An Exploration of Civil, Uncivil and Radical Disobedience

Philosophy Compass, 2016

Many historical and recent forms of protest usually referred to as civil disobedience do not fit the standard philosophical definition of " civil disobedience ". The moral and political importance of this point is explained in section 1, and two theoretical lessons are drawn: one, we should broaden the concept of civil disobedience, and two, we should start thinking about uncivil disobedience. Section 2 is devoted to the main objections against, and theorists' defenses of, civil disobedience. Henry David Thoreau famously protested slavery, the war against Mexico, and the atrocious treatment of Native Americans by refusing to pay the poll tax for seven consecutive years in the 1840s. Shortly after World War I, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, confessing his debt to Thoreau, organized a noncooperation campaign by Indian peasants against British landlords and revenue officials in the Champaran and Kheda districts. Gandhi led his most successful campaign against British colonial rule in 1930, as thousands of Indians joined his 241-mile Salt March to protest Great Britain's Salt Acts, which prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt. Twenty-five years later, Martin Luther King, Jr., inspired by both Thoreau and King, led a year-long boycott of buses in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest racially segregated seating. Although usually referred to as civil disobedience, these actions do not fit the standard philosophical definition of " civil disobedience ". The moral and political importance of this point will be explained in section 1. That section also ref lects on recent forms of protest—from Pussy Riot to Anonymous—and draws two theoretical lessons from these protests: one, we should broaden the concept of civil disobedience, two, we should start thinking about uncivil disobedience. Section 2 is devoted to the main objections against, and theorists' defenses of, civil disobedience.

Middle West Review

This article addresses a neglected class of cases of civic resistance involving the anonymous and covert disruption of institutions and practices. Such cases have become more commonplace in the first decades of the twenty-first century with the rise of "hacktivism," but they sit uneasily within the traditional conceptual and normative framework of civil disobedience the legitimacy of which is premised on the publicity of dissent and on the willingness of dissenters to accept the legal consequences of their actions. To make sense of these new forms of civic resistance, the article introduces the concept of "disruptive disobedience." It elaborates the concept by contrasting it with other forms of civic resistance, and proposes a moral justification for it by presenting it as a corrective to democratic exclusion. Finally, it tests that justification by applying it to a prominent contemporary case involving Aaron Swartz's illegal download of JSTOR research articles.

Revolt and Revolution: The Protester in the 21st Century, 2016

In the wake of theArab Spring, Time Magazine named 'The Protester', 2011's Person of the Year. Revolts, social unrest and demands for systemic changecontinue to spread from the anti-austerity street marches in Europe and the progressive 'No Borders' global movement, to protests against neoconservative and xenophobic populist movements. Histories are currently being (re)written and he immanence and promise of large scale political revolutions is as present today as ever on our planet. As the goals and aspirations of protesters across the world become more heterogeneous and less programmatic, it becomes increasingly hard to say what 'the protester' wants and where 'the revolution' will take us. This book embraces the ambiguity and heterogeneity of contemporary protest movements, pointing to how the potentials of revolutionary acts reside behind seemingly irrelevant, disorganized outbursts of apparently aimless acts. Giving meaningt o the sign carried by a protester of the Occupy Wall Street demonstration: 'We're here; we're unclear; get used to it'.

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.

Mobilization, 2019

Capital and Class, 2016

Res Publica

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 persuasive force 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 political project of living together, and so to treating others as persons to be persuaded. 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.

Princeton University Department of Sociology and Public Affairs, 2021

This paper addresses such scholarly questions as: Was there any interesting racial component to the BLM protests, especially given COVID disparities in health care for Black patients? Did the emotional and mental effects of quarantine have an effect on BLM protest attendance? If so, how? Were there distinct aspects of certain cities that made protests more highly attended and more common? Through directly engaging with such scholarly questions, it can be better understood how COVID-19 affects and has affected the occurrence of BLM protests and demonstrations. A comprehensive study through the administering of a 25-question hybrid survey-interview protocol to 418 individuals living in the United States with diverse demographic backgrounds who attended or would have attended BLM protests (both for and against BLM) serves as the basis of scholarly evidence for this composition. This research is intensely important as an intersection of social efficacy, activism, and dissent that serves as an informative, unstudied source of how social protest is affected in a time of epidemiological crisis.