Suchergebnisse

Studying diffusion -- Quiet, you may wake up the Greeks : the diffusion of protests against austerity -- ACTA la vista baby : the diffusion of protest against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement -- TTIP-ing over democracy : the diffusion of protests against TTIP and CETA.

The article analyses local contestation of data centres in the Dutch province of North Holland. I explore why and how local councillors and citizen groups mobilized against data centres and demanded democratization of decision-making processes about digital infrastructure. This analysis is used as a vantage point to problematize existing policy and academic narratives on digital sovereignty in Europe. I show, first, that most debates on digital sovereignty so far have overlooked the sub-national level, which is especially relevant for decision making on digital infrastructure. Second, I insist that what matters is not only where digital sovereignty lies, that is, who has the power to decide over digital infrastructural projects: for example, corporations, states, regions, or municipalities. What matters is also how power is exercised. Emphasizing the popular democratic dimension of sovereignty, I argue for a comprehensive democratization of digital sovereignty policies. Democratization in this context is conceived as a multimodal multi-level process, including parliaments, civil society and citizens at the national, regional and local levels alike. The shape of the cloud should be citizens' to decide.

While the Brexit referendum campaign has been extensively researched, media, regulatory bodies, and academics have often talked at cross-purposes. A strong focus on Cambridge Analytica's role in the 2016 referendum, despite official investigations concluding the company had only limited involvement in the campaign, has distracted attention from more mundane but highly controversial data practices, including selling voters' data to third parties or re-using campaign data without consent from data subjects. This empirical case study of data-driven referendum campaigning around Brexit raises two broader theoretical questions: First, moving beyond the current focus on transparency and accountability, can public participation in the ownership and management of campaign data address some of the problematic data practices outlined? Second, most academic literature on data-driven campaigning, in general, and referendum campaigns, in particular, has often overlooked the key question of what happens with campaigning data once campaigns are over. What legal safeguards or mechanisms of accountability and participation are there to guarantee consent when it comes to further re-use of people's data gathered during campaigns? Ultimately, the article raises the question of who should have a say in how "people's data" is used in referendum campaigns and afterwards and makes a case for democratising such decisions.

In our times of increasing screen dependency, the data infrastructures making possible 'online' or 'virtual' modalities of work and leisure have been increasingly contested. From the Netherlands to Ireland and Chile, activists have challenged the environmental consequences of energy- and water-intensive data centres, as well as the often undemocratic ways of deciding on their construction. In this piece, I draw on insights from the field of social movement studies to outline four key problems that can help us understand better the bottom-up infrastructural politics of screen media: (1) How can we explain the differential politicization of data infrastructures in various national contexts? (2) How do movements frame their resistance to data infrastructures? (3) How do we define success in the contestation of data infrastructures? (4) To what extent have we observed the transnationalization of data infrastructures contestation? These problems open up potential new directions for research that draws on comparisons and is attentive to diffusion processes across contexts.

Despite the growing literature on Brexit, specifically, and conflicts of sovereignty, more generally, there has been insufficient research on how the concept of sovereignty has been used in citizen campaigns and street protests across the United Kingdom – a form of 'counter-democracy' through which people attempted to oversee the post-referendum political process. Combining qualitative content analysis of campaign websites with a discourse-network analysis of media articles on Brexit protests, this article shows that claims to sovereignty were mobilised not only in conflicts between the United Kingdom and the European Union, but also in conflicts between different institutions within Britain itself. Both 'Leavers' and 'Remainers' appealed to popular and parliamentary sovereignty at different points in time, pragmatically adapting their framing according to changing circumstances but also as a result of a dynamic series of interactions with each other, including denying, keying and embracing their opponents' frames. Crucially, conflicts around different institutionalisations of popular sovereignty did not demand system change, a rhetoric familiar from other protests of the 2010s such as Occupy Wall Street with its emphasis on 'We are the 99%'. To the contrary, pro- and anti-Brexit mobilisations remained firmly focused on Brexit policy itself. They problematised the split between 'Remainers' and 'Leavers' within the United Kingdom, between 48% and 52%, and thus, on a deeper level, the tension between the political principle of popular sovereignty and the sociological reality of a split country. Finally, the more Leavers opposed Remainers, the more movements and parties on each of these two sides aligned. Politicians featured prominently in campaigns and as speakers at protest events, contributing to close cooperation between protesters and parties, and precluding anti-systemic discourses around popular sovereignty that would target parties and institutions altogether.

Defence date: 22 Februrary 2018 ; Examining Board: Prof. Donatella della Porta, Scuola Normale Superiore, European University Institute (External Supervisor); Prof. László Bruszt, Scuola Normale Superiore; Dr. Sebastian Haunss. BIGSSS, Universität Bremen; Dr. Paolo Gerbaudo, King's College London ; This thesis focuses precisely on the anti-ACTA mobilization and the way it fits within the broader wave of contention. While the anti-ACTA campaign did not include occupation of squares (but only the more traditional protest marches), it shared many important features with other protests in the wave of contention, including the adoption of the Anonymous mask and the national flag as crucial symbols (Gerbaudo, 2017), the demand for more democratic decision-making, and most importantly – the belief in the Internet as a tool for empowerment that could contribute to a more horizontal democratic society (Beyer, 2014; Jarvis, 2014; Juris, 2012; McCarthy, 2015). The big difference is that for anti-ACTA protesters, the Internet was more than a tool - it became a cause in itself. People protested to defend Internet freedom, interpreted in a wide variety of ways by different actors, but most often as the freedom of sharing culture (and files) online, the freedom of not being 2 under surveillance, and the freedom of expressing oneself as a key prerequisite for the functioning of any democratic community.