Join us on Thursday, March 14, at 12:30 pm for a discussion with:
Dennis Redeker, PhD Fellow at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS), University of Bremen, and International Graduate Researcher Visiting Scholar at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, New York University
Digital Constitutionalism: Norm-Entrepreneurship of Transnational Advocacy Networks in the Internet Rights Field
Abstract: As the Internet and digital technologies become ever more pervasive in our societies, the struggle around the norms governing the behavior of users, governments and corporations intensifies. Digital constitutionalism has been developed as a term that describes a conversation around fundamental rights and principles regarding the Internet. Initiatives of digital constitutionalism are often led by networks of civil society groups that act as norm entrepreneurs aiming to entrench a set of rights and principles into a transnational constitutional order. Documents of digital constitutionalism typically lay out demands for an array of individual norms, from net neutrality to freedom of expression online. The transnational advocacy networks (TANs) associated with these documents navigate different levels of engagement, from global Internet governance fora, such as the Internet Governance Forum, to divergent local contexts in which Internet related norms are at stake.
The talk sheds light on the emergence and development of three different transnational networks with a focus on the coalition around the “Feminist Principles of the Internet”. The focus of the presentation lies on the negotiation processes that lead to the manifestations of norms expressed in the documents of constitutionalism, the role these documents play in mobilizing TANs, and the use of these documents in the groups’ norm-entrepreneurship. The argument is based on a comparative case study methodology utilizing an analysis of around twenty qualitative interviews with civil society representatives from around the world and numerous written and digital materials.
Room: Political Science thesis room: 5200.07
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
