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While liberal-democratic states like America, Britain and Australia claim to value freedom of expression and the right to dissent, they have always actually criminalized dissent. This disposition has worsened since 9/11 and the 2008 Great Recession. This ground-breaking study shows that just as dissent involves far more than protest marches, so too liberal-democratic states have expanded the criminalization of dissent. Drawing on political and social theorists like Arendt, Bourdieu and Isin, the book offers a new way of thinking about politics, dissent and its criminalization relationally. Using case studies like the Occupy movement, selective refusal by Israeli soldiers, urban squatters, democratic education and violence by anti-Apartheid activists, the book highlights the many forms dissent takes along with the many ways liberal-democratic states criminalize it. The book highlights the mix of fear and delusion in play when states privilege security to protect an imagined ‘political order’ from difference and disagreement. The book makes a major contribution to political theory, legal studies and sociology. Linking legal, political and normative studies in new ways, Watts shows that ultimately liberal-democracies rely more on sovereignty and the capacity for coercion and declarations of legal ‘states of exception’ than on liberal-democratic principles. In a time marked by a deepening crisis of democracy, the book argues dissent is increasingly valuable.
In the first complete account of prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts, dozens of previously unknown cases come to light, revealing the lengths to which the John Adams administration went in order to criminalize dissent. The campaign to prosecute dissenting Americans under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 ignited the first battle over the Bill of Rights. Fearing destructive criticism and “domestic treachery” by Republicans, the administration of John Adams led a determined effort to safeguard the young republic by suppressing the opposition. The acts gave the president unlimited discretion to deport noncitizens and made it a crime to criticize the president, Congress, or the federal government. In this definitive account, Wendell Bird goes back to the original federal court records and the papers of Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and finds that the administration’s zeal was far greater than historians have recognized. Indeed, there were twice as many prosecutions and planned deportations as previously believed. The government went after local politicians, raisers of liberty poles, and even tavern drunks but most often targeted Republican newspaper editors, including Benjamin Franklin’s grandson. Those found guilty were sent to prison or fined and sometimes forced to sell their property to survive. The Federalists’ support of laws to prosecute political opponents and opposition newspapers ultimately contributed to the collapse of the party and left a large stain on their record. The Alien and Sedition Acts launched a foundational debate on press freedom, freedom of speech, and the legitimacy of opposition politics. The result was widespread revulsion over the government’s attempt to deprive Americans of their hard-won liberties. Criminal Dissent is a potent reminder of just how fundamental those rights are to a stable democracy.
In recent years, Indigenous peoples have lead a number of high profile movements fighting for social and environmental justice in Canada. From land struggles to struggles against resource extraction, pipeline development and fracking, land and water defenders have created a national discussion about these issues and successfully slowed the rate of resource extraction. But their success has also meant an increase in the surveillance and policing of Indigenous peoples and their movements. In Policing Indigenous Movements, Crosby and Monaghan use the Access to Information Act to interrogate how policing and other security agencies have been monitoring, cataloguing and working to silence Indigenous land defenders and other opponents of extractive capitalism. Through an examination of four prominent movements — the long-standing conflict involving the Algonquins of Barriere Lake, the struggle against the Northern Gateway Pipeline, the Idle No More movement and the anti-fracking protests surrounding the Elsipogtog First Nation — this important book raises critical questions regarding the expansion of the security apparatus, the normalization of police surveillance targeting social movements, the relationship between police and energy corporations, the criminalization of dissent and threats to civil liberties and collective action in an era of extractive capitalism and hyper surveillance. In one of the most comprehensive accounts of contemporary government surveillance, the authors vividly demonstrate that it is the norms of settler colonialism that allow these movements to be classified as national security threats and the growing network of policing, governmental, and private agencies that comprise what they call the security state.
"The criminalization of dissent, and possible threats to civil liberties posed by this criminalization, have become central issues of debate within liberal democracies, particularly in relation to discussions of political violence and the role of law in protests. Law against Liberty provides significant commentary on the criminalization of political movements and dissent within (neo)liberal democracies in the contemporary context. The criminalization of dissent has been a common feature of neo-liberal governance in the current period of capitalist globalization. It has accompanied various structural adjustment and free trade policies as the required force to impose such programs on unwilling publics. Police violence has been a constant feature of alternative globalization demonstrations. Examples of escalating state attacks on opponents of global capital include tear gas attacks, use of rubber bullets and concussion grenades, illegal searches and seizures, surveillance and beatings of arrestees, and, most severely, the deaths of people at the hands of police as in Genoa and England. At the same time demonstrators have developed new repertoires of protest practice, including acts of violence and combat. Yet these engagements of escalation (as police and protesters adapt to each other's actions) have been understudied and undertheorized in recent social science works. Most works on the criminalization of dissent focus on a specific national context. Those that offer multinational examples tend to be earlier works that predate the Seattle protests of 1999, a watershed event in the development of alternative globalization movements and struggles. Based on contributions from engaged scholars, many of whom have direct, first-hand experience in the protests that they analyze, this book offers the most extensive and diverse examination of dissent and its criminalization in contemporary liberal democracies."--Publisher.
