Focus on civil disobedience.
Ostas, D. "Civil Disobedience in a Business Context: Examining the Social Obligation to Obey Inane Laws." American Business Law Journal 47, no. 2 (July 1, 2010): 291.
Folklore recounts a rather amusing exchange between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The conversation reportedly took place as Thoreau spent a night in a Massachusetts jail for failure to pay his poll tax. Thoreau conscientiously refused to pay a tax that would support both slavery and a war with Mexico that he deemed unjust. The night in jail would prompt Thoreau's classic essay on civil disobedience, broadly defined as the deliberate violation of law for reasons of conscience and moral principle. The present article examines whether civil disobedience has any role to play in the business context. Part I briefly reviews the philosophical literature. Part II then turns to the role of civil disobedience in business settings, discussing four illustrative cases. Part III concludes with reflections and analysis that suggest that in some settings civil disobedience of business regulations can be both expected and justified.
Dominguez, R. "Electronic Civil Disobedience: Inventing the Future of Online Agitprop Theater." PMLA. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 124, no. 5 (October 1, 2009): 1806.
In 1998, online-activist actions were often framed as potentially illegal, as a form of "cybercrime" known as DoS (Denial of Service) or DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service), an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) was consistently clear, however, that its actions were meant to raise legal, not technical, questions. Accordingly, electronic civil disobedience (ECD) is not about code qua code between machines but about a new form of social contestation that appeals to existing laws that define the legal status of civil disobedience nationally and internationally. Here, Domiquez discusses electronic civil disobedience and looks at EDT's online activism.
Gilgenbach, C. "Civil Disobedience: An Encyclopedic History of Dissidence in the United States." Review. Reference & User Services Quarterly 49, no. 1 (October 1, 2009): 92-93.
[..] of the political viewpoint being asserted, civil disobethence, or the willful refusal to obey the law as a form of peaceful protest, has been an important tactic employed in the pursuit of freedom, justice, and equality. The primary strength of this work is that it brings together in one source entries on topics that would otherwise have to be located in a variety of reference works such as general encyclopedias, biographical sources, and specialized reference works on topics such as slavery, the civil rights movement, religion, and women's suffrage, to name a few.
Applbaum, A. "Legitimacy without the Duty to Obey." Philosophy and Public Affairs 38, no. 3 (July 1, 2010): 215.
Applbaum aims to make conceptual room for a view about political legitimacy called the power-liability account. The view claims that political legitimacy is a form of normative power that entails moral liability, but not necessarily a moral claim-right that entails moral duty. The power-liability account supports appealing interpretations of justified civil disobedience in the face of legitimate but unjust law at home and of justified human rights interventions that violate legitimate international law abroad. He believes that the power-liability view indeed is correct, but it often is thought that the view not only is false but also incoherent.
Baer, B. "Shit Writing: Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable, the Image of Gandhi, and the Progressive Writers' Association." Modernism/Modernity 16, no. 3 (September 1, 2009): 575-595.
The paraph rather lifts the novel out of an empirically indeterminate earlier time of writing, reflecting also a desired trajectory (not "homewards," as in the novel's final line, but rather colony-to-metropolis), as well as the necessity of that trajectory's errancy.8 The novel's journey can never be contained by place and date; it will not necessarily "arrive" in Bloomsbury. [..] the printed text of Untouchable is framed by two dates: 1935, the date of publication at the beginning, and the 1933 of the paraph at the end.9 This possibly inadvertent framing emblematizes the errancy of the novel's travels, allowing us to read Untouchable as an alternative narrative filling-out of the time it took for the 1933 White Paper to become the 1935 Act.
Bonilla, Y., and R. Martínez. "Puerto Rico in Crisis: Government Workers Battle Neoliberal Reform." NACLA Report on the Americas 43, no. 1 (January 1, 2010): 6-8.
In general, Puerto Rican union organizers face a very complex challenge: Since most unionized workers on the island are in the public sector, they end up clashing most directly with the state, the very institution they are trying to defend against privatization.
Chamy, A. "Obituary." The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs 29, no. 3 (April 1, 2010): 56.
A founding member of Jewish Voice of Peace, Zinn supported the civil disobedience of Israeli peace activists and spoke out on behalf of human rights everywhere.
Covey, D. "THE ETHICS OF OPEN ACCESS TO RESEARCH: A Call for Civil Disobedience and Moral Courage." Progressive Librarian no. 33 (July 1, 2009): 26-42,108.
