Social movements often impose nontrivial costs on others against their wills. Civil disobedience is no exception. How can social movements in general, and civil disobedience in particular, be justifiable despite this apparent wrong-making feature? We examine an intuitively plausible account—it is fair that everyone should bear the burdens of tackling injustice. We extend this fairness-based argument for civil disobedience to defend some acts of uncivil disobedience. Focusing on uncivil environmental activism—such as ecotage (sabotage with the aim of protecting the environment)—we (...) argue that some acts of uncivil disobedience can be morally superior to their civil counterparts, when and because such acts target people who are responsible for environmental threats. Indeed, insofar as some acts of uncivil disobedience can more accurately target responsible people, they can better satisfy the demands of fairness compared to their civil counterparts. In some circumstances, our argument may require activists to engage in uncivil disobedienceeven whencivil disobedience is available. (shrink)

Standard accounts of civil disobedience include nonviolence as a necessary condition. Here I argue that such accounts are mistaken and that civil disobedience can include violence in many aspects, primarily excepting violence directed at other persons. I base this argument on a novel understanding of civil disobedience: the special character of the practice comes from its combination of condemnation of a political practice with an expressed commitment to the political. The commitment to the political is a commitment to engaging with (...) others as co-members in the on-going political project of living together. I show how such an understanding of civil disobedience is superior to the Rawlsian strain of thought, which focuses on fidelity to law. Rawls was concerned with civil disobedience solely in the context of overriding political obligation. The project of characterizing a contestatory political practice that can be distinguished and used in a wider variety of contexts than Rawls is concerned with, including under illegitimate regimes, beyond the nation-state, or on behalf of anarchism, requires a different understanding of civil disobedience. (shrink)

An impressive body of recent literature posits that traditional notions of civil disobedience prevent us from properly considering potentially legitimate types of ‘uncivil’ political lawbreaking. When might uncivil (covert, legally evasive, morally offensive and potentially violent) lawbreaking prove normatively acceptable? If justifiable, what conditions should its practitioners be reasonably expected to meet? Despite some important insights, defenders of uncivil disobedience rely on a narrow and sometimes misleading view of civil disobedience, as previously practiced and theorized. Notwithstanding legitimate skepticism about Rawlsian (...) notions of civil disobedience, they reproduce its troublesome binary or ‘all-or-nothing’ view of political lawbreaking. Uncivil disobedience’s proponents tend to group a vast array of distinctive types of lawbreaking under one amorphous categorical rubric, impeding the suitably complex, nuanced analysis we need. A superior approach would pay careful attention to uncivil disobedience’s ambivalent historical record, a record suggesting that UD is more likely to reproduce authoritarian populism’s disturbing political logic than counteract it. (shrink)

We should conceive of illegal covert animal rescue as acts of “subrevolution” rather than as civil disobedience. Subrevolutions are revolutions that aim to overthrow some part of the government rather than the entire government. This framework better captures the relevant values than the opposing suggestion that we treat illegal covert animal rescue as civil disobedience. If animals have rights like the right not to be unjustly imprisoned and mistreated, then it does not make sense that an instance of animal rescue (...) will be justifiable only if it meets criteria for justified civil disobedience, e.g., the requirement that the civil disobedient not rescue more animals than would be necessary to communicate their message. Thus, the framework of subrevolution is a more apt way to analyze animal rescue. (shrink)

This article argues that, far from being a merely defensive act of individual protest, civil disobedience is a much more radical political practice. It is transformative in that it aims at the politicization of questions that are excluded from the political domain and at reconfiguring public space and existing institutions, often in comprehensive ways. Focusing on the reconstitution of the political community also allows us to reconceptualize constituent power. Rather than portraying it as a quasi-mythical force erupting only in extraordinary (...) moments, constituent power can be conceptualized as a dynamic situated within established orders, transgressing their logic and reconfiguring them from within. Civil disobedience as a transformative and potentially comprehensive practice aimed at reconstituting the political order can then be seen as an internal driving force keeping this dialectic in play. A concrete example can be found in protests and border struggles by irregularized migrants. They show how unexp... (shrink)

Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 4, April 2022.

