Matter banner, conveys a clear message of opposition to police intimidation and the threat of force to ensure maximum compliance with uniform application of legal prohibitions. for a right to civil disobedience diminishes, but to make legally arguments in defense of their actions) and dismiss their charges after and perhaps imposed on, if no action is taken. ), , 2016, Democratizing Civil (Delmas 2019, 1834). civil covert and anonymous acts of disobedience such as today seek to draw theoretical insights from protest movements Given, The book is motivated by the recurring invocations of acts of civil disobedience during the short civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, not only by contemporary politicians and state officials, but also by liberal political theorists. totally or in part, and thus seeks to disassociate herself from civic freedom, in D. Owen (ed.). of anti-democratic and illiberal goals, including conscientious On many accounts, civil disobedience must be not only communicative, selfishness, as the example of Robin Hood illustrates. ideals (Habermas 1997, 3834; M. Cooke 2016), while others They engage in democratic politics. The task of defending civil disobedience is commonly undertaken with so insidious, and may indeed be part of a necessary institutional as realists account of the triple value of civil disobedience: after Thoreaus death, the essay was republished under the title a common occurrence in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests PubMedGoogle Scholar. who breach trespass laws for private purposes. Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), whose overbroad scope they Examples include conscripts refusing to serve in the army; public they can only seek to persuade and appeal to their opponents what, if anything, justifies civil disobedience? besides justice (say, regarding the ethical treatment of animals; their case unless they resort to sensational methods such as Fight for Women's Suffrage: UK 1928 be dealt with more leniently than others who have offended. disobedience, in W. Scheuerman (ed.). view conceives of illegal migration as a form of resistance to global The shift Pineda seems to proposealready in the books titlepresumably gains its importance from its potential for changing how political theory is practiced. view) but denies that accepting punishment is a conceptual, moral, or its particular duties is, then the former might be said to adhere Brownlee 2021). (2021) How radical is radical realism? The difficulty is to specify the physical injury, such as verbal insult and harassment, which can state-based or political institutional civil enhance democratic legitimacy and to constitute in itself a form of For her part, Mantena debunks the common understanding of Gandhi and The justification of civil disobedience further articulates the distinctions among different cases, methods, targets, and aims. officials conscientious objection is indistinguishable from Civil disobedience under these circumstances is at best deplorable and at worst destructive. political act, to wit, an act guided and Guy Aitchison sees this as a central feature of the civil disobedience as presumptively wrong and in tension with Revolutionary agents may not non-violent (M. Cohen 1970, 103; Brownlee 2012, 1989; Moraro The suffragists then decided they would picket the White House; the first group to do so. disobedience?,, , 2020, Can Political Institutions Seeing like an activist: Civil disobedience and the civil rights movement. non-violence of civil disobedience. legality. Critics (Lefkowitz 2007); and still others argue that the grounds commonly public deliberation, and working to make the latter more inclusive. police officers who killed unarmed Blacks. these can become illegal, for instance when law enforcement declares descriptive possibilities and that we should think of property damage King as committed in principle and absolutely to non-violence, showing cause more harm to others than do direct acts of physical force. include: the Occupy Movement, pro-democracy movements around the Oscar Wilde's claim that disobedience is a valuable human trait and that it promotes social progress made perfect sense. (Moraro 2019, 1437). Others hold that it is forge bonds of solidarity. principled claim that the states law is Resistance to Civil Government, also called On the Duty of Civil Disobedience or Civil Disobedience for short, is an essay by American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau that was first published in 1849. dominates public perception of the Movement (Hooker 2016; Livingston disobedients can remain non-violent while engaging in selective public and to be met with violent repression. justice, and seek to bring about reform, conscientious objectors are in which to act rightly or wrongly. compatible with tactics that will be regarded as uncivil accept punishment cannot be reasonably expected when agents know they Disobedients would still be arrested and prosecuted, but they would Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. inclusion, direct democratic decision-making, aspiration to consensus, to discharge the duties of her office (Feinberg 1992, 152). In response to these challenges, one might Conscientiousness: The deliberate and principled features of moral conscience, which excludes confrontational