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"Can Digital Disobedience Be Civil?"

Robin Celikates
University of Amsterdam

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Bio: Robin Celikates is Associate Professor (UHD) of Political and Social Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. He is also an associated member of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) in Frankfurt am Main, where he taught political philosophy before coming to Amsterdam, and a Program Leader at the Amsterdam Center for Globalization Studies. Currently he co-ordinates the NWO-funded research project "Transformations of Civil Disobedience". His main areas of specialization are: theories of civil disobedience, democracy, collective action, recognition, migration and citizenship, and methodological questions in political and social philosophy (especially critical theory). Other areas of interest include the philosophy of the social sciences, moral philosophy, Rousseau, and sociological and political theory.Ìý

Abstract:ÌýCan Digital Disobedience Be Civil? >> In liberal discourse civil disobedience is often understood as a form of protest that involves breaking the law but restricts itself to being exclusively symbolic, nonviolent and reformist. This understanding stands in tension with a variety of practices of disobedience involving forms of disruption and direct confrontation often classified as violent and aiming at a more radical transformation of the existing system - while still claiming to be civil. In this talk I will first problematize mainstream understandings of the ‘civil’ in ‘civil disobedience’ and then turn to digital disobedience as a set of practices that exemplifies the complex reality of disobedience - a reality that raises a series of conceptual, normative and political challenges for thinking about digital disobedience as civil, including questions of anonymity, public justification and political effectivity.