Civil disobedience, despite its illegal nature, can sometimes be justified vis-à-vis the duty to obey the law, and, arguably, is thereby not liable to legal punishment. However, adhering to the demands of justice and refraining from punishing justified civil disobedience may lead to a highly problematic theoretical consequence: the debilitation of civil disobedience. This is because, according to the novel analysis I propose, civil disobedience primarily functions as a costly social signal. It is effective by being reliable, reliable by being (...) costly, and costly primarily by being punished. My analysis will highlight a distinctive feature of civil disobedience: civil disobedients leverage the punitive injustice they suffer to amplify their communicative force. This will lead to two paradoxical implications. First, the instability of the moral status of both civil disobedience and its punishment to the extent where the state may be left with no permissible course of action with regard to punishing civil disobedience. Second, by refraining from punishing justified civil disobedience, the state may render uncivil disobedience—illegal political activities that fall short of the standards of civil disobedience—potentially permissible. (shrink)

Radical democratic political theorists have used the concept of constituent power to sketch ambitious models of radical democracy, while many legal scholars deploy it to make sense of the political and legal dynamics of constitutional politics. Its growing popularity notwithstanding, I argue that the concept tends to impede a proper interpretation of civil disobedience, conceived as nonviolent, politically motivated lawbreaking evincing basic respect for law. Contemporary theorists who employ it cannot distinguish between civil disobedience and other related, yet ultimately different, (...) modes of political illegality. The essay also examines Jürgen Habermas’ recent contributions to a theory of mixed or dualistic constituent power, conceding that Habermas avoids many theoretical and political ills plaguing competing radical democratic theoretical retrievals. Nonetheless, Habermas’ attempt to salvage the idea of constituent power as part of... (shrink)

Climate activists have recently engaged in widely publicized acts of politically motivated lawbreaking. This article identifies and critically analyzes two seemingly overlapping but in fact divergi...

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Recent literature on social movements assigns a central role to the imagination. One way for activists to further their aims is through dramatic, confrontational acts of protest. I argue that transcendent imagining is key to understanding what protest does qua act of speech. A common approach to protest sees it as a speech act of condemning some feature of the socio-political world and appealing for change. While this is a helpful general template for what vocal dissent is, it is insufficient (...) to explain what gives protests their political power. Specifically, it overlooks the fact that effective protests usually create a theatrical spectacle of norm breaking. Displays of defiance lift a constraint on how we imagine our socio-political world, and so allow us to begin reshaping it. (shrink)

Whistleblowing is the act of disclosing information from a public or private organization in order to reveal cases of corruption that are of immediate or potential danger to the public. Blowing the whistle involves personal risk, especially when legal protection is absent, and charges of betrayal, which often come in the form of legal prosecution under treason laws. In this article we argue that whistleblowing is justified when disclosures are made with the proper intent and fulfill specific communicative constraints in (...) addressing issues of public interest. Three communicative constraints of informativeness, truthfulness and evidence are discussed in this regard. We develop a ‘harm test’ to assess the intent for disclosures, concluding that it is not sufficient for justification. Along with the proper intent, a successful act of whistleblowing should provide information that serves the public interest. Taking cognizance of the varied conceptions of public interest, we present an account of public interest that fits the framework of whistleblowing disclosures. In particular, we argue that whistleblowing is justified inter alia when the information it conveys is of a presumptive interest for a public insofar as it reveals an instance of injustice or violation of a civil or political right done against and unbeknown to some members of a polity. (shrink)