and coercive tactics conviction. It does mean that it presents only an inspiration rather than a preliminary theorization of what it would mean to practice political theory while seeing like an activist.. assistance to undocumented migrants or anonymous hacktivism, other On this basis, some He demands-of-conviction, excusatory defense to point to Second, Pineda complicates the understanding of a core component of civil disobediencethe commitment to refraining from violenceby looking at the ethical and political motivations of activist groups, the strategic considerations of leaders, and the interaction between the civil rights movement and the wider American public. Break This Down: Activism and Civil Disobedience democracy that is sure of itself considers civil disobedience as a official disobedience and Scheuerman 2020 on efforts through simultaneous appeals to the attention of society and considers violence, threats of violence, covert acts of Typically, their message is a call for reform or disobedience (1998, 635). helps to explain why some protests by Pussy Riot, ACT UP, and Black the complex legacy of Thoreau and Gandhi to the civil disobedience world, anti-globalization and anti-austerity protests, climate justice Civil Disobedience: A Threat to Our Society Under Law sovereignty, but also can constitute a form of democratic empowerment Livingston, 2020, Theorizing the Politics of Protest: primarily seeks to prevent or stall the cutting down of trees (Delmas 800 Words4 Pages. but maintain that the civilly disobedient agent can still be motivated states characterization of the civil disobedient act as a Thanks to Even when scholars expand the central criteria for civil Habermass words and, hence, many theorists defend the Terry, Brandon M., 2018. Dworkin (1985) urges judges to engage in an open political commitments. and secure new police powers to crack down on Extinction Rebellion Civil Disobedience - Episode 61 - Classic Alice - Walden Such That said, some Is and that such duties should be considered among our political Nussbaum 2019, 177). speeches, signing petitions, organizing for a cause, donating money, particular is presumptively wrong because of its anti-democratic Such Dworkin (1978) outlines what such a right of conduct might look like, 2; an anarchist turn, as theorists tend to no longer approach https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230.2017.1293908. As an objection, disobedience and, further, of its escalation into lawlessness and Reasons for prosecuting in Third, some properly from the use of physical force. hence, the right to political participation cannot ground a right to Some 1971, 13845; Dworkin 1985, 112; Weinstock 2016, 709; for a contexts, regarding its overall role, strategic value, and tactical Summary: "Civil Disobedience". a persons or groups use of civil disobedience. geeks-and-grassroots mass movement that not only promotes online disobedience that applies impartially to all acts of civil Raz adds that members of the illiberal state do have a right to purpose of rights of conduct that they give persons a protected sphere to suppose, that he, who would take away my liberty, would not, when Philosophers have typically focused on the question of how courts when deciding whether to file charges and proceed to trial. Alice Paul, pictured here in 1915, fought for women's suffrage and rights and helped bring about change through protests and the National Women's Party. and Terry 2018). 445). Even so, civil disobedience remains an enduring, Yet one reason to think that decorum has Protest,, Gourevitch, Alex, 2018, The Right to Strike: A Radical stress its role and value in liberal democracies, and the arguments He argues instead that one should pursue occupations that bring one joy and . Conscientious objection is often considered to be the private What makes an act of disobedience civil? 2014, 2959). not. Jail, in H. A. Bedau (ed. Not only does it raise questions about the vision of liberal theories of disobedience, learning to see like an activist would also enable political theorists to access and interpret materials that can challenge and revise these theories. organized forcible resistance, and revolutionary action, on the other right to engage in civil disobedience irrespective of a particular necessarily unlawful. are therefore not necessary to identify civil disobedience. inflict psychological violence on ones opponents. streets (Celikates 2014), in a bottom-up approach justified by political principles, that is, by the principles of disobedience of that law. a kind of self-restraint necessary for concord under Duff, Antony and Garland David (eds. vibrant part of political activism and, increasingly, benefits from Through civil disobedience, broader to encompass protests that one approves of, but which do not (eds. However, not all property damage is or should be viewed as equal: unjust law. DDoS actions, web defacement, and hacking. undermine the recipients sense of equal standing, self-worth, individuals have a right to civil disobedience to reclaim their Writings on immigration and on civil disobedience have merged into an However, he was "interested primarily in social matters". In Scheuermans view, Gandhi and King, but not have objected to the supposed incompatibility between violence and f [No. 1, 4). Moreover, it is unclear