Radical Democratic Disobedience

Abstract: The article defends the forms of civil disobedience currently practised by environmental protesters. It reviews the justifications of civil disobedience by Dworkin, Rawls and Singer, and finds them more or less wanting. A new and more extensive justification is provided on the basis of our duties to prevent harm befalling future generations.

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.

Contemporary Political Theory, 2020

Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Nature Limited. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".

Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2009

A fundamental dimension of contemporary social movements is the use of civil disobedience, as means of both exerting mass pressure on the political system and as a process through which the participants of a social movement perceive and construct an alternative and autonomous democratic power. This article attempts to develop a political and ethical reflection about the transformative dimension and collective potential of civil disobedience drawing on the notions of the right to rebel and the performative.

2024

Through a critical reconstruction of Jan-Werner Müller's approaches to (1) civil disobedience, (2) uncivil disobedience, and (3) resistance, I argue that his effort to frame popular protest as a form of militant democracy helps us bring to light one of the key contradictions at the heart of recent theories of the latter: such theories neglect or underestimate the persistence of structural democratic exclusion, especially along racial lines, and the threat it poses to the democratic order. This problem is especially salient in Müller’s theory of democratic self-defense because of its focus on the justification of social protest as a means of protecting democracy. In his theory, the level of dangerousness or graveness of the anti-democratic threat dictates how radical militant disobedience can and must be. At the same time, Müller contradictorily restricts the exercise of political protest and resistance in contexts where militant democracy is said to be urgently necessary and where minorities such as African Americans suffer from structural democratic exclusion.

2021

The year 2020 was a most discombobulating yearthe Covid 19 pandemic, economic disruption, massive movements for racial justice and police reform, a Presidential election, worsening climate change, and growing uncertainty about "our democracy". Also, 2020 saw the publication of a most challenging book; a book of essays, Protest and Dissent, focused on African American political thought and Gandhian non-violence. This book is additionally valuable for its references to the literature.

Perspectives on Politics, 2022

which one reaction was Bodin's notion of indivisible sovereignty and another was Grotius's model of the composite polity, according to which "he differentiated between 'the common Subject of Supreme Power [which] is the State (civitas)' and the 'proper subject,' which could be one person or an assembly, potentially ruling over multiple States" (p. 266). Reformation, Resistance, and Reason of State is, to be sure, a book of great learning, discrimination, and nuance, and to that justice cannot be done in a short review. Nonetheless, it is, in my view, insufficiently argumentative. The reader must work rather too hard to glean such lines of argument as those outlined in the preceding text. Its subject is given an almost wholly nominalist treatment, one writer after another, and I longed for more explicit comparison, as well as a more centripetal analysis, coming back to a thesis, even if this had to be to a thesis about a set of developments that were still underway at any single juncture. The best-established surveys, such as those written by Annabel Brett, Francis Oakley, Quentin Skinner, and Richard Tuck, all have a stronger thread of argumentation running through them. Relatedly but separately, nearly all the discussion is at

The central challenge for theorists and practitioners of radical politics today is to develop the tools for collective action on a global scale, but also account for the specificity of diverse local struggles and promote the free transformation of individual and collective subjectivities through political action. This article examines the radical democratic theory of Chantal Mouffe, post-sovereignty cosmopolitanism of David Held and contemporary anarchist theory, in light of participant research in contemporary global resistance movements. As none of these concepts can meet the challenges facing global resistance movements today or the demands of liberty and equality, ‘democratic insurrection’ is intended as both an alternative theoretical category and a practical tool for radical politics. Defined by a forum–affinity–network system, democratic insurrection is based on voluntary associations and the production of the common. By expanding the democratic moments of deliberation, decision and action across time and space, democratic insurrection allows for democratic practice and acts of resistance on a range of scales and organisational forms. Radical politics today demands the theorisation and practice of democracy beyond the state and insurrection beyond armed revolt. Democratic insurrection demonstrates the possibility of such theory and practice, but must still overcome the persistence of dominant power relations that continue to plague global resistance movements from within.

APSA 2013 Annual Meeting Paper, 2013

With the concept of democratic disobedience this paper introduces a justification for civil disobedience that differs from the traditional account of liberal civil disobedience primarily in two aspects: first, the grounds on which disobedient actions are justified and second, the scope of legitimate demands within this mode of protest. To demonstrate the potential of this new mode of justification it is applied to the case of anti-abortion activism in the U.S.The liberal concept of civil disobedience is based on the idea that in cases of blatant injustices civil disobedience is a means to trump and correct democratic decisions in the name of justice. Democratic disobedience, on the other hand, does not invoke an external corrective instance, but rather bases its justification on the assumption that the democratic process is inherently imperfect and therefore inevitably produces democratic deficits, i.e. incongruities between the will of the citizens and governmental politics. Contrary to the liberal model, democratic disobedience does not refer to pre-political or metaphysical concepts like justice, God or personal conscience, but grounds its justification in the conflictual practice of democratic decision-making processes. This theoretical reorientation expands the legitimate reasons for civil disobedience beyond strict violations of justice. To counterbalance this tendency democratic disobedience is strictly confined to demand only a reintroduction into the political decision-making process and, accordingly, the justification for democratic disobedience expires if a political reengagement with the issue in question is successfully triggered – and this includes the case in which the sovereign reaffirms the policy. By virtue of this construction liberal and democratic disobedience can co-exist and complement each other depending on the particular context and the justifying reasons for civil disobedience. What renders the concept of democratic disobedience especially valuable, however, is that this new formulation avoids any tendencies towards an instrumental understanding of democracy and justifies disobedience rather as a productive form of participation than as a parasitic external revising mechanism that limits democratic self-government.

Editor's Introduction to forthcoming issue of Democratic Theory Journal (2017).

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.

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

Res Publica, 2004

The purpose of this paper is not to define civil disobedience, but to identify a paradigm case of civil disobedience and the features exemplified in it. After noting the benefits of this methodological approach, the paper proceeds with an examination of two key, interconnected features: conscientiousness and communication. First, a link is made between the conscientious aspect of civil disobedience and moral consistency; a civil disobedient demonstrates a conscientious commitment to certain values through her willingness to condemn, and to dissociate herself from, governmental decisions that violate those values. A parallel is then drawn between the communicative aspect of civil disobedience and the communicative aspect of lawful punishment by the state. Both practices are associated with an aim to demonstrate protest against certain types of conduct and an aim to bring about a change in that conduct. In paradigm situations, a civil disobedient aims to lead policymakers not only to reform existing law, but also to internalise her objections so as to produce a lasting change in the law. Having such aims places some constraints upon the modes of communication that she reasonably may use to achieve these aims. This paper concludes by considering three controversial modes of communicationcoercion, publicity and violence.