%0 Journal Article
%T Introduction: Resistance, disobedience or constituent power? Emerging narratives of transnational protest
%A Peter Niesen
%J Journal of International Political Theory
%@ 1755-1722
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/1755088218808065
%X Transnational social movements, campaigns and individual activists have described their activities in the traditional vocabularies of political dissent: as protest, opposition, contestation, dissidence or rebellion. Where strategies have involved illegal, well-publicised activities, the vocabularies of resistance and of civil disobedience have become an activist lingua franca. What all such descriptions have in common is that they paint a largely defensive picture of activist aims and self-understandings. In contrast, the emergence of the ¡®global constitutionalist¡¯ paradigm in international law and politics has re-introduced the category of constituent power. Transnational initiatives such as the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) have begun to frame their activities in a ¡®constitutive¡¯ and less in a ¡®reactive¡¯ language. When countering the challenges of cross-border domination, new collectives may grasp the chance for extra-institutional self-activation. The special issue aims to assess and compare the features and the various strengths and weaknesses of the respective languages of contestatory and constitutive politics
%K Constituent power
%K transnational civil disobedience
%K transnational constituent power
%K transnational protest
%K transnational resistance
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1755088218808065