Beyond (and Before) the Transnational Turn: Recovering Civil Disobedience as Decolonizing Praxis

Can civil disobedience be transnationalized? This question presumes civil disobedience to be a fundamentally domestic concept—one constitutively tied to both the nation-state and the normative underpinnings of liberal, constitutional democracies. This article shows how this assumption mistakes one v...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Democratic theory (Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)) N.Y.)), 2022-12, Vol.9 (2), p.11-36
Main Author:	Pineda, Erin
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	20th century Activists Book publishing Citizenship Civil disobedience Civil rights Civil rights workers Decolonization Democracy Dominance History of ideas India Liberalism Mays, Benjamin Nation states New York Political activism Political science Praxis Rustin, Bayard South Africa Transnationalism United Kingdom White supremacy
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Summary:	Can civil disobedience be transnationalized? This question presumes civil disobedience to be a fundamentally domestic concept—one constitutively tied to both the nation-state and the normative underpinnings of liberal, constitutional democracies. This article shows how this assumption mistakes one version of civil disobedience’s twentieth-century intellectual history for the whole of it, and risks reproducing binaries (domestic vs. international, democracies vs. non-democracies) that trouble attempts to theorize the transnational. Turning to an alternative intellectual history—a network of civil rights and anticolonial activists—reveals a novel theory of civil disobedience as decolonizing praxis, as well the stakes of these binaries: the disavowal of white supremacy as pervasive and durable global structure of governance, linking the domestic to the international, and democratic rule to domination.
ISSN:	2332-8894 2332-8908