Reframing civil disobedience: Constituent power as a language of transnational protest

Abstract

In 1992, the Frankfurt scholar Ingeborg Maus launched a polemical attack against then current narratives of democratic protest, objecting to the languages of ‘resistance’ or ‘civil disobedience’ as defensive, servile and insufficiently transformative. This article explores in how far the language of constituent power can be adopted as an alternative justificatory strategy for civil disobedience in transnational protests. In contrast to current approaches that look at states as agents of international civil disobedience-as-constituent power, I suggest we look at political movements. I focus on the example of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) which understands itself as a pan-European movement of civil disobedience, at the same time working towards an articulation and exercise of constituent power among the people(s) of Europe. In the final section, I sharpen the criteria for the invocation of constituent power in transnational protest in distinguishing between its articulation, activation and exercise.