The Handbook presents a most updated and comprehensive exploration of social movement research. It not only maps, but also expands the field of social movement studies, taking stock of recent developments in cognate areas of studies, within and beyond sociology and political science. While structured around traditional social movement concepts, each section combines the mapping of the state of the art with attempts to broaden our knowledge of social movements beyond classic theoretical agendas, and to identify the contribution that social movement studies can give to other fields of knowledge.
Criminalization of Activism draws on a multiplicity of perspectives and case studies from the Global South and the Global North to show how protest has been subject to processes of criminalization over time. Contributors include scholars and activists from different disciplinary backgrounds, with a balance between authors from the Global North and the Global South. An introduction frames the topic within critical criminology, while also highlighting the possible disciplinary approaches and definitions of criminalization of resistance/activism. The editor also investigates the particularities of the current times in comparison to dynamics of criminalization in prior stages of capitalism. Bringing together a range of criminalization themes into a single volume, compromising historical criminology, Indigenous studies, gender studies, critical criminology, southern criminology and green criminology, it will be of great interest to scholars and students of criminology, social movement theory and social sciences, as well as those involved in activism and with a stand against criminalization.
"This report evaluates patterns of arrest and detention conditions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 25 years after the Oslo Accords granted Palestinians a degree of self-rule over these areas and more than a decade after Hamas seized effective control over the Gaza Strip. Human Rights Watch detailed more than two dozen cases of people detained for no clear reason beyond writing a critical article or Facebook post or belonging to the wrong student group or political movement."--Publisher website.
An eye-opening look at the influential Supreme Court justice who disrupted American jurisprudence in order to delegitimize opponents and establish a conservative legal order
"India's constitution protects the right to peaceful expression and its courts have issued numerous decisions that are protective of the right. However governments at both the national and state level persist in using harsh laws, many of them relics of the colonial era, to criminalize peaceful expression and arrest critics. While some prosecutions, in the end, have been dismissed or abandoned, many people who have engaged in nothing more than peaceful criticism have been arrested, held in pre-trial detention, and forced to defend themselves in costly criminal proceedings. Fear of such actions has led others to engage in self-censorship. In 2016 there has been a spike in the number of sedition cases filed nationwide. Human Rights Watch calls on the Indian government to drop all pending charges and investigations against those who are facing prosecution for the exercise of their right to freedom of expression, halt the abuse of the legal process and detain critics, and amend or repeal relevant laws to bring them into line with international human rights standards"--Page [4] of cover.
A powerful analysis of why lies and falsehoods spread so rapidly now, and how we can reform our laws and policies regarding speech to alleviate the problem. Lying has been with us from time immemorial. Yet today is different-and in many respects worse. All over the world, people are circulating damaging lies, and these falsehoods are amplified as never before through powerful social media platforms that reach billions. Liars are saying that COVID-19 is a hoax. They are claiming that vaccines cause autism. They are lying about public officials and about people who aspire to high office. They are lying about their friends and neighbors. They are trying to sell products on the basis of untruths. Unfriendly governments, including Russia, are circulating lies in order to destabilize other nations, including the United Kingdom and the United States. In the face of those problems, the renowned legal scholar Cass Sunstein probes the fundamental question of how we can deter lies while also protecting freedom of speech. To be sure, we cannot eliminate lying, nor should we try to do so. Sunstein shows why free societies must generally allow falsehoods and lies, which cannot and should not be excised from democratic debate. A main reason is that we cannot trust governments to make unbiased judgments about what counts as "fake news." However, governments should have the power to regulate specific kinds of falsehoods: those that genuinely endanger health, safety, and the capacity of the public to govern itself. Sunstein also suggests that private institutions, such as Facebook and Twitter, have a great deal of room to stop the spread of falsehoods, and they should be exercising their authority far more than they are now doing. As Sunstein contends, we are allowing far too many lies, including those that both threaten public health and undermine the foundations of democracy itself.