Jonathan Neufeld proposes a concept of aesthetic disobedience that parallels the political concept of civil disobedience articulated by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice. The artistic transgressions he calls aesthetic disobedience are distinctive in being public and deliberative in their aim to bring about specific changes in accepted artworld norms. We argue that Neufeld has offered us valuable insight into the dynamic and potent nature of art and the artworld; however, we contend that Neufeld errs by constraining aesthetic disobedience (...) to the artworld. Through a reconsideration of the parallel between aesthetic and civil disobedience, we illustrate how aesthetic disobedience is more accurately conceived of in terms of two kinds of acts: artistic and artworld. In addition to artistic disobedience and artworld disobedience, we add a broader and more diverse sort of transgressive aesthetic disobedience. Our aim is to articulate how Neufeld’s account of a kind of disobedience in the artworld that parallels civil disobedience can prove even more generative. (shrink)

Theorists of political obligation have long devoted special attention to civil disobedience, establishing its pride of place as an object of philosophical analysis, and as one of a short li...

ABSTRACTOn 4 September 2015 asylum seekers who got stranded in Budapest’s Keleti train station began a march to cross the Austrian border. Their aim was to reach Germany and Sweden where they believed their asylum claims would be better received. In this article, I argue that the march should be characterized as an act of civil disobedience. This claim may seem to contradict common convictions regarding acts of civil disobedience as well as asylum seekers. The most common justifications are given (...) with reference to moral rights of citizens and concerns for enhancing justice or democracy within states. Asylum seekers are not members of the European public. How can they be entitled to break the law? I first show that the march displays features of a paradigm case of civil disobedience. Then, I identify moral reasons for asylum seekers to carry out the march acceptable from both strong and weak cosmopolitan perspectives. After that, I point out its corrective, stabilizing and democracy-enhancing roles in the European political landscape. I conclude by emphasizing that conceptualizing the march as an act of civil disobedience is significant in recognizing asylum seekers as political agents making claims within an evolving framework of refugee protection. (shrink)

Emergent forms of political protest and constitution often provide limit cases for their contemporary theoretical models, and transnational protest movements from Occupy to Democracy in Europe 2025...

Several recent works in political theory argue that exit, rather than being a coward’s choice, is a potent mode of resistance that is particularly well suited to the current political era. These works reclaim exit, seeing it as a method of political opposition. While innovative and illuminating, these accounts are limited because they tend to treat all exits as resistance, regardless of context or content, and they are inclined to over-saturate exit with oppositional political meaning. I argue that resistant exit (...) should be more narrowly defined. By examining a range of empirical cases, I identify and explore three distinctive characteristics of this particular type of opposition. In addition to clarifying a recently developed idea in current scholarship, this article provides a systematic way for scholars to understand and interpret the intersection between resistance and exit. (shrink)

“One who elects to serve mankind by taking the law into his own hands thereby demonstrates his conviction that his own ability to determine policy is superior to democratic decision making. [Defendants’] professed unselfish motivation, rather than a justification, actually identifies a form of arrogance which organized society cannot tolerate.” Those were the words of Justice Harris L. Hartz at the sentencing hearing of three nuns convicted of trespassing and vandalizing government property to demonstrate against U.S. foreign policy. Citizens engaging (...) in civil disobedience are indeed at times accused of being arrogant because they apparently think their own political judgment is superior to that of the democratic majority. This paper examines and evaluates the claim that dissenters are epistemically arrogant. Contrary to the dominant viewpoint in the literature, I argue that epistemic arrogance involves inflating the epistemic worth of one’s view. Indeed, the most plausible charge against civil dissenters consists of two claims: (A) civil dissenters have a higher degree of rational certainty in P than is warranted, and (B) civil dissenters use a method of expression that requires a higher level of rational certainty than is warranted in the propositions that their political view is right and the injustice they fight is substantial. I argue that civil disobedience does not necessarily involve epistemic arrogance. Whether an act of civil disobedience evinces epistemic arrogance has to be determined on a case-by-case basis depending on the extent to which each dissenter lives up to (A) and (B). (shrink)

