This essay focuses on the Marcos regime’s efforts to stifle student protest in the lead-up to and early days of martial law in the Philippines. By changing the perception of student activists from scholars of the nation to radicals who were outside or opposed to the nation, the Marcos government tried to both silence the opposition and promote a notion of Philippine development that identified the good citizen as one who was a productive worker. An examination of the Marcos government’s changes to labor policy alongside its efforts to reshape education allows us to better understand the interconnectedness of Marcosian notions of development, labor exploitation at home and abroad, and state-led attempts to foreclose alternative notions of Philippine progress.
In advance of Donald Trump’s return to power in the United States, several commentators proposed “militant democracy” as the means to guard against authoritarian takeover. Coined a century ago by the German émigré Karl Loewenstein, militant democracy refers to the preemptive, targeted suspension of democratic rights, liberties, and procedures to demobilize those who would use such freedoms to destroy democracy. For its advocates, Trump’s return — and the brutal assaults on civil rights, civil liberties, and the integrity of the constitutional order that has followed — provide evidence that the United States either lacked the tools of militant democracy or failed to mobilize them. The authors argue that the opposite is true. The current crackdown on dissent, epitomized by the assault on pro-Palestine speech, assembly, and mobilization, is better understood as a product of militant democracy — its bitter fruit — than evidence of its absence. As the authors show, today’s war on dissent was forged through the war on communism, the war on crime, and the war on terror, whose paranoid discourses and repressive institutions most often served to target minorities and silence left-wing dissenters, whom it constructs as criminals, foreign agents, or terrorists — subversive and racialized threats from within.
A tradition that often traces back its roots to Ancient Greece, and what remains one of the most dominant strands of contemporary democratic theory, holds that assembly-based deliberation constitutes a corrective for, or even an ideal replacement of, weakening representative models of democracy. While often attributing the unjust outcomes of deliberative decision-making to procedural concerns and considerations around weak statehood, rather than a normative conflict in and of itself, theorists have ignored the possibility that the deliberative project can be not only a means of democratization through the redistribution of political power to everyday citizens, but also a means of entrenching existing structures of domination, de facto turning into yet another mechanism of criminalization of anti-colonial and anti-extractivist dissent. To understand this normative conflict, the entrenchment of both representative democratic systems and the colonial-extractive project, and engage in tracing anti-colonial deliberative theories, the essay follows C. L. R. James's appeal to anchor deliberative democracy's political project within the sites of domination and struggles for liberation: the contemporary shapes of the plantation.
Many political philosophers and theorists argue that acts of political disobedience have a special status or cachet and thus should be treated differently — more sympathetically. This defense of disobedience generates a demand for dissidents who engage in such acts (“disobedients”) to differentiate themselves from mere criminals. According to an influential view, disobedients must act in constrained ways that communicate to their audience that their actions are motivated by conscientious convictions or considered judgments about the injustice against which they protest. This view is, however, unable to deliver plausible verdicts about the actions of disobedients in deeply nonideal societies — in which the social meaning of the actions of members of marginalized groups are systematically distorted, or in which there is no tolerance for law violation in general. In response to these difficulties, this article defends a contextualist view of demarcating political disobedience, which relies on the relationship between an act of law violation and collective action. Specifically, an act of law violation is one of political disobedience if a collective claims it as an act that contributes to its goal of enacting social change, and if the law violator assents to such a claim.
In the wake of Trinidad and Tobago’s Black Power revolution of 1970, governments across the Caribbean passed a series of laws designed to contain the threat of radical activism. These included legislation on immigration, emergency powers, public order, sedition, “racial offenses,” and curbs on the political activities of public servants. Focusing principally on public order acts (POAs), this essay explores how Black Power and other anti-systemic activism were framed as an issue of security and public order, legitimizing measures that curbed freedoms of movement, expression, and assembly; and setting the boundaries of permissible political action. Legislation with roots in the colonial era was renovated and extended to confront challenges to the postcolonial state. Such techniques of colonial power, including measures framed as emergencies, have been routinized in the present day.
