Introduction: Resistance, disobedience or constituent power? Emerging narratives of transnational protest

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.