GUY AITCHISON

I offer a conceptual framework for assessing the normative legitimacy of coercive disobedience—involving threats, disruption, force, and deceit—by social movements. A standard liberal view is that while coercion may be required to resist authoritarian regimes, it is illegitimate in a democratic state since it conflicts with majority rule and mutual respect. In restricting disobedience to a form of moral persuasion, this perspective neglects how social power and material interests can distort the conditions for open, fair deliberation. I offer a principled defense of coercive disobedience, not only in repressive states but in plausibly democratic societies....read more.

Online Public Shaming (OPS) is a form of norm enforcement that involves collectively imposing reputational costs on a person for having a certain kind of moral character. OPS actions aim to disqualify her from public discussion and certain normal human relations. We argue that this constitutes an informal collective punishment that it is presumptively wrong to impose (or seek to impose) on others. OPS functions as a form of ostracism that fails to show equal basic respect to its targets. Additionally, in seeking to mobilise unconstrained collective power with potentially serious punitive consequences, OPS is incompatible with due process values...read more.

This article provides a political theory of the hunger strike, and sets out principles for its normative evaluation. My main focus is on recent actions by detained migrants, though the historical practice of hunger strikes is, of course, much broader, spanning cultural and ideological divides, including the British suffragettes, Gandhi, Irish republicans, the ANC, Turkish communists, Palestinian militants, Guantanamo Bay detainees, and many thousands of ‘regular’ prisoners with no specific political affiliation or status. Hunger strikes can be situated within the more general phenomenon of sacrificial resistance, where agents inflict physical hardship and injury on their bodies (up to the point of death)...read more.