Paper short abstract:

I argue that civil disobedience is best seen as political, not moral action because its principles are undecidable and therefore always subject to justificatory challenges. Principles underpinning obligations to obey or permission to disobey the law are thus political and subject to politicisation.

Paper long abstract:

Civil disobedience is generally agreed to be a permissible type of principled rule-breaking. But what kind of principles underpin civil disobedience? While both traditional and contemporary philosophical conceptions of civil disobedience typically stress the moral aspect of civil disobedience, in this paper I argue that civil disobedience is best seen as a political rather than moral type of action. To argue this, I first reverse the question: rather than asking under what conditions it is permissible to break the law, I ask why we typically think we ought to obey the law. A moral view, such as that classically offered by John Rawls, suggests that the moral principles purportedly embodied in the law specify when and why the law demands obedience. Based on a careful reading of Jacques Derrida’s seminal 1992 essay Force of Law, I argue that moral principles provide a particularly thin basis on which to construct an obligation of obedience. Such principles will either fail to attain consensus, or simply be too general and thin to supply an adequate basis for an entire political community. This is so because, as Derrida argues, any decision aiming at justice must go through what he calls the undecidable. Undecidability specifies decisions that lack any determinate ground to ascertain that no further justificatory questions could or need be asked after the decision, but which must nevertheless be decided. Ultimately, this suggests that any concept of justice is political because it must decide on the undecidable. Concretely, this means that any principle – moral or otherwise – which underpins either the obligation to obey the law or the permission to disobey it can always be subject to further politicisation by being challenged and contested. Civil disobedience, therefore, is best seen as a type of rule-breaking rooted in the political.

Paper short abstract:

This talk engages practices of self-reform among climate activists, arguing that intimate practices of ethical conduct appear closely entangled with more spectacular public actions. This might contribute to reconciling moral and political anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

Climate activists widely agree that attempts to divert planetary collapse involves both concerted action on the side of governments and diligent reform on the side of individuals and communities. Complementing existing research on highly visible and mediatized forms of public action, such as marches or blockades, this talk considers decidedly off-street and non-public forms of climate activism. Drawing on fieldwork among climate activists in Germany, I engage practices of self-reform and realignment geared toward realizing more just futures or avoiding ecological collapse. In so doing, I demonstrate that the intimate and the embodied self emerges here as the object of routinized practices of monitoring and control that aim at reforming habits, desires or tastes toward – what is perceived as – the planetary good. Against this background, I argue that intimate practices of ethical conduct appear closely entangled with more spectacular public actions, one frequently feeding into the other, yet to understand the working of selves requires different methodological stances and theoretical sensibilities. This might provide for grounds to reconcile moral and political anthropology.

Paper short abstract:

I will analyse how rules emerge, change, lose their significance in the context of environmental collapse, for the climate movements and the ethnographer studying these. I will also consider how movements for the future aim to pave a better future through predictive and prefigurative rule-making.

Paper long abstract:

My paper would be considering anthropologically what rules evolve from facing the future of environmental catastrophes, how do relations with existing expectations, regulations, norms change, and how are such changes predicted and rules to prefigure a better future established when fighting against the destruction of the future?

Using data from on- and offline ethnographic fieldwork from activist groups (Extinction Rebellion; forest protests; anti-fracking campaigns) in Estonia and the UK, I will analyse how future imaginings are channelled into action and what rules such action is expected to abide by. What are the social, cultural, creative and systematic ways in which people study, guide, abandon or embrace the idea of profound change in the world where nothing is guaranteed? What rules for the future are foreseen and applied, and what are the relations between the rules of today and the rules of the predicted future? The comparative dimension of this study would provide further insights into what frames and guides such futures when the focus of the main concern is on climate change, biodiversity loss, and/or the extraction industry. What rules must one break today to even take part in the future?

Finally, the presentation aims to consider the methodological aspects of studying the future. What rules should the ethnographer follow and what are they expected, or prefer to, break when the people with whom they study fall with their visions of terrible futures?

Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the moralities through which neighbourhood patrols enacting forms of informal policing renegotiate the rules of belonging to and traversing particular urban or national spaces and the ambiguities of the ‘legality’ that they purport to defend while often bordering on the illegal.

Paper long abstract:

Informal policing is on the rise in Europe. Over the last decade, neighbourhood crime prevention patrols, civilian defense groups, border patrols have mobilized under various forms in several European countries. While not constituting a unified social movement, such groups tend to place themselves on the right side of the political spectrum; some of them harbour (neo-)fascist ideologies of moral righteousness and sacrifice for the country, and many of them subscribe to the imaginary of the ‘crimmigrant Other' that needs to be expelled or exterminated. Often operating in a grey legal area, such formations attempt to renegotiate the rules around who is entitled to be in a given urban or national space, and who is not. Rightful residents are separated from those perceived to be foreign, barbaric, immoral, dangerous, or outright criminal. In the process, the rules of belonging to and traversing particular spaces are negotiated according to moral criteria. While criticizing the law for being too lenient towards undeserving foreigners, they claim to defend 'legality'. Drawing upon research carried out between 2014 and 2017 in Italy, as well as within my current project on the German and Dutch cases of informal policing in the urban space, I will reflect on the ambiguities of discourses purporting to defend ‘legality’ through means which often border on the illegal. This reflection affords a glimpse into the transformations of the idea of a state increasingly perceived as unable or unwilling to protect its own citizens.