[..] the situation must be tied to an ongoing battle between incompatible ideologies that has escalated to a crisis of values. [..] by requiring authors to legally retain certain rights to their work it challenges the tradition of full copyright transfer to the publisher. [..] it challenges the model underlying U.S. copyright law that assumes economic gain is the incentive that drives faculty to conduct research and to publish journal articles.
Fritsvold, E. "Under the Law: Legal Consciousness and Radical Environmental Activism." Law & Social Inquiry 34, no. 4 (October 1, 2009): 799.
A growing body of sociolegal scholarship focuses the study of law away from formal texts and legal institutions and toward the experiences and perceptions of "everyday" citizens. This study introduces seventeen "radical" environmentalists who engage a repertoire of tactics that includes some actions that involve relatively severe forms of illegality. This research seeks to investigate the role of civil disobedience and lawbreaking within the radical environmental movement and the corresponding legal consciousness of movement actors. Utilizing ethnographic fieldwork and content analysis, this analysis suggests that Ewick and Silbey's (1998) three-tiered model of legal consciousness is an operative starting point, but could be enhanced through theoretical expansion. This study proposes a new category of legal consciousness--Under the Law---that views the law as the protector and defender of a social order that is fundamentally illegitimate. Under the Law is qualitatively different from existing conceptualizations of legal consciousness and reaffirms the mutually constitutive nature of law and society.
Guilbeault, S. "THE GREEN ACTIVIST." Americas Quarterly 4, no. 1 (January 1, 2010): 109-111.
In Quebec, we are putting in place measures to reduce our oil dependency by promoting increased electricity use in the transportation sector, greater use of renewable energy and improved energy efficiency as well as the use of bunker fuels and a carbon tax, to name a few examples. [..] my involvement with governments, business or even my position as adviser for Cycle Capital Management, one of North America's largest clean-technology venture capital funds.
Iovino, S. "Naples 2008, or, the waste land: trash, citizenship, and an ethic of narration." Neohelicon 36, no. 2 (December 1, 2009): 335-346.
After having been systematically disfigured by building developers for decades, in the last 15 years Naples has been over-polluted and unable to manage the problem of waste dumping sites. The latest and most blatant outcome of this situation is the world-infamous image of a beautiful and ancient city literally swallowed by its own trash. But behind this shocking TV-picture lies a structural condition in which ecological devastation, politics and business are tightly interlaced. Environmental ruin is here in fact just another face of a deeper political failure, which can be labeled a crisis of citizenship, also caused by the rise of the so-called "ecomafia." This essay questions whether and how ecological culture and ecocriticism in particular can provide the population with critical instruments necessary to develop their own "strategy of survival" both environmental and political. After reflecting on the philosophical implications of the idea of waste, it considers whether projects of environmental education based on narrations about territorial issues can be implemented as forms of a "narrative re-inhabitation": a task intended to sharpen people's ecological and political awareness starting from their "locatedness," to restore social hope and to envision long-term community projects. In this framework, the eco-cultural retrieval and invention of locally embedded stories and of place-identity is both an expression of civil disobedience toward a corrupted power and a means of political resilience.
Isiksel, N. "Fundamental rights in the EU after Kadi and Al Barakaat." European Law Journal 16, no. 5 (September 1, 2010): 551-577.
This article takes stock of the emerging scholarship on the European Court of Justice's 2008 Kadi decision and seeks to make sense of the court's apparent evasiveness towards international law. The article argues that Kadi is best understood as an act of civil disobedience prompted by the UN Security Council's misapplication of foundational principles of the international order. In turn, the court's forceful articulation of the stakes in this case signals a prioritisation of basic rights within the supranational constitutional architectonic. In this respect, the domestic constitutional implications of Kadi are just as far reaching as its consequences for the EU's status as an actor under international law.
Jones, C. "The Moral Problem of Health Disparities." American Journal of Public Health: Supplement 1 100, no. S1 (January 1, 2010): S47-51.
Why Should We Eliminate Health Disparities?
Health disparities exist along lines of race/ethnicity and socioeconomic class in US society. I argue that we should work to eliminate these health disparities because their existence is a moral wrong that needs to be addressed. Health disparities are morally wrong because they exemplify historical injustices. Contractarian ethics, Kantian ethics, and utilitarian ethics all provide theoretical justification for viewing health disparities as a moral wrong, as do several ethical principles of primary importance in bioethics. The moral consequences of health disparities are also troubling and further support the claim that these disparities are a moral wrong. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides additional support that health disparities are a moral wrong, as does an analogy with the generally accepted duty to provide equal access to education. In this article, I also consider and respond to 3 objections to my thesis.
