Pristupačnost
dear Students,
on Wednesday 27 May, we will attend the lecture below instead of my lecture, signature list will be circulated. the seminar will take place normally so that you can present your work.
Zrinjka Perusko
Symposium
CONTENTIOUS POLITICS:
POLITICAL DISSENT AND UNCIVILITY
27th of May, 2015 at 12:00
University of Zagreb
Faculty of Political Science
Main Building, room D
PROGRAM
12:00 – 12:40 Derek Edyvane (University of Leeds),
Toleration and Civility
12:40 – 13:20 Discussion
13:20 – 14:00 Lunch Break
14:00 – 14:40 Tamara Caraus (CAS Fellow), The East European Dissidence in
Transnational Perspective: Towards a Cosmopolitan Disobedience
14:40 – 15:20 Discussion
PAPERS & SPEAKERS
Derek Edyvane, Toleration and Civility: Two Tales of Everyday Diplomacy
The January 2015 attack on the offices of French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, has inflamed longstanding debates about how the members of liberal democratic societies should respond to normative diversity. Living with others in conditions of moral and cultural difference - the 'diplomacy of everyday life' - is notoriously difficult. But despite its notoriety, this specific question of the *difficulty* of accommodating diversity, and of living with difference, is one that has not attracted much attention from political theorists. What is it that enables any particular regime of accommodation to attract the enthusiastic allegiance of its supporters? Many people do experience the accommodation of diversity as a good - can we render their outlook intelligible? These questions form the focus of the paper. In order to address them, it is necessary to adopt a slightly unconventional approach. Most work in the political theory of toleration and multiculturalism tends to be quite 'state-centric', but if we are to articulate the goods of everyday diplomacy, we need to think more about what is sometimes called the 'lived experience' of diversity, about the ways in which political ideas and practices can be integrated (or can fail to be integrated) with everyday life. In this paper, I consider Samuel Scheffler's account of the good of toleration, which links the practice of toleration with the development of an intrinsically valuable and rewarding form of fraternal solidarity. I shall outline some reservations about Scheffler's account, and contrast it with a distinctive civility-based account of everyday diplomacy. Toleration and civility are often treated as being (almost) synonymous, but my account will suggest a surprisingly deep rupture between them, one that provokes fundamental questions both about the kind of society a liberal democracy is, and about the kinds of people we - the inhabitants of liberal democracies - really are.
Derek Edyvane – Assistant Professor in in political theory, specialising in the area of contemporary political philosophy. His first degree was a BA in history and politics from Lancaster University. After graduating, he went to the University of York, where he studied first for an MA and then for a PhD in political philosophy. Having completed the PhD, he was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship.
His research covers a range of issues and problems in contemporary political philosophy. He is particularly interested in the concept of political community and its relationship to the moral diversity and conflict characteristic of modern liberal democracies. He also has research interests in multiculturalism, political ethics and political liberalism.
He is an author and co-author of three books (Edyvane, D. (2012) Civic Virtue and The Sovereignty of Evil: Public Morality in Uncertain Times (Routledge); Edyvane, D. and Matravers, M. (eds) (2012) Toleration Re-Examined (Routledge); Edyvane, D.J. (2007) Community and Conflict: The Sources of Liberal Solidarity. Palgrave MacMillan) and numerous articles in leading scientific journals.
Tamara Caraus, The East European Dissidence in Transnational Perspective: Towards a Cosmopolitan Disobedience
Globalization and the post-2008 financial crisis have generated modes of opposition and dissent, be they dissent from global political-economic systems, opposition to international institutions or to local political regimes, and we are witnessing the emergence of a new type of global politics – the politics of dissent and disobedience. However, the predominant (Rawlsian) understanding of civil disobedience, as theory and action developed within the modern nation-state, fails to capture the transformation of disobedience in global context. Aiming at a new perspective of conceiving disobedience in global context and assuming that contemporary protests often draw from modes and imaginations of earlier modes of dissent, this presentation shows firstly that the East European dissidence emerged as a transnational political action in its nature and scope, and its theoretical relevance goes beyond the historical context where it was manifested. Second, the presentation argues that there are important points of intersection between theory of civil disobedience and this historical episode of dissent, although the standard (Rawlsian) theory of civil disobedience, tailored for a ‘more or less just society’, dismissed the relevance of Eastern European dissidence as taking part in an unjust and non-democratic political regime. Third, the presentation maps the differences between these two patterns of dissent, arguing that the East European dissidence as a pattern of dissent has more relevance than the standard civil disobedience for understanding resistance in the current globalised context, where power, be it political or economic, has non-democratic elements. Finally, the theoretical underpinnings of the East European dissidence and its relevance for global context are advanced as cosmopolitan disobedience - a concept to be applied to a further wider discussion on the structural effects that globalization has on the definition, justification and role of disobedience.
Tamara Caraus - Researcher at New Europe College, Bucharest, Romania and a Fellow at Center for Advanced Studies of Southeastern Europe, University of Rijeka. Her current area of research includes political theory of cosmopolitanism, dissidence, civil disobedience, global resistance, and agonistic/radical democracy. Tamara Caraus has undertaken research projects in political philosophy at Institut fur die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, Vienna, Austria; University of Uppsala, Sweden; University of Groningen, The Netherland; Oxford University, UK; Palacky University of Olomouc, Czech Republic and others. She contributed with articles to various academic journals and edited volumes, published Tzara mea (2001), Ethical Perspectives on the Postmodern Rewriting (2003), Traps of Identity (2011), and co-edited Cosmopolitanism and the Legacy of Dissent (Routledge, 2014).
