NZCCL / VUW Law essay prize winner for 2025 announced!
We are delighted to announce that the winner of the NZ Council for Civil Liberties essay prize for 2025 is Jessica Ye for her essay Rupturing the liberal grammar of ‘critical’ civil disobedience theories: Decolonial refusal of state recognition and affirmation of alternative lifeworlds.
Jessica’s piece was a provocative exploration of what civil disobedience means in a colonial society. Her suggestion is that much decolonial protest is not so much a participatory political action but rather steps towards building a new and separate political system. The essay challenges liberal democratic assumptions and obliges the reader to question their own biases. – Thomas Beagle, Chairperson, NZCCL
We hope to organise a webinar for Jessica to explain her essay and answer questions.
The competition is open to students at the Faculty of Law within Victoria University.
Essay abstract
Liberal democracy maintains such a hegemony in contemporary political theory that even ‘critical’ theorists of civil disobedience have struggled to delink from it. The risk of treating liberal democracy as an irreproachable normative horizon that can accommodate the claims of all civil disobedients, is that theorists obscure the very colonial, imperial and racial power structures that some civil disobedients challenge. To prevent the risk of a ‘race-neutral’ approach to theorisation and ensure authentic representation of the claims and methods of civil disobedients, then, an epistemic turn is required. This requires civil disobedience theorists to epistemically disobey and draw on critical decolonial theory.
Decolonial theory challenges the trend in the civil disobedience literature to frame the increasingly coercive means deployed by civil disobedients as communicative, which subsumes their civil disobedience into appeals to the state for recognition. Rather, disobedients, particularly indigenous and allied decolonial actors, refuse the fantasy of emancipation by settler states and states that are former colonial powers. Furthermore, decolonial extralegal acts should not be read solely as denials of state authority but as affirmative enactments of other modes of political life which exceed a liberal imaginary. These kinds of acts may be compatible, but incommensurable with civil disobedience as a category due to their world-building dimension. At other times, certain decolonial acts enacted within indigenous law, sovereignty and governance cannot be considered civil disobedience. Finally, decolonial theory provokes theorists to revisit what they take the point of theorising civil disobedience to be. Is it to set boundaries that delimit justifiable action, or is it to theorise, with a good measure of self-reflexivity, in solidarity with activists who pursue liberation on the ground?