J.R.T. Toonders (Janneke) MA

Janneke Toonders works with democratic theory to understand the relation between contentious political actions and democratic politics. With this PhD project, specifically, she aims to understand the democratic significance of stormings of public buildings.

From Hong Kong, to Washington D.C., to Nairobi: protesters have frequently stormed buildings of governance and public authority in recent years. Unlike the iconic storming of the Bastille in 1789, these contemporary stormings target the institutions of representative democracies. Interestingly, some stormings are considered (legitimate) democratic interventions, while others are rejected as riots or (attempted) violent coups. With this PhD project, she asks in what ways stormings have played varying, but often politically significant, and sometimes revolutionary roles. In order to do so, the project will formulate a political-philosophical theory of stormings that 1) builds a conceptual framework embedded in (radical) democratic theory to understand them, and 2) formulates criteria to evaluate them in terms of their democratic legitimacy.

The project is funded by the NWO (PhDs in the Humanities), and is supervised by Dr. Mathijs van de Sande and Prof. Vivienne Matthies-Boon.