030246 SE Dimensions of the Political: Civil Disobedience (2023W)

Images of mostly young people taking to the streets urging more radical measures to curb climate change and its disastrous consequences have been circulating in the media for some time. They are reminiscent of other renowned protest movements that used unlawful methods to fight injustices in liberal democracies: the most famous are the various actions (sit-ins, bus boycotts, etc.) of the civil rights movement in the southern states of the USA, as a result of which the regime of racial segregation was brought to an end. Such protests claim to practise civil disobedience. The term is understood to mean the legitimate (under certain conditions, e.g. non-violence) infringement of individual legal norms in liberal democracies with the aim of working towards a change in the legal situation or state policy. In this seminar we want to approach the phenomenon of civil disobedience from the perspective of legal philosophy: We will ask what constitutes civil disobedience and what distinguishes it from other forms of protest, under what circumstances it is justified in liberal democracies and which role it can play in them. Historical examples as well as current protest actions that claim the term civil disobedience for themselves will be examined. In addition to legal-philosophical literature and current reports, literary and pop-cultural discussions of civil disobedience (comics, films, TV series) will serve as a basis for the treatment of the themes.