Karlberg, M. "Constructive Resilience: The Bahá'í Response to Oppression." Peace & Change 35, no. 2 (April 1, 2010): 222-257.
Against the backdrop of dramatic struggles for social change in the twentieth century, characterized by non-violent opposition and civil disobedience, the Baha'i community of Iran has pursued a distinctively non-adversarial approach to social change under conditions of violent oppression. This non-adversarial model has received little attention in the literature on social change. This article therefore seeks to bring the model into focus by outlining the Bahá'í community's experience of oppression, by examining the principles that inform their collective response to oppression, by discussing the results of their response, and by deriving from this a set of heuristic insights that can guide further inquiry into the dynamics of peace and change.
Karroubi, M. "I Support Ayatollah Khomeini's Republicanism." New Perspectives Quarterly 27, no. 1 (January 1, 2010): 50.
An interview with Mehdi Karroubi, an opposition politician and cleric who has taken a leading role in protests against the results of the recent elections in Iran, is presented. Here Karroubi talks about the root cause of his continuing protests in Iran and discusses how civil disobedience and demonstrations translate into political change.
Kishik, D. "Life and Violence." Telos no. 150 (April 1, 2010): 143.
An act of pure violence is a very peculiar one, since it has nothing whatsoever to do with the law: it is not meant to transgress or oppose a law (as in criminal activity or civil disobedience); it is not meant to preserve or uphold a law (as in regular police enforcement or special military rule); and it is not meant to create or make a law (as in political revolution or aggressive protest). In fact, pure violence is not meant to achieve any particular end. A regular violent act that is not a "pure" one is often perceived as legitimate as long as it has a justified outcome. Here, Kishik looks at the intricate and problematic link between life and violence.
Lee, I. "Attack on the Gaza Flotilla: An Eyewitness Account." Insight Turkey 12, no. 3 (July 1, 2010): 1-5.
Palestinians in Gaza have suffered under an illegal siege-first impose by Israel in 2005 and strictly enforced since early 2009-which Amnesty International has called "a flagrant violation of international law." Hundreds of civilians, the representatives from dozens of countries, attempted to deliver much-needed material to the Gazan people by the Gaza flotilla. The passengers on board-including elected officials, diplomats, media professionals, and other human rights workers-joined the flotilla as an act of civil disobedience and because they believe there is no decent justification for preventing shipments of humanitarian aid from reaching people in crisis. Israeli military launched a nighttime assault with heavily armed soldiers who shot and killed nine civilians and seriously injured dozens more. What happened to the flotilla is happening to the people of Gaza on a daily basis. It will not stop until international law is applied to all countries, Israel included.
Leontidou, L. "Urban Social Movements in 'Weak' Civil Societies: The Right to the City and Cosmopolitan Activism in Southern Europe." Urban Studies 47, no. 6 (May 1, 2010): 1179.
The transition from fast spontaneous urbanisation in southern Europe, with popular squatting as a form of civil disobedience, to 'new social movements' (NSMs) for democratic globalisation in cities, is taking place in the context of a broader transition. In the 20th century, there were unstable politics, civil wars and also still dictatorships in the south, which contributed in a north- south divide in Europe, engulfing civil societies, the welfare state, planning and grassroots mobilisations for a 'right to the city'. This paper focuses on social transformation during the 21st century and points to three directions. First, it explores the nature of several NSMs as urban social movements (USMs) organised by loosely networked cosmopolitan collectivities, social centres and flaneur activists demanding a 'right to the city', and interprets this with reference to globalisation, democratisation and the Europeanisation of southern civil societies. Secondly, it unveils innovative forms of 'urban' mobilisations in the south, influencing the rest of the Europe: squatting in the past, social centres and the ESF (both starting in Italy) at present. Thirdly, it traces transformations of USMs between two centuries and argues about the deconstruction of the north-south divide in Europe with regard to movements and definitions of the 'right to the city'. Mediterranean USMs have offered new insights and have broadened geographical imaginations in Europe.