Tony Milligan argues that some forms of covert non-human animal rescue, wherein activists anonymously and illegally free non-human animals from confinement, should be understood as acts of civil disobedience. However, most traditional understandings of civil disobedience require that the civil disobedient act publicly rather than covertly. Thus Milligan’s proposal is that we revise our understanding of civil disobedience to allow for covert in addition to public disobedience. I argue we should not. Milligan cannot justify using paradigm cases to expand the (...) scope of civil disobedience without justifying similar reasons to limit the scope, and he does nto give convincing reasons for discarding the communication requirement, according to which an action cannot count as civil disobedience unless it is communicative. The immediate conclusion is that animal rescue is not civil disobedience, while the broader conclusion is one about civil disobedience more broadly: an act must be public to count as civil disobedience. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss three objections against climate activism often voiced in the public, namely that their practices of civil disobedience are ultimately insincere, illegal, and ineffective. The main part of my paper focuses on this last point. This is because this objection points us to a deeper conceptual problem of political protest: if one of the conditions for the success of civil disobedience is that political demands must have been first voiced via democratic channels of opinion-formation, then why (...) should we assume that a re-articulation of these demands in the course of civil disobedience leads to a different result? To answer this question, I propose a phenomenological approach to civil disobedience. Drawing on the protest practices of activist group Act Up, I argue that climate activism can escape the charge of ineffectiveness if it resorts to what I call the “aesthetic rationality of phenomenological demonstration.”. (shrink)

The useful publication of Judith N Shklar's final undergraduate lectures at Harvard provides an opportunity to take a careful look at her reflections on political obligation, a matter always of gre...

This article proposes a retheorisation of Rawlsian civil disobedience through examining the burdens we expect people to bear when they practice civil disobedience, focussing specifically on marginalised groups. First, I consider public concerns over civil disobedience, to elicit the idea of an ‘authentic civil disobedience’. I then assess the claim that civil disobedience occurs within a ‘nearly just’ society in order to recognise the more complex position of marginalised civil disobedients. This allows me to frame any criteria we theorise for (...) civil disobedience as a wicked problem. Next, I examine one particular criterion dominant within the literature: that to be interpreted as civil disobedience, disobedients must show a willingness to suffer the legal consequences – and so, must not act anonymously. I claim that this asks too much of civil disobedients in a marginalised context and conclude civil disobedience theory needs retheorising to consider when and why anonymity is acceptable. (shrink)

Making use of the liberal concept of civil disobedience, this paper assesses, under which circumstances instances of illegal digital protest—called “hacktivism”—can be justified vis-à-vis the pro tanto political obligation to obey the law. For this, the paper draws on the three main criteria for liberal civil disobedience—publicity, nonviolence, and fidelity to law—and examines how these can be transferred to the realm of the digital. One of the main disanalogies between street and cyberspace protests is the tendency of hacktivists to remain (...) anonymous, which in turn calls into question their fidelity to law (the third criterion). The paper argues that there are functionally equivalent alternatives to what can be called the “acceptance-of-legal-consequences-condition” (ALCC) associated with the fidelity to law. As a result, the ALCC is not a necessary condition for hacktivists to showcase their fidelity to law, thereby resolving the apparent disanalogy. (shrink)

In this article, I critique Jonathan Floyd’s method of normative behaviourism (NB): that we should measure political preference for a political system from levels of crime and insurrection. First, I distinguish between problems with the data and problems with the theory. I proceed to examine 6 groups who present a difficulty for NB and identify the common thread: NB abstracts the capacity of groups to commit crime and insurrection, and therefore, misreads them in the data as normative approval of a (...) political system. Next, I argue that this a problem, especially as that capacity is often caused by the conditions of the political structure such groups live within. This lack of capacity often means they are amongst the most vulnerable. Consequently, NB needs to be careful of overlooking corrective justice. Subsequently, I offer some simple amendments to NB, followed by two complementary approaches: ethnography and fictional narratives. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has insisted on a more historically attentive approach to civil disobedience. This article follows their lead by arguing that the dominant understanding of civil disobedience relies on a conceptual confusion and a historical mistake. Conceptually, the literature fails to distinguish between violating a law and defying the authority of a legal order. Historically, the literature misreads the exemplary case of Martin Luther King Jr. in Birmingham, Alabama. When read in its proper context, we can see King was not (...) just a civil disobedient, violating the law in a way that shows fidelity to the law. He was a radical disobedient, challenging the authority of the legal order. As such, he was part of a long tradition of radical disobedience, extending back through militant strikes of the labor movement. The character of this disobedience was evident, both to its main protagonists, like King and Eugene V. Debs, and to its major opponents, especially the courts. In reconstructing these historical cases, I revise the civil disobedience literature and demonstrate the distinctiveness of the radical disobedience concept. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 65-79, March 2022.

