Cosmopolitan disobedience
| Published date | 01 October 2021 |
| Date | 01 October 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088219850196 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088219850196
Journal of International Political Theory
2021, Vol. 17(3) 222 –239
© The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1755088219850196
journals.sagepub.com/home/ipt
Cosmopolitan disobedience
Steve Cooke
University of Leicester, UK
Abstract
Increasingly, protests occur across borders and are carried out by non-nationals. Many of
these protests include elements that break the laws of their host country and are aimed
at issues of global concern. Despite the increasing frequency of transnational protest,
little ethical consideration has been given to it. This article provides a cosmopolitan
justification for transnational disobedience on behalf of self and others. The article
argues that individuals may be justified in illegally protesting in other states, and that in
some circumstances they may do so even when laws have been legitimately constituted
by the domestic constituencies of those states. Using a cosmopolitan reading of the
notion of civility and of the civil realm, the article argues that transnational protests are
capable of conforming to the normative and conceptual standards necessary for them
to be labelled civil disobedience. As a result, they ought to carry a privileged moral
status compared with other forms of protest. The article applies the All Affected Principle
to argue that a democratic deficit can provide transnational protesters and resident
migrants with a right to civil disobedience even where that right is not held by members
of the demos they protest within.
Keywords
All Affected Principle, civil disobedience, cosmopolitanism, direct action, environmental
activism, global citizenship, protest, transnational protest
On 18 September 2013, two Greenpeace activists, protesting against oil drilling in the
Arctic, attempted to climb a Russian oil rig in order to hang a banner from it. The protest
was conducted peacefully and preceded by an announcement on social media. The two
activists were captured and detained by the Russian coastguard. The following day,
Russian security forces boarded the activists’ ship, the Arctic Sunrise, and detained the
ship’s crew, a freelance journalist and more activists. In total, 30 people were taken at
gunpoint, beaten and imprisoned. They became known as the Arctic 30. The Arctic 30
Corresponding author:
Steve Cooke, School of History, Politics & International Relations, University of Leicester, University Road,
Leicester LE1 7RH, UK.
Email: smc77@le.ac.uk
850196IPT0010.1177/1755088219850196Journal of International Political TheoryCooke
research-article2019
Article
Cooke 223
spent 2 months in jail. Initially, they were charged with piracy – carrying a 15-year maxi-
mum sentence – although this charge was dropped after international outcry and replaced
with one of aggravated hooliganism, carrying a maximum term of 7 years. All 30 prison-
ers were eventually released and granted amnesty following pressure from governments
and civil society. Nine months after it was seized, the Arctic Sunrise was also released.
The case of the Arctic 30 is an example of a trend towards increasingly global forms
of protest. Protesters from across the globe routinely join together to practice their activ-
ism across borders. Many of these protests are addressed at issues that are global or
international in nature such as climate change or international finance regimes. When
world leaders gather each year for the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, they are met by environmental pro-
testers from around the world. Similarly, when members of the World Economic Forum
meet so too will they be greeted by anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation protesters.
Others speak to more localised cross-border issues such the case in 2018 when activists
from Spain, France, Germany, Holland and Italy gathered near the French border in the
Italian town of Ventimiglia to protest against policies preventing migrants entering
Europe from North Africa via the Mediterranean. But there are also cases where protest-
ers cross borders to protest the ostensibly domestic issues of another nation. For exam-
ple, in the United States, 2016–2018 protests against the local impact on the regional
water supply and sites of spiritual importance resulting from the construction of the
Dakota Access Pipeline drew in First Nation and other environmental activists from
Canada. Finally, foreigners are often participants in protests within the nation they reside
in. A good example of this is the case of protests against attacks on the Central European
University (CEU) in Hungary by the increasingly authoritarian government of Victor
Orban. These protests in 2017 and 2018 included thousands of international students and
academics resident in Hungary for the purposes of work or study.
These forms of transnational and global protest create interesting issues for political
morality, particularly when they involve deliberate breaches of law. To date, most ethical
consideration of illegal protest has been conducted in the context of a citizen’s relationship
with her state and her fellow citizens within that state. As a result, challenging problems
raised by the issue of foreign non-state actors engaging in protest have been largely over-
looked. This problem is one identified in a recent paper by Siobhan O’Sullivan, Care
McCausland, and Scott Brenton. In their paper, they try to determine whether anti-whaling
activities on the high seas and other forms of illegal transnational animal rights activism
can be described as civil disobedience using a Rawlsian understanding of the concept. The
focus of their attempt is to ask whether acts such as those of Sea Shepard and Greenpeace
conform to the requirements of being conscientiously motivated, carried out in public,
aimed at changing the law and non-violent. In the course of their analysis, they highlight
the link between the Rawlsian conception of civil disobedience and the nation state, noting
that his conception defines civil disobedience as a means by which citizens challenge the
laws of their own states. This, they note, leaves the conception ill-equipped to address
contemporary forms of activism and the existence of transnational law. They conclude with
a call to re-conceptualise civil disobedience in a way that connects it with notions of global
citizenship (O’Sullivan et al., 2017). This article is an attempt to answer that call and
address some of the wider issues raised by the practice of transnational disobedience.
To continue reading
Request your trial