Transnational social movements, campaigns and individual activists have described their activities in the traditional vocabularies of political dissent: as protest, opposition, contestation, dissidence or rebellion. Where strategies have involved illegal,… Click to show full abstract
Transnational social movements, campaigns and individual activists have described their activities in the traditional vocabularies of political dissent: as protest, opposition, contestation, dissidence or rebellion. Where strategies have involved illegal, well-publicised activities, the vocabularies of resistance and of civil disobedience have become an activist lingua franca. What all such descriptions have in common is that they paint a largely defensive picture of activist aims and self-understandings. In contrast, the emergence of the ‘global constitutionalist’ paradigm in international law and politics has re-introduced the category of constituent power. Transnational initiatives such as the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) have begun to frame their activities in a ‘constitutive’ and less in a ‘reactive’ language. When countering the challenges of cross-border domination, new collectives may grasp the chance for extra-institutional self-activation. The special issue aims to assess and compare the features and the various strengths and weaknesses of the respective languages of contestatory and constitutive politics.
               
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