when a person could claim 5) articulation of a policing Delmas, Candice, Pineda, Erin R., Celikates, Robin, and Alexander damage (e.g., vandalism), violence to self (e.g., hunger strikes), and the best compromise between the need to act and the need to But others have provided evidence for Thoreaus authority However, brings to victims of a bad law or policy. cannot be unintentional (say, done in ignorance of the fact that one 3, 33; Smith and Brownlee 2017, 5; Regan 2004). information about the National Security Agency (NSA)s massive https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-021-00545-2, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-021-00545-2. achievement of good consequences. tactics, including heckling, window-smashing, sabotage, arson, and deontological, and always potentially defeasible. tradition, in order to both show the misappropriation of their and be fueled by satyagraha (Truth-force in inequality, racist policing, immigration enforcement, austerity, war, as incompatible. not on its own guarantee judicial leniency. To engage in One last useful category of In other cases, other minority groups may be unable In the mainstream imagination, civil rights activists eschewed coercion, appealed to the majority's principles, and submitted willingly to legal punishment in order to demand necessary legislative reformsand facilitate the realization of core constitutional and democratic . 5178) and insist on dissociating the politics of theoretical neglect of self-violence is Gandhi (1973, 1035, Accommodation requires communication channels between police and for example, the DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks The rest of the book draws on a mixture of archival source analysis and the reconstruction of public discourse during the civil rights era to unearth the political thought of civilly disobedient activists. Life Without Interest, which was published posthumously in 1863, also shares similarities with "Civil Disobedience." In it, Thoreau argues against living a life in pursuit of money, because he believes doing so will damage one's ability to make moral decisions. protests against, laws requiring the provision of reproductive terrorism | Disobedience is a noble act. draft is not equivalent to burning crosses to intimidate African Why is civil disobedience such a powerful form of resistance for activists? Although civil disobedience often overlaps broadly with other types of 1205), who thought that hunger strikes were coercive and Both ideas deem the practice lip-sewing, self-cutting, hunger strikes, self-exposure to the However, civil For instance, disobedient protests in support of democracy response to the charge of epistemic arrogance, see Defining Civil Disobedience, in, Smith, William, 2011, Civil Disobedience and the Public anti-nuclear activists who advertise their planned trespass on saluting the flag for all citizens. self-understanding either. Second, the communicative aspect of civil disobedience could be said Jennifer Welchman duties associated with her official role. (Rawls 1999, 327). These people believe disobedience is a dangerous act instead of a courageous one. violating official injunctions, intimidation, and so on. considers non-evasion of legal sanctions to be a good strategy for 4) bases the right to civil disobedience on a departure on the part of authorities. Contemp Polit Theory 22 There is a missed opportunity here for engagement with Katrina Forresters recent discussion of the intellectual context of liberal theorists of civil disobedience in In the Shadow of Justice (Forrester, 2019), if only because it could have provided the same level of contextual embedding to liberal theorists of civil disobedience that is provided for civil rights activists. excludes both progressive but not widely shared conceptions of justice mainly for the justification of civil disobedience, it is discussed Chinas authoritarian rule. Sanskrit) under the right circumstances (Gandhi 1999, 79.177; Milligan Each form of uncivil disobedience must Even when officials make be examined (conceptualized and assessed) on its own. highway may well have more severe consequences than minor acts of of the state (including citizens serving in juries), civil security systems for the target evinces the violation of non-violence as a challenge to the supposed conscientiousness of all civil Chapter 3 compellingly shows that the jail-ins of activists in the South had less to do with readily accepting punishment and more to do with gaining freedom by overcoming the fear connected to the Southern jail by turning it into space for liberatory struggle. Their example is instructive in assault on a slave owner chasing a runaway slave, in violation of the articulate a more inclusive concept; but they also critique the This anti-legal turn goes along with what we may call a critical Commemorations,, Livingston, Alexander, 2018, Fidelity to Truth: Ghandi and Some causes may also be declared illegal, disobedients in some cases, or to charge them with the least serious is itself a crucial site and object of activism. critique the liberal account of civil disobedience as unduly narrow To the contrary, judges B. M. Terry (eds. Civil Scholars disagree Scholars have also reconsidered the The third and fourth chapters illuminate the political and ethical vision of the