Rethinking Civil Disobedience as a Practice of Contestation-Beyond the Liberal Paradigm

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

“…The argument proceeds in three steps: In the first section, I argue that far from being a merely defensive act of protest of individual rights-bearers against governments and political majorities that transgress the limits established by constitutionally guaranteed moral principles and values, civil disobedience has historically been and continues to be a potentially much more radical political practice. This practice is transformative in that it is aiming at the politicization of questions that are excluded from the political domain and is directed at reconfiguring public space and existing institutions, often in comprehensive ways (see Celikates, 2014Celikates, , 2016aCelikates, , 2016b. While this is true for many cases of civil disobedience in the national framework-think of the classical, but often misrepresented, case of Martin Luther King and the US Civil Rights Movement, or more recently of the so-called Arab Spring and the Occupy movements, the radically transformative potential of civil disobedience becomes even more evident once we turn to the transnational domain.…”

Pirate open access as electronic civil disobedience: Is it ethical to breach the paywalls of monetized academic publishing?

“…However, the term itself is of much more recent origin, appearing first in the mid‐19th century in a celebrated essay by American naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1849). Civil disobedience, which has come widely to be considered a right of citizens, may be defined as an intentionally unlawful yet principled act of protest aimed at changing a perceived unfair state of affairs, including specific policy or legal statute, with no intention of challenging the rule of law in general (Celikates, 2016; Habermas, 1985).…”

Principled disobedience in the EU

“…Drawing on contemporary discussions of the normativity of civil disobedience adapted to the transnational context, I suggest three standards can be established (Celikates, 2016a(Celikates, , 2016bScheuerman 2016aScheuerman , 2016b. Taken cumulatively, they allow principled disobedience to be marked off from outwardly similar forms of exceptionalism and extra-legality, achieving thereby a status that is normatively distinct.…”

“…Discussions of the politically motivated transgression of rules tend to focus on street‐level direct action. Civil disobedience is typically construed as occurring outside the institutions of political representation, displaying for this reason such virtues as spontaneity and horizontal organization (Celikates, , p. 39). This concept of disobedience is not without relevance to the transnational sphere: indeed, an expanding body of work has examined resistance by social movements to EU politics, including the mobilizations associated with the Indignados, Aganaktismenoi and Occupy (Celikates, Kreide, & Wesche, ; Douzinas, , ).…”