Lui, M. "San Francisco's International Hotel: Mobilizing the Filipino American Community in the Anti-Eviction Movement." Review. Journal of Asian American Studies 12, no. 3 (October 1, 2009): 357-360,379-380.
Despite the attention paid to the elderly Filipino residents, Habal argues that current narratives of the I-Hotel struggle as a pan-Asian political movement have worked to obscure and subsume the specific and complicated transnational history of radical Filipino American political organizing and consciousness within the larger narrative of pan-Asian political activism and history. [..] as she discusses in the book's chapter on the history of San Francisco's Manilatown, the gradual disappearance of the Filipino neighborhood from the cityscape as a result of urban renewal projects to expand the city's central business district and economic development and expansion of Chinatown have further erased the historic presence of Filipinos in the area.
Magaloni, B. "The Game of Electoral Fraud and the Ousting of Authoritarian Rule." American Journal of Political Science 54, no. 3 (July 1, 2010): 751-765.
How can autocrats be restrained from rigging elections when they hold a huge military advantage over their opponents? This article suggests that even when opposition parties have no military capacity to win a revolt, opposition unity and a consequent threat of massive civil disobedience can compel autocrats to hold clean elections and leave office by triggering splits within the state apparatus and the defection of the armed forces. Opposition unity can be elite-driven, when parties unite prior to elections to endorse a common presidential candidate, or voter-driven, when elites stand divided at the polls and voters spontaneously rebel against fraud. Moreover, the article identifies some conditions under which autocrats will tie their hands willingly not to commit fraud by delegating power to an independent electoral commission. The article develops these ideas through a formal game and the discussion of various case studies.
Michna, C. "Stories at the Center: Story Circles, Educational Organizing, and Fate of Neighborhood Public Schools in New Orleans." American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (September 1, 2009): 529-555,833.
Plessy's was a planned act of civil disobedience organized by the Citizens' Committee, a civil rights group led by Afro-Creole elites and buoyed by the support of African Americans throughout New Orleans.1 On February 12, 2009, the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts (NOCCA), the exclusive public arts academy that is known for its famous graduates and that currently owns the lot at Press and Royal streets, installed a plaque on the site of Plessy's arrest to memorialize his brave actions and the Citizens' Committee's inspiring, if failed, legal campaign.2 When NOCCA decided to install this plaque, it joined a campaign in New Orleans that had been working for the past eight years to create public memorials to the city's African-American heritage and to connect those memorials to history education in local schools. Creating public city spaces for the remembering and celebration of grassroots resistance movements and local counterhistories of place can transform democratic practices in cities because doing so intervenes in lived, spatial practices in a way that encourages city residents of all class, gender, race, and ethnic backgrounds to come together and think critically about the historical structures underlying present-day inequalities.
Nmaju, M. "Violence in Kenya: Any Role for the ICC in the Quest for Accountability?" African Journal of Legal Studies (Online) 3, no. 1 (November 1, 2009): 78-95.
This article examines the violence that broke out in Kenya after the 2007 presidential elections. After weeks of fighting and the establishment of a coalition government made up of the incumbent president and the leader of the opposition, relative calm returned to the country. However, the government has been slow to implement the recommendations of the Commission of Inquiry into Post Election Violence (Waki Commission). One key suggestion the Waki Commission made was to call upon the Kenyan government to establish an independent Special Tribunal made up of domestic and international jurists to prosecute those responsible for the crimes committed during the violence. At the time of writing, the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber II had been assigned the matter to determine whether the Office of the Prosecutor could initiate investigations. This article argues that the crimes committed in Kenya during the post election violence do not meet the ICC threshold on jurisdiction and gravity, and do not have the essential legal attributes of genocide and crimes against humanity. However, the manner in which the ICC handles this situation has the potential to influence the way future crimes are tried; thus the ICC must ensure that impunity does not prevail over accountability.
Parker, K. "Takin' It to the Streets: Hare and Madden on Civil Disobedience." Charles S. Peirce Society. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 46, no. 1 (January 1, 2010): 35-40.
Peter Hare and Edward Madden explored the concept of civil disobedience between 1968 and 1978. They sought to clarify the concept of civil disobedience by outlining its various forms, identifying its components, and describing the kinds of situation where its use is and is not legitimate. They considered a number of recent and contemporary cases, including World War II resistance efforts, the Vietnam war protests, the American civil rights and Black Power movements, protests for women's reproductive rights, and physicians' strikes. Arguing primarily on the basis of human rights theory, they conclude that civil disobedience, including violent actions, can be justified in a variety of situations. They explicitly respond to two extant arguments against robust acts of civil disobedience: that they are unwarranted because they promote social instability, and that they are unnecessary given the procedural provisions of the U.S. legal system.