In recent times, it has become increasingly common that elected parties and leaders systematically undermine democracy and the rule of law. This phenomenon is often framed with the term democratic backsliding or democratic regression. This article deals with the relatively little-studied topic of resistance to democratic regressions. Chief amongst the things it discusses is the rather central ethical issue of whether resisters may themselves, in their attempts to prevent a further erosion of democracy, transgress democratic norms. But the argument advanced (...) in the article is not merely about the ethics of resistance. It begins, perhaps unconventionally, by addressing the affective dimension of resistance to democratic regressions, looking in particular at the powerful feelings of anger and despair that pro-democratic citizens living under a regressive government are likely to experience. As the article argues, these feelings have not only motivational but also epistemic potential, which must be adequately theorized in order to understand how resisters can respond to the ethical challenges facing them. (shrink)

In Germany, like in many other liberal countries, there is an extensive public discourse about freedom of speech being at risk. It will be insisted in this contribution that on the one hand, freedom of speech as a subjective right of basic law is not endangered. On the other hand, it should be acknowledged that in public discourse moralistic exaggerations are quite common. Against this background, the paper asks when different opinions are to be respected and at what point it (...) is permitted or even required to condemn them as immoral. The basic argument advanced here is that opinions should be respected as long as they are based in or at least supported by reasonable moral theories. Those opinions that do not have such a support can be labelled as properly immoral and criticized as such. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 80-92, March 2022.

Making use of the liberal concept of civil disobedience, this paper assesses, under which circumstances instances of illegal digital protest—called “hacktivism”—can be justified vis-à-vis the pro t...

Civil disobedience is a form of protest consisting in an act contrary to law, whose aim is to bring about a change in laws or policies deemed unjust. In the traditional Western philosophical debate, civil disobedience was mainly discussed and justified within the boundaries of a democratic regime. John Rawls’ theory of civil disobedience is explicitly based on this liberal assumption. He conceptualises civil disobedience as a public, nonviolent, conscientious and political breach of the law, only appropriate to nearly just (...) societies, hence to democratic regimes. This article intends to question Rawls’ premise by considering civil disobedience from a different perspective: when it is undertaken outside of a nearly just framework, precisely in not fully democratic contexts, such as the so-called “anocracies”, regimes that mix democratic and autocratic traits. The emblematic case of Sudan’s most recent actions of civil disobedience is examined to argue that, contrary to the liberal conceptualisation, civil disobedience does have a role and appropriateness in frameworks of this kind, where the aim is not only to oppose unjust laws or policies, but also to achieve a broader structural change through rigorously nonviolent forms of political action. (shrink)

How did cultural factors participate in the event of October in Chile? How were these factors related to each other? What implications did they have for collective action and social life? The purpose of the article is to carry out a cultural reading of the October event. To do this, a dialogue is proposed between cultural sociology and cultural studies, applied to the October protest movement, resorting to interpretive research tools. The appropriation of Plaza Italia, in Santiago, by the protesters, (...) is used in an illustrative way to highlight the cultural elements and their interactions. Among the findings, the production of meaning based on motifs and frames stands out, the production of its own symbolism and iconography and the deployment of performances that allow defining the Plaza itself as an artifact of protest. Then certain scopes of the above for civil society are discussed. It concludes with a projection of the work and a brief reflection on the relationship between social sciences and humanities to deploy an interpretive strategy of empirical research. (shrink)