M. Eraldo Souza Dos Santos

I have been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Académie française, the Maison française d'Oxford, the Leuven Institute for Advanced Studies, the Munich Centre for Global History, the Friedrich Nietzsche College of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, the Hannover Institute for Philosophical Research, the German Research Foundation (SFB Cultures of Vigilance), the French-Dutch Network for Higher Education and Research, and the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel. I have also held visiting positions at the Center for Law and Philosophy at the Université catholique de Louvain, the Ethics Institute at Northeastern University, and the Chair of Political Theory and the History of Political Thought at the University of Lausanne. Between 2015 and 2018, I was one of the members of the research project Critical Theory and Religion at the Goethe University Frankfurt (Institute for Social Research and Martin Buber Chair for Jewish Studies). 

 

In addition to my research activities, I have taught history, philosophy, and political science at the Sorbonne, Sciences Po Paris, Bielefeld University, the Leibniz University Hannover, the University of Potsdam, and the Charles University in Prague, in both undergraduate and graduate programs. In the spring and summer of 2022, I was an Erasmus+ visiting lecturer at the University of Southampton and at the University of Vienna. I also taught at the University of Chicago's Vienna Human Rights program in 2022 and 2023.

 

My public writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Jacobin Brasil, Nexo, World Politics Review, The Diplomat, The Philosopher, and elsewhere. 

 

 

In addition to this project, I have written on the political thought of the German anti-Nazi resistance group “The White Rose,” ideas of forbiddenness and transgression in political theology, Evangelical conceptions of (dis)obedience to God, poverty and resistance in the history of political thought, the politics of social movements against airport construction and expansion, the meanings of the idea of the state monopoly on violence, and the political phenomenon I call Gandhian Bolsonarism. In my most recent work, I have explored how HIV/AIDS activism and queer civil disobedience have enriched our political repertoire since the late 1980s and reframed the relationship between health and political freedom in an original fashion. A review essay on this topic is forthcoming in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. In another recent essay, I discuss how radical democrats have appropriated liberal genealogies of civil disobedience in uncritical ways. In an article in preparation for a special issue of the Annual Review of Law and Ethics, I also explore how liberal philosophers tamed in their theories of civil disobedience the radicalism of anti-nuclear movements. Moreover, I have a deep interest in interpretative methods, especially ethnography, and the ways in which they can contribute to shedding light on how activists conceptualize civil disobedience and (non)violence. This has led me to explore the relationship between philosophy and anthropological fieldwork in an essay forthcoming in American Ethnologist. Driven by interpretive questions, I also problematize in a review essay in preparation for Comparative Political Theory the ways in which American conceptions of civil disobedience are used to analyze or theorize about the practice of civil disobedience beyond the United States. In Lausanne, I contributed to the drafting of a Swiss National Science Foundation research project on the history and politics of militant democracy. In an article currently under review by a political theory journal, I critically assess Jan-Werner Müller’s theory of (un)civil disobedience and resistance as forms of militant democracy.   

 

Militant democracy refers to the adoption of illiberal measures to protect democracy against efforts to subvert it. These measures typically include restrictions on the right of participation of antidemocratic political actors and bans on extremist political parties and associations. With this new project, I aim to contribute – by mobilizing elements from my previous one – to recent debates about whether civil disobedience and other forms of popular resistance can be framed as militant democracy as well as the legal framing of climate and antiracist disobedience as terrorist activity. I also intend to explore the relationship between militant democracy and processes of racialization, by tracing the racial underpinnings of the idea that it is necessary to defend the democratic order against its “enemies” or against “threats” to it. In doing so, I aim to shed new light on a series of political phenomena: from African American disenfranchisement to anti-refugee and anti-terrorism policies, from the global spread of Islamophobia, Arabophobia, and Sinophobia to right-wing populism, from the geopolitics of the Mexico-United States border to the political (re)configurations of the carceral state in the form of concentration, detention, and internment camps since WWII.

 

Beyond academia, my next book project is an (auto)biography of my illiterate mother and a meditation on the lived experience of Blackness and enslavement in modern Brazil. At the age of seven, my mother was sold into slavery by her white foster sister. It was 1968—eighty years after the abolition of slavery in Brazil and four years into the anti-communist coup d’état, during the month in which the military overruled the Constitution by decree. By weaving in extensive archival research and interviews, the book narrates our journey to Minas Gerais—where she was born—and Bahia—the Blackest state in Brazil, where she was enslaved on a farm for three years—to investigate why the family that enslaved her has never been brought to justice. It also narrates my grandmother’s journey to find her missing daughter. I have offered intensive craft seminars and masterclasses based on this project at the Writing Workshops, the Center for Fiction, and the UEA Creative Writing Course. My creative writing has recently appeared in O Sabiá.

 

As an editor, I currently serve as the fact-checker for Aaron Robertson’s nonfiction debut, The Black Utopians (Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Chatto & Windus, 2024), which has been characterized as “a philosophical, historical, and deeply personal account of the role of race in American utopianism.” I am an alumnus of the Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop.

 

 

 

Toward a Global History of Abe Fortas's Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobedience

This paper traces the global history of United States Supreme Court Justice Abraham “Abe” Fortas’s 1968 book, Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobedience. Published months before a scandal that would eventually force Fortas to resign from the Supreme Court, the book criticized the use of civil disobedience by activists opposing the Vietnam War. I show that Fortas’s book contributed to reconfiguring the debate on the justification of civil disobedience in the United States, both inside and outside academia. Drawing on largely overlooked archival materials, I also reveal that this debate had repercussions throughout the world and played a key role in American foreign policy during the Cold War era. With support from the U.S. government, the book was translated and published in countries such as Brazil, France, Germany, and Japan—and shaped debates about civil disobedience in the context of international struggles against student radicalism. Reframing the history of civil disobedience around this little known legal figure has, I argue, broad implications for the work of historians, philosophers, political scientists as well as activists and political commentators, who follow unknowingly in Fortas’s footsteps when they argue whether civil disobedience should be public (and never clandestine), nonviolent (and never coercive), and reformist (and never revolutionary)—features of civil disobedience that became commonplace in the course of worldwide debates about Fortas’s book. Fortas—and not Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, Jr.—remains until today the most influential theorist of civil disobedience. In retracing this history, I aim to theorize how idea(l)s of law and order, predominant in the American discourse on civil disobedience in the late 1960s and early 1970s, entered the international sphere amid fears that radical movements of resistance inspired by anticolonial struggles and the African American civil rights movement could destabilize the liberal international order. I also seek to probe the fundamental role of books as well as publishing and translation projects in the development of American soft power during the Cold War.

 

 

English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish

 

Democratic Theory

Social Movements

History of Political Concepts

Civil Disobedience and Resistance

Afro-Asian, Hemispheric, and Transatlantic Intellectual Exchanges

 

African American Encounters with Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean

        As a Teaching Assistant
Florence Haegel, Introduction to Political Science
Annabelle Lever, Introduction to Political Theory
Aleksandar Rankovic, Politics in the Anthropocene: Science, Power, and Justice