Title: How are our systems of security and justice accelerating domination of the lives of ordinary people? A motivational posturing perspective.

Speaker: Professor Valerie Braithwaite, Emeritus Professor, School of Regulation and Global Governance, Australian National University (ANU)

Chaired by Professor Clifford Shearing.

Chapters:
00:00 Welcome from Clifford Shearing
02:20 Intro from Valerie Braithwaite
03:30 Transformative and Restorative Justice
05:00 Relationships with justice systems
10:00 Resistant and Dismissive Defiance
22:30 Covid and Dismissive Defiance
27:41 Q&A

Abstract:

Motivational posturing theory provides a finetuned analysis of how social institutions are having their social legitimacy eroded. Central to motivational posturing theory is the difference between citizens showing resistant defiance and citizens showing dismissive defiance. While these two types of defiance are related, resistant defiance and dismissive defiance present different challenges to authorities. Resistant defiance is amenable to negotiation through the now well accepted pathway of procedural justice, trust building and rebooting social legitimacy, all of which build citizen cooperation (either acquiescence or commitment to the authority’s demands). Dismissive defiance is less accommodating to gestures of appeasement from authorities. Authorities fear dismissive defiance and tend to respond by looking the other way, or when that is not possible, using domination, sometimes lawful, sometimes not. Unfortunately, as authorities use domination to control ‘dismissive disruptors’, they agitate ‘resistant disruptors’, unleashing grievances that ripple out across society. Such grievance spreads through myriad channels of influence to generate nebulous discontent across society, which in times of crisis can be harnessed in coordinated defiance against authorities. This can be at times when authorities are most in need of the public’s cooperation (eg COVID19 pandemic).

We can shape alternative scenarios for meeting crises through strengthening institutions that engage with resistant defiance constructively through offering honesty, transparency, understanding, problem solving, and power sharing as well as holding power to account. This paper draws on Australia’s green shoots for promising institutional arrangements in contexts where regulators previously have been steering the flow of events in counterproductive directions child protection, aged care, social welfare, tertiary education, environmental protection and the COVID19 pandemic.

Bio:

Valerie Braithwaite is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Regulation and Global Governance, Australian National University (ANU). She researches regulatory decisionmaking that aspires to be moral, just and beneficial, and in turn, elicits among those being regulated cooperation, trustworthiness, and hope. Her publications include: Trust and Governance (coedited with Margaret Levi); Hope, Power and Governance; Taxing Democracy; Defiance in Taxation and Governance; Bound to Care; Restorative and Responsive Human Services (with Gale Burford and John Braithwaite); Shame Management through Reintegration (with Eliza Ahmed, Nathan Harris and John Braithwaite); and Regulating Aged Care (with John Braithwaite and Toni Makkai).

This webinar is the third of a series of bimonthly webinars entitled Security and Justice Futures which aim to confront the dilemmas, reimaginings and futures of security and justice from a crossregional perspective. Drawing from a range of speakers from north and south contexts, the series seeks to engage with both academic and practitioner audiences to encourage a mutual dialogue on the futures of security and justice in diverse contexts.