Digital disobedience and the law

Digital disobedience can be defined as politically motivated online lawbreaking. It includes Distributed Denial of Service actions, hacktivism, digitally based leaking (for example, Anonymous, Wikileaks), and whistleblowing (along the lines pursued by Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden). Given its growing political importance, the phenomenon requires careful theoretical attention. Against the widespread tendency to criminalize digital disobedience by appealing to conventional notions of the ‘rule of law’, this article argues that some of its proponents are in fact engaging in digital lawbreaking as expressions of their fundamental respect for the rule of law. Although this diagnosis highlights the partial overlap with conventional models of civil disobedience (which oftentimes similarly conceive of politically motivated lawbreaking as necessarily resting on a more fundamental respect for the law), we should hesitate before viewing digital disobedience simply as modernized or digitalized civil disobedience. Digital disobedience includes some political novelties, and traditional views of civil disobedience only get us so far in making sense of those novelties.     

Trust,institutions, and indigenous self‐governance: An exploratory study

Trust is important to the institutions that make societies successful. Globally, Indigenous peoples are actively building institutions for self‐governance, but there remains little empirical work on trust in this context. To address this gap, we use a mixed methods approach to explore three levels of trust among individual members from three related, but politically distinct First Nations (Indigenous peoples) in British Columbia, Canada. British Columbia offers a unique and dynamic context to explore trust and its relationship with the diverse institutional choices among First Nations. Survey results show that trust is low among respondents and individual variables predictive of trust in mainstream contexts, like education and employment, are not determinative. However, interpersonal trust and political trust were highest in the First Nation most active in institution building, and who linked this with a cultural revitalization narrative. Interviews suggested a bidirectional relationship between individual and collective drivers of trust in this context.     

The Cost of Terrorism: The Relationship Between International Terrorism and Democratic Governance

After Al Qaeda's destruction of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, many democracies reacted to the event, and to international terrorism in general, by passing laws restricting civil liberties and political rights, raising questions about the balance between security and liberty. Such laws have produced alarms among civil libertarians, worldwide. Are the alarms justified? In this article we analyze the relationship between the yearly number of international terrorist attacks in 24 countries from 1968–2003 and (a) measures of civil liberties and political rights as provided by Freedom House, and (b) levels of democracy as measured in the Polity IV scales. We take the number of international terrorist events, by country, from data provided by the Memorial Institute of the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) http://www.tkb.org/Home.jsp. Our analysis indicates that there is, generally, no relationship between the number of international terrorist events and the levels of civil rights, political rights, or democracy as measured by the Freedom House and Polity IV indicators. When there is a statistically significant relationship, it is negative, opposite to what is predicted by the tradeoff hypothesis.