Rethinking Civil Disobedience as a Practice of Contestation (MS)

The goal of this article is to show that mainstream liberal accounts of civil disobedience fail to fully capture the latter's specific characteristics as a genuinely political and democratic practice of contestation that is not reducible to an ethical or legal understanding either in terms of individual conscience or of fidelity to the rule of law. In developing this account in more detail, I first define civil disobedience with an aim of spelling out why the standard liberal model, while providing a useful starting point, ultimately leads to an overly constrained, domesticated and sanitized understanding of this complex political practice. Second, I place the political practice of civil disobedience between two opposing poles: symbolic politics and real confrontation. I argue that the irreducible tension between these poles precisely accounts for its politicizing and democratizing potential. Finally, I briefly examine the role of civil disobedience in representative democracies, addressing a series of recent challenges made in response to this radically democratic understanding of disobedience.

(Des)troços: revista de pensamento radical, 2022

Adopting a genealogical methodology, this paper aims to unveil the historical intricacies of civil concept and the liberal model of civil disobedience. As suggested by Hanson, there has been a Resistance to civil government later republished as Civil disobedience that goes from its editors until Gandhi. By the same token, there has been a second process, not of selective appropriation per se, but of colonization in which authors of the liberal model of civil disobedience impose a series of theoretical constraints in the form of constitutive elements that ought to be fulfilled in order for a political movement to be considered a legitimate case of civil disobedience. This has resulted in civil disobedients being required to recognize the legitimacy of legal and political systems and to demand changes only within the boundaries of the rule of law. Conversely, we suggest a different and radical approach to civil disobedience, one that acknowledges that civil-base, i.e., determined from real political actions and not necessarily centered on legal foundations or normative status.

International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 2020

Purpose-Civil disobedience is often defined as a public, conscientious, nonviolent act of breaking the law in an attempt to change an unjust policy or law. When applied to real-life situations, this widely accepted definition overlooks key features of civil disobedience and ignores civil acts that fundamentally challenge undemocratic institutions or the state and make socio-political changes possible. The purpose of this paper is to criticize and revise the conceptual, ethical and socio-political understandings of civil disobedience by integrating deliberative theory with some radical perspectives on civil disobedience. Design/methodology/approach-This paper integrates and critically revises previous approaches to the justification and role of civil disobedience in democratic systems. Specifically, the ethical concerns about civil disobedience are discussed and the deliberative concept of civil disobedience is expanded as a form of political contestation by incorporating the socio-political aspects of civil disobedience. Although it is a conceptual discussion, the paper opted for an exploratory approach using empirically related examples to illustrate the theoretical discussion. Findings-The paper provides a new perspective to the literature on civil disobedience. The critical review shows that the limited general understanding of civil disobedience conceptually is not useful to analyze various forms of civil disobedience. Research limitations/implications-The reviewed literature is limited due to a limited space. Practical implications-The paper includes practical implications for policymakers and authorities when evaluating and responding to civil actions more effectively and for members of civil movements and organizations when creating new forms of civil protest and effective responses to authorities. Originality/value-This paper may be a modest first attempt to reframe the concept of civil disobedience by integrating deliberative democracy theory and some radical perspectives.

2021

Historical Social Research, 2024

The aim of this article is to describe the institution of civil disobe- dience as a type of action that can be subsumed under the category of Norb- ert Elias’ “civilization.” The first thesis I aim to defend in my article claims a historical universality of civil disobedience, by which I mean that the most in- fluential doctrines of law and lawmaking imply, more or less directly, the right to civil disobedience and a specific form of the latter. As far as the central ideas of law trigger distinct civilization processes, the twin forms of civil diso- bedience fulfill the same social function. This article will distinguish four such traditions of civil disobedience: religious, romantic, reformist, and demo- cratic. My second, central thesis refers to the last tradition and claims that the democratic idea of civil disobedience focuses on law-breaking understood as a communicative use of the legal code. The very act of communication im- plies the existence of a communication recipient constituted by the whole population of citizens who are the public of the system of law. Furthermore, I argue that the pre-democratic traditions of civil disobedience provide the modern concept of civil disobedience with essential characteristics: transpar- ency, ethical motivation, civility (proportionality), and nonviolence. Thus, my argumentation culminates in the insight that the basic definitional elements of civil disobedience constitute it as a form of civilization par excellence, alt- hough lawmakers and governments frequently condemn civil disobedience as a decivilized or decivilizing practice.

Essays in Philosophy, 2007

I intend this piece as an invitation to think through civil disobedience as a strategy for social transformation and, more specifically, to rethink its significance for revolutionary political change. To that end, I offer a series of theses, each of which may serve as an occasion for public debate and all of which together constitute an argument for a particular way of thinking about civil disobedience as an historical phenomenon and as a contemporary strategy. My argument, in short, is that civil disobedience is better understood and more effectively practiced as a means by which to dismantle and reconstitute social orders than as a tool by which to effect change within social orders that remain intact. The discussion is of significance for practitioners and would-be practitioners to the extent that it clarifies what is at stake when one engages in civil disobedience. It is of significance for social and political philosophers concerned with the ideological consistency of civil disobedience as a strategy within contemporary movements for social change, and it is of significance for historians of philosophy seeking to assess campaigns that have moved civil disobedience toward the center of political discourse – most notably the Gandhian independence movement in India and the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Essays in Philosophy, Vol. 8, No. 2, June 2007

Contemporary Political Theory, 2020

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Criminal Law and Philosophy, 2015

In her book, Conscience and Conviction, Kimberley Brownlee argues that there is nothing undemocratic about the robust, primary right to civil disobedience that she devotes most of her argument to defending. To the contrary, she holds that there is nothing paternalistic about civil disobedients opposing the will of democratic majorities, because, inter alia, democratic majorities cannot claim particular epistemic superiority, and because there are flaws inherent to democratic procedures that civil disobedience addresses. I hold that Brownlee's arguments fail. In particular, her argument fails because it does not properly construe the nature of the epistemic claim that can be made either by democratic procedures or by civil disobedients, and because it illegitimately conflates the concern about permanent minorities that has been a constant thorn in the side of democratic theorists, with a concern with all outvoted minorities, whether permanent minorities or not. Keywords Civil disobedience Á Democracy Á Rights Á Minorities Kimberley Brownlee's Conscience and Conviction (2012; references to this work given parenthetically in the text) is the most systematic philosophical account we possess of the place of civil disobedience in liberal democratic theory. Actually, it is much more than that. It is a subtle and humane articulation of the notion of conscience itself, and a deep and searching exploration of the changes that would be wrought in our professional lives and in our lives as citizens were the claims of conscience to be taken seriously. I can't possibly do justice to the richness of the book in the context of a short essay. Rather, I will concentrate on a rather small corner of her overall argument: that there is nothing inherently undemocratic about civil disobedience. One of the complaints about recognizing too extensive a right to civil disobedience in the political ethics of liberal democracies is that those who engage in it are in effect taking the law into their own hands. They are, after all, disobeying laws that have been democratically deliberated upon and