New Publication by BIGSSS PhD Fellow Dennis Redeker! › view all

27.05.2018

"Towards digital constitutionalism? Mapping attempts to craft an Internet Bill of Rights"


BIGSSS PhD Fellow Dennis Redeker recently published an article in a special issue of the International Communication Gazette edited by Claudia Padovani and Mauro Santaniello. The paper contains the results of an analysis of so-called Internet Bill of Rights, a type of document that proliferated in recent years. The article is the product of an interdisciplinary collaboration with co-authors Lex Gill (now at the Citizen Lab, University of Toronto) and Urs Gasser (Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University) at the intersection of law, sociology and political science. The paper expands on a previous working paper of the same name, whose definition of digital constitutionalism has made a significant contribution to the scholarship of digital rights documents.    

Download article "Towards digital constitutionalism?" through the SAGE journals 
International Communication Gazette website.

Abstract:

The article develops digital constitutionalism as a common term connecting a constellation of initiatives that seek to articulate a set of political rights, governance norms, and limitations on the exercise of power on the Internet. We start by reporting on insights from an analysis of the substantive content of over 30 such documents, and make reference to the political and technological changes to which they may relate. We offer an overview of the core actors in the area of digital constitutionalism and a brief exploration of the processes by which their initiatives aim to entrench rights into law and practice. We discuss the changing sites of political and legal intervention, including a more recent focus on domestic and regional initiatives. Finally, we consider what a future research agenda could entail.