scholarly journals Contesting a biopolitics of information and communications: The importance of truth and sousveillance after Snowden

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguelángel Verde Garrido
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Information And Communications Technologies ◽  
Neoliberal Governmentality ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Political Economies ◽  
Digital Agency ◽  
The Guardian ◽  
Mass Surveillance ◽  
Policies And Practices

This article aims to provide a novel conceptual understanding of the nature of the global mass surveillance policies and practices revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden in collaboration with the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers. The critical analysis and conceptual reinterpretation of state and corporate surveillance and its impact on the political agency of civil society is multidisciplinary. An intersection of surveillance studies, political philosophy, and global politics/international relations provides an overview of the policies and practices that states and corporations develop and implement in relation to information and communications technologies (ICT). Clarifying how contemporary society is global and digital, it analyzes the way in which political economies inform contemporary policies and practices of surveillance. A critical analysis the relation of political economy to neoliberal governmentality, biopolitical technologies of power, and contemporary regimes of truth, leads to posit that global mass surveillance is a technology of power deployed by a contemporary biopolitics of information and communication. A conceptual reinterpretation of Foucault’s notion of parrhesia and Mann’s notion of sousveillance leads to posit that parrhesiastic sousveillance is a socio-political and technologically-enabled modality of resistance that can resemantize contemporary politics of truth and lead towards a newborn digital agency for global(ized) civil society.

The Rise of Digital Repression

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Feldstein
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Political Repression ◽  
The World ◽  
Dna Collection ◽  
Opposition Movements ◽  
Mass Surveillance

This book documents the rise of digital repression—how governments are deploying new technologies to counter dissent, maintain political control, and ensure regime survival. The emergence of varied digital technologies is bringing new dimensions to political repression. At its core, the expanding use of digital repression reflects a fairly simple motivation: states are seeking and finding new ways to control, manipulate, surveil, or disrupt real or perceived threats. This book investigates the goals, motivations, and drivers of digital repression. It presents case studies in Thailand, the Philippines, and Ethiopia, highlighting how governments pursue digital strategies based on a range of factors: ongoing levels of repression, leadership, state capacity, and technological development. But a basic political motive—how to preserve and sustain political incumbency—remains a principal explanation for their use. The international community is already seeing glimpses of what the frontiers of repression look like, such as in China, where authorities have brought together mass surveillance, online censorship, DNA collection, and artificial intelligence to enforce their rule in Xinjiang. Many of these trends are going global. This has major implications for democratic governments and civil society activists around the world. The book also presents innovative ideas and strategies for civil society and opposition movements to respond to the digital autocratic wave.

Resisting Austerity: Resonant Solidarities and Small Wins

2021 ◽  
pp. 135-154
Author(s):  
Jonathan S. Davies
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Local State ◽  
International Solidarity ◽  
Regime Politics ◽  
Political Economies

Chapter 6 explores resistance from the perspective of its capacity to deplete the governability of austere neoliberalism, construct solidarities, incubate alternative political economies in local state and civil society, and channel particularistic grievances into a more generalised anti-neoliberal or anti-capitalist politics. It highlights three ways in which resistance to austere neoliberalism acts positively in and against neoliberal regime politics. First, in the specific case of Barcelona, resistance propelled anti-austerity forces into office and consolidated municipalist regime capacity through discourses, practices and mobilisations around international solidarity, anti-racism and feminisation. Second, the chapter discusses numerous instances in which acts of resistance serve to politicize and reconstitute civil society forces organising against austere neoliberalism. Third, it identifies significant trends towards political generalisation, where specific grievances give rise to systemic grievances and critique.

Property, Rights, and Freedom

1994 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald F. Gaus
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Economic System ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Basic Liberty ◽  
John Gray ◽  
Jan Narveson ◽  
Constitutional Tradition ◽  
The Guardian ◽  
Instrumental View

William Perm summarized the Magna Carta thus: “First, It asserts Englishmen to be free; that's Liberty. Secondly, they that have free-holds, that's Property.” Since at least the seventeenth century, liberals have not only understood liberty and property to be fundamental, but to be somehow intimately related or interwoven. Here, however, consensus ends; liberals present an array of competing accounts of the relation between liberty and property. Many, for instance, defend an essentially instrumental view, typically seeing private property as justified because it is necessary to maintain or protect other, more basic, liberty rights. Important to our constitutional tradition has been the idea that “[t]he right to property is the guardian of every other right, and to deprive a people of this, is in fact to deprive them of their liberty.” Along similar lines, it has been argued that only an economic system based on private property disperses power and resources, ensuring that private people in civil society have the resources to oppose the state and give effect to basic liberties. Alternatively, it is sometimes claimed that only those with property develop the independent characters that are necessary to preserve a regime of liberty. But not only have liberals insisted that, property is a means of preserving liberty, they have often conceived of it as an embodiment of liberty, or as a type of liberty, or indeed as identical to liberty. This latter view is popular among contemporary libertarians or classical liberals. Jan Narveson, for instance, bluntly asserts that “Liberty is Property,” while John Gray insists that “[t]he connection between property and the basic liberties is constitutive and not just instrumental.”

scholarly journals Comparing Digital Protest Media Imaginaries: Anti-Austerity Movements in Greece, Italy & Spain

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 404-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emiliano Treré ◽  
Sandra Jeppesen ◽  
Alice Mattoni
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Political Economies ◽  
Independent Media

This article presents findings from an empirical study of repertoires of contention and communication engaged during anti-austerity protests by the Indignados in Spain, the precarious generation in Italy, and the Aganaktismenoi in Greece. Drawing on 60 semi­structured interviews with activists and independent media producers involved in the 2011 wave of contention, we bring together social movement and communications theoretical frameworks to present a comparative critical analysis of digital protest media imaginaries. After examining the different socio-political and protest media contexts of the three countries translocally, our critical analysis emphasizes the emergence of three different imaginaries: in Spain the digital protest media imaginary was technopolitical, grounded in the politics and political economies of communication technologies emerging from the free culture movement; in Italy this imaginary was techno-fragmented, lacking cohesion, and failed to bring together old and new protest media logics; and finally in Greece it was techno-pragmatic, envisioned according to practical objectives that reflected the diverse politics and desires of media makers rather than the strictly technological or political affordances of the digital media forms and platforms. This research reveals how pivotal the temporal and geographical dimensions are when analyzed using theoretical perspectives from both communications and social movement research; moreover it emphasizes the importance of studying translocal digital protest media imaginaries as they shape movement repertoires of contention and communication; both elements are crucial to better understanding the challenges, limitations, successes and opportunities for digital protest media.

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