Publications on Félix Tréguer

Post-Snowden Contention: The Case of France

Mon, 25 Apr 2016 11:19:55 +0000

Last week, I attended the 7th Biennial Surveillance & Society Confrence in Barcelona, where I presented a paper entitled: « From Deep State Illegality to Law of the Land: The Case of Internet Surveillance in France. »

Download the paper

This paper (update: now published by Media and Communication in a special issue on « Post-Snowden Internet Policy » – pdf) aims to contribute to cross-country comparisons of the consequences of post-Snowden contention for the techno-legal apparatus of modern forms of secret state surveillance.

Insurgent Citizenship Online & the Struggle Over Free Speech in “Established” Democracies

Tue, 04 Mar 2014 10:19:04 +0000

Below is an input statement presented at the 20th New Faces Conference, held on February 27– March 2, 2014 in Istanbul on “Citizenship and Political Participation in the Mediterranean Region”. It is a shorter version of another paper summing ongoing doctoral research. It was also published and translated in Greek on the Artivist e-Magazine.

The Internet is bringing about a new era for freedom of expression and association, as we move toward a more horizontal, diverse and citizen-centric public sphere. The Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 provided a stark illustration of how the ongoing structural transformation of our communications infrastructure can help citizens unsettle authoritarian regimes, empowering civil society in relation to the State. It also showed how the advent of actual democracies is also often hampered by the political establishment, which deploys systems of mass surveillance and online censorship to control the public sphere and compress the emancipatory power of freedom of communication and enforce social control. Again and again, we see the political hopes of social movements clash against the authoritarian tendencies of the power elite.

Insurgent Citizenship on the Internet: Pushing Back the Limits of the Public Sphere

Fri, 15 Nov 2013 07:13:47 +0000

I presented a few weeks ago at the International Congress of the Research Committee on Sociology of Law of the International Sociological Association. The congress was held in Toulouse on 3-6 September 2013 and its theme was “Sociology of Law and Political Action”. My paper was presented during a workshop on « Non-Compliance to the Rules and Disobedience Towards the Law« .

Abstract: This paper presents ongoing doctoral research on Internet-based movements of “insurgent citizenship” aiming to redefine the right to free expression and communication in contemporary democracies. Since its inception, the Internet has been perceived and lived as a space of free communication and democratic experimentations, withdrawn from state sovereignty and the sanction of the law. Today, these founding utopias are still alive in the militant practices of citizen groups undertaking the critical functions of the public sphere while operating at boundaries of legality, and more specifically of communications law (e.g. press law, copyright). Through such practices, these insurgent movements challenge the existing power balance between civil society and the state within the public sphere. By analyzing three instances of insurgent citizenship on the Internet – a French website documenting police abuse, WikiLeaks and peer-to-peer file-sharing – as well as the repression they undergo, the article assesses the ability of representative regimes to recognize de jure (in law) and de facto (in practice) the structural transformation of the public sphere brought about by the Internet.