CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Repetto, Elettra |
|---|---|
| Title | Transnational Civil Disobedience: Understanding illegal political dissent beyond borders |
| Summary | This thesis reviews the concept of civil disobedience as defined by Rawls, expanding it beyond borders, and focuses on its consequences, especially the unintended harmful ones. The main features associated with disobedience, its political and civil nature, its nonviolence, and its communicativeness are analyzed and tested transnationally while I also focus on the agents of illegal political dissent and their motivations. Departing from an understanding of disobedience where citizens were the agents par excellence, I introduce migrants but also digital actors such as hackers and whistleblowers as the new agents of change, alongside social movements and NGOs. Their disobedience is transnational in its crossing borders in diverse ways I will explore, as it addresses transnational targets and denounces problems that affect the world or different states in the same way, like climate change. To justify such acts, on the one side, I focus on the wrongs disobedience normally contests, i.e. violations of rights, the lack of political participation, the unconstitutionality of the law, but I also introduce the possibility that civil disobedience is justified when it legitimately responds to a serious threat in a preventive manner. On the other, I deal with the natural duties that each of us has and that apply globally, and that in some cases can justify disobedience or even make it an obligation when we cannot discharge our duties otherwise. The last part of my thesis is dedicated to the consequences of transnational civil disobedience (TCD)and explores whether TCD could still be justified the moment it causes damage to people, who are not bystanders, and who are already disadvantaged or are exactly those protesters wanted to help, TCD could still be justified. My answer involves considering human beings as autonomous and forces protesters to take into account the interests of the people they are protesting for or who might be in some way affected by their disobedience. This requires protesters to take into account the possible affected parties in planning their protests, both making sure protesters do not act on others’ behalf without them knowing, and, later, discharging the duty to redress those they may affect. This holds true even when their protest is morally motivated and all things considered just and good. Here, the specific agents on whom the duty of reparation falls, as well as the methods to redress people are only hinted at, and open to a new direction of research. |
| Supervisor | Miklosi, Zoltan |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/repetto_elettra.pdf |
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