Contenu du sommaire : (Un)civil disobedience

Direct action is an attempt to disrupt a contentious practice, rather than an effort to communicate opposition to that practice to others. It has received much less philosophical attention than the related but distinct notion of civil disobedience, which means that we lack comparable insight into its nature, justification and role in more-or-less democratic societies. This article contends that direct action can be legitimate in democracies if it is carried out in line with what is described here as an ethic of responsibility. This ethic imposes duties upon citizens to moderate the coercive and violent dimensions of their activism, while also restricting the use of direct action to the most serious and urgent cases of harm.

In this paper, I examine the nature and ethics of nonviolent action as a type of political engagement that is distinct from civil disobedience and other favoured philosophical categories. I offer a justification for the specifically coercive character of non-violent action and identify the legitimate role it has to play not only in authoritarian states but in plausibly democratic societies. I critically interrogate Gandhi's influential understanding of nonviolent action – or “satyagraha” – as a method that converts opponents solely through the loving, purifying force of self-suffering and an argument by Vinit Haksar that nonviolent action does not count as coercive so long as its aims are morally justified. I dispute these perspectives and offer a justification for the use of coercive tactics based on democratic, republican grounds as a means to collectively contest certain objectionable forms of political domination.

The Birth of a Modern Nation. Gender, Orientalism and Heteronationalism in the 19th Century
This article explores the gender norms developed by French orientalists and Iranian modernists in the 19th century based on analyzes of their scientific and literary productions and of their social and intellectual trajectories. The first part focuses on the production of knowledge on Iran in the 19th century. It reveals how French orientalists made invisible Iranian elites in their production of orientalist knowledge. It also analyzes the process of orientalization of gender though the trope of the harem. A second part shows how the modernization of Iran was structured by gender norms that targeted women especially and led to the making of a heteronationalism in the end of the 19th century.