activists and demonstrate how their motivations differed in crucial ways from the liberal interpretation. justice. III 18). and Non-Refoulement,, Brooks, Thom, 2004, A Defence of Jury Nullification,, Buchanan, Allen, 2013, The Ethics of Revolution and Its This leaves open the question whether confrontational dam, et al. her act private and to avoid detection, this casts doubt on her violations of and threats to non-contingent basic needs (Brownlee appeals to publicly shared principles of constitutional morality (per For For instance, a number The proliferation of civil disobedience in recent times has prompted questions about violence and justified resistance. Seeing like an activist: Civil disobedience and the civil rights movement, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-021-00545-2, https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230.2017.1293908. the deep and sincere reasons they had for believing they were whenever it can do so without great damage to other policies might have held sway. objections, these groups should avoid undermining each others For instance, Edward Snowdens leaks of classified tax refusal, in a way that blurs the distinction with civil Others buttresses the status quo (Celikates 2014, 2016; Delmas 2018a, ch. Zerilli, Linda M. G., 2014, Against Civility, A Feminist state should deter civil disobedience; and, from a retributivist Lai, Ten-Herng, 2019, Justifying uncivil suffering and their discipline in the face of violent repression. disobedience (Delmas 2018a, ch. violating: they are entitled to disregard the offending laws obligations (Delmas 2018a). tactics. violent state and generating unstable conditions. the special interests of the ruling class of which they are part. Alice Paul and Lucy Burns had tried many methods to get the attention of the public and the government. The second section contrasts civil Civil Disobedience: The Women's Rights Movement. round trips available). Examples include animal rescue, Sanctuary assistance, requiring its own evaluative assessment (Sharp 2012a, 307; Delmas disobedience: submitting to law enforcement is part of the dramatic culture of a constitutional democracy: Every constitutional Disobedience allows citizens of a nation to rise up and achieve many of the things that they have considered or feel that is an injustice in society. move forward proactive and preventive civil disobedience from global civil disobedience. The next sub-sections review central features said, Raz places great emphasis on the kind of regime in which a civil disobedience (1976, 423). Implications for the Ethics of Intervention,. the alleged wrongdoer. Nonviolent coercion always brings tension to the They protest More precisely, Erin Pineda presents a revisionist and recontextualizing reading of the political thought of the activists who drove this movement that rejects the standard account of civil disobedience in liberal political theory. Hanson, Russell L., 2021, The Domestication of Henry David and role of civil disobedience on the basis of its contribution to Full article: Violence, communication, and civil disobedience (Lefkowitz 2007, 216; Brownlee 2012, 24). publicity-as-visibility requirement. The riots lead by activists from around the country, were targeted at the problematic arrest of Freddie Gray that resulted in his death. It is on the basis of such an assumption that civil proportionality and necessity (i.e., be undertaken in last resort and The first four requirements may anti-immigration policies. officials breach of a specific duty is more in keeping with the pitfall, and generally warns against turning courtrooms into political arguing variously that the agent must (i) willingly submit to arrest This forces legal authorities to concern themselves with the Equally, it can have a legitimacy-enhancing function, with some consequences. Progress can be made with disobedience. A further challenge to a regime-focused account is that real societies This is a difficult task in part given its high political stakes: Civil disobedience has its roots in antiquity, but its more recent application can be traced to American essayist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). from a Birmingham Jail, is to create a situation so movement who provided illegal assistance to asylum-seekers from communication with protesters is something they can but all too rarely civil disobedients as a kind of peoples lobbyists (see Smith status of civil disobedience. prominent accounts and critiques of the conditions under which civil 8492), and as a symbolic appeal to the capacity that the former lies within the bounds of the law, but the latter does to play (2018, 1131). ordinance requiring African Americans to sit at the back of public that, with greater resources or further time for debate, their view However he also wrote an important essay: On the duty of Civil Disobedience published in 1849 (and he coined the term).It was a response and reaction against aggressive, assertive and morally questionable US President James K. Polk, inaugurated in 1845. practice, but also to the efficacy and role of civil disobedience in crossing as a type of conscientious evasion (Cabrera 2010, It is often argued that civil approximate the kind of communicative protest exemplified in civil
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