CFP: Krisis Dossier on Civil Disobedience: Dilemmas of Political Resistance

It seems obvious that civil disobedience consists in intentionally unlawful and principled collective acts of protest that have the political aim of changing specific laws, policies or institutions. Civil disobedience is therefore to be distinguished from both legal protest and »ordinary« criminal offenses or »unmotivated« rioting, but also from conscientious objection and full-scale revolution. In practice, however, these boundaries are politically contested and probably cannot be drawn as easily as theory suggests. Furthermore it is equally contested whether civil disobedience always has to be public, nonviolent, exclusively directed at state institutions, limited in its goals, and restricted to transforming the system within its existing limits.

Two of the most prominent theories of civil disobedience, those of Rawls and Habermas, highlight its primarily or even exclusively symbolic character. This, however, seems to reduce civil disobedience to a purely moral appeal, which sets all hopes on a responsive public. On a theoretical as well as on a practical level we are today faced with the question whether civil disobedience requires a moment of real confrontation for it to be politically effective. It seems that civil disobedience does in fact have an irreducible symbolic dimension, but that it cannot be reduced to this dimension, because without moments of real confrontation, it would also lose its symbolic power and turn into a mere appeal to the conscience of the powers that be and their respective majorities. The necessity of going beyond the purely symbolic seems to be substantiated by the symbolic function of civil disobedience itself, as a condition of its effectiveness: civil disobedience is a form of political practice that is essentially relying on stagings and (re-)presentations.

We invite proposals for articles that seek to address these and related issues from a political and sociologically informed perspective that avoids the shortcomings of earlier attempts to theorize civil disobedience from an overly moralistic and juridical perspective. Contributions that focus on recent forms of civil disobedience – the Arab Spring, Occupy, Israel/Palestine, hacktivism, digital disobedience etc. – and how they address the tension between symbolic politics and real confrontation are especially welcome.

If you would like to contribute, please send us a proposal of max. 500 words, before June 1, 2012. We will notify you before June 15 about the acceptance of your proposal. The deadline for a first draft (up to 7000 words) is October 1. You will receive comments by November 1. The deadline for the final version is November 20.

Editorial address: [email protected] | www.krisis.eu  

About Krisis

Krisis is a bi-lingual (English and Dutch) interdisciplinary journal widely read in philosophy and STS circles. It has previously published works by authors such as Étienne Balibar, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, Thomas Pogge and Richard Rorty.

Krisis provides a platform for articles that discuss issues in contemporary social, political and cultural thought, and also seeks to make the work of classic authors relevant to current social and cultural problems. Over the last 25 years Krisis has published original contributions in social and political philosophy, cultural theory, philosophy of science and technology and the partly Dutch invention of empirical philosophy.

While Krisis is a peer-reviewed journal with a high academic standard, it also seeks to uphold its function as a forum for current critical thought on public affairs. That is, Krisis is sensitive to the tradition of European philosophy that takes its role as public thought seriously, and does not overlook its naïve ambition to inform public discourse. Krisis continues actively to seek to contribute to wider societal debates, in the Netherlands and elsewhere.