Parry, W. "Israel Responds to Palestinian Nonviolence With Violence and Repression." The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs 29, no. 2 (March 1, 2010): 12-13,33.
[..] nonviolent resistance belies Israel's claims of victimization and reveals the true victims, thereby subverting Israeli propaganda, which has depended on portraying Palestinians as violent murderers in order to justify Israeli aggression and murder. [..] it was largely as a result of Othman's BDS advocacy trip to Norway that the Norwegian finance minister announced the State Pension Fund's $5.4 million divestment from Elbit, an Israeli company involved in producing security and military equipment that aids Israel's illegal occupation.
Rose, C. "King's Dream: The Legacy of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" Speech." Review. History 38, no. 4 (October 1, 2010): 126-127.
At a time when ongoing cultural wars over American values continue to divide the nation, this detailed look at how Americans at opposite ends of the political spectrum have used parts of the speech to promote their own agendas not only sheds light on the contested legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, but also unravels deep-seated divisions over the meaning of core American beliefs. Sundquist's juxtaposition of King's unyielding faith in America with Black Power (BP) activists' scathing view, however, seemingly invokes the traditional narrative of theBPmovement,which presents a narrow and static portrayal of post-World War II black radicalism.
Vesely-Flad, E. "Creating a Conscience." Fellowship 75, no. 7-9 (October 1, 2009): 3.
Shortly thereafter, he published the landmark Hind Swaraj, which sought to describe satyagraha and his developing antiWestern philosophy. "When I refuse to do a thing that is repugnant to my conscience," wrote [Mohandas Gandhi], "I use soul-force." His teachings helped inspire a nation, as well as people of conscience across the globe, to rise and resist imperialism.
Regardless, the CO. issue is a lens through which our society must continue to grapple with an individual's consciencebased struggle to resist state-sponsored violence. It receives scant attention in our nation today because military conscription is no longer practiced here - and too often, the argument is made that someone who has "freely" decided to join the military cannot change their mind. In March 2010, a Truth Commission on Conscience in War (www.conscienceinwar.org) will address the topic of "selective conscientious objection," bringing this debate to national attention. And for members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW, www.ivaw.org) and other young men and women who have refused deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan, this conversation might literally be one of life and death.
Weisband, E. "How Do I Save My Honor? War, Moral Integrity, and Principled Resignation." Review. Human Rights Quarterly 31, no. 4 (November 1, 2009): 1160-1162.
Felice's book stands as a tribute to those who by means of principled resignation seek, not only to restore personal honor, but as a consequence of the exercise of their public voice, reinvigorate public honor as well. [..] he makes a claim for the importance of a public space in a democratic society for those who, even in war and at times of utter political duress, find it necessary to go public in the name of moral integrity.
Winter, A. "The Laughing Doves of 1812 and the Satiric Endowment of Antiwar Rhetoric in the United States." PMLA. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 124, no. 5 (October 1, 2009): 1562.
Antiwar activists in the United States have often made recourse to satire in order to rebut claims that their dissent is sententious and effeminate. Federalist opponents of the War of 1812 used the genre to posit, moreover, that they alone could manage the military and economic crisis that resulted from a disastrous second war against Great Britain. But satire, in an era of incipient nationalism, was problematically associated with British snobbery. I argue that wartime periodicals show Federalist satire pulling in diverging directions. Projects like Alexander Hanson's Federal Republican are regressive, reviving the Augustan archetype of the satirist as intellectual martyr, even as they unwittingly lay the groundwork for a liberal model of civil disobedience. Projects like George and Henry Helmbold's Tickler are progressive, phrasing Federalist principles in the post-Federalist vocabulary of liberal competition through their experiments with populist dialect, which also anticipate the postwar transformation of British American "satire" into all-American "humor."
Anonymous, . "Notes on contributors." Contemporary Political Theory 9, no. 2 (May 1, 2010): 147-148.
Volker Heins is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Research, Goethe University, Frankfurt, and a member of the Centre for Human Rights & Legal Pluralism at McGill University, Montreal. Carole Pateman is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UCLA, USA and Honorary Professor at EUROS, Cardiff University, UK.
