Ashwini Vasanthakumar (Queen’s University – Faculty of Law) has posted The Political Obligations of Oppressed Citizens: Resistance, Refusal, and the Politics of Transformation on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
In this chapter, I explore the political obligations of oppressed citizens. Oppressed citizens typically are excluded from accounts of political obligation; indeed, it is assumed that oppressed citizens cannot owe political obligations. Among other things, this exclusion fails to recognise the political efforts of oppressed citizens as they do: as stemming from the political obligations they owe as members of a political community. I first sketch an account of how oppressed citizens could be subject to political obligations, drawing on consent and associative accounts of political obligation. I then illustrate how oppressed citizens can discharge their political obligations, focusing on resistance and refusal. By putting into conversation scholarship on political obligation with more recent discussions of oppression and resistance, I have two principal aims: to counter the cursory attention paid to oppressed citizens by standard accounts of political obligation, and to show how the political activism of oppressed citizens, often treated as a function of their moral duties, can in fact stem from their political obligations.
Recommended.