictive, as an intentionally unlawful and principled collective act of protest (in contrast to both legal protest and 'ordinary' criminal offenses or 'unmotivated' rioting 17 ), with which citizens -in the broad sense that goes beyond those recognized as citizens by a particular state -pursue the political aim of changing specific laws, policies, or institutions (in contrast to conscientious objection, which is protected in some states as a fundamental right and does not seek such change) in ways that can be seen as civil (as opposed to military). Those who engage in civil and civic practices of disobedience and contestation continue to act as citizens -indeed they exemplify what it means to be a citizen in reasserting their political agency against politically entrenched and often invisibilized forms of domination, exclusion, or marginalization.…”

Beyond (and Before) the Transnational Turn

“…Issuing a reply to Frazier's worries three decades before, Rustin intimated that white fear was the ultimate source of racist, retaliatory violence-and that white fear of armed black movements would only exacerbate this violence. But nonviolent direct action also addressed and transformed an equally important form of fear integral to the maintenance of white supremacy: the fear of the oppressed, made to acquiesce to oppression or face the costs of violence unto death (Livingston 2018;Pineda 2015). Nonviolence was not submission but defiance in the face of the threat of death-an active, assertive means of action that could both confront and diffuse white racist fear; a decolonizing praxis that acted directly on the psychological and relational bases of white supremacy in order to transform them.…”

“…To trouble these binaries and multiply the conceptual resources available for transnationalizing civil disobedience, I suggest that we pluralize its history of political thought, taking seriously the idea that disobedient activists themselves produce political theories of their own-whose orienting frameworks, motivating questions, and normative vocabularies may depart significantly from those adopted by scholars, even those scholars writing about them (on this, see e.g., Celikates 2015;Inouye 2021;Kelley 2003;Livingston 2018;Pineda 2015Pineda , 2021). 1 I then provide one example of how we might go about this pluralization, by revisiting the way that civil rights and anticolonial activists moved across seemingly disparate contexts to construct a world in motion against linked structures of racist imperialism, colonial rule, apartheid, and Jim Crow, producing a novel account of civil disobedience.…”