This thesis investigates the resistance of actors of civil society against perceived militarism, by means of a qualitative case study. As the title suggests, the establishment of a “Cyber Valley” in Tübingen, has not only been met with approval by local citizens. This thesis examines a protest movement against the Cyber Valley – a cooperative research project for technological advancements in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The research reveals that this protest movement was not reliant on a firm organizational structure but was led by an open alliance of individuals, called the Bündnis gegen das Cyber Valley. The organizational approach resulted in various forms of civil resistance. The empirical research on these acts of resistance, adds a perspective for a more holistic approach. On their website (nocybervalley.de) the Bündnis gegen das Cyber Valley documented developments of the protests. These accounts constitute a large part of the written material this study is based on, complemented with semi-structured expert-interviews with four protesters. The interviews generated a conceptualization of militarism, as a driving motivation for the activists. Thereby, this study contributes to the contemporary definition of militarism in the context of civil resistance. The field of peace and conflict studies can benefit from this and similar studies in that they uncover conceptualizations of key conflicts, as perceived by actors of civil society.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:mau-18566 |
| Date | January 2020 |
| Creators | Boger, Christina |
| Publisher | Malmö universitet, Malmö högskola, Institutionen för globala politiska studier (GPS) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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