Civil Disobedience

First published Thu Jan 4, 2007; substantive revision Wed Jun 2, 2021
From the Boston Tea Party to Mahatma Gandhi’s Salt March, and from suffragists’
illegally casting their ballots to whites-only lunch counter sit-ins, civil disobedience has
often played a crucial role in bending the proverbial arc of the moral universe toward
justice. But what, if anything, do these acts, and countless others which we refer to as civil
disobedience have in common? What distinguishes them from other forms of
conscientious and political action?
On the most widely accepted account, civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and
conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws
or government policies (Rawls 1999, 320). On this account, people who engage in civil
disobedience operate at the boundary of fidelity to law, have general respect for their
regime, and are willing to accept the legal consequences of their actions, as evidence of
their fidelity to the rule of law. Civil disobedience, given its place at the boundary of
fidelity to law, is said on this view to fall between legal protest, on the one hand, and
conscientious refusal, uncivil disobedience, militant protest, organized forcible
resistance, and revolutionary action, on the other hand.
This picture of civil disobedience, and the broader accounts offered in response, will be
examined in the first section of this entry, which considers conceptual issues. The second
section contrasts civil disobedience, broadly, with other types of protest. The third
focuses on the justification of civil disobedience, examining upstream why civil
disobedience needs to be justified, and downstream what is its value and role in society.
The fourth examines states’ appropriate responses to civil disobedience.

 1. Features of Civil Disobedience

o 1.1 Principled Disobedience
o 1.2 Civility
 1.2.1 Communication
 1.2.2 Publicity
 1.2.3 Non-violence
 1.2.4 Non-evasion
 1.2.5 Decorum
o 1.3 Fidelity to Law
 2. Other Types of Protest
o 2.1 Legal Protest
o 2.2 Rule Departures
 o 2.3 Conscientious Objection
o 2.4 Immigration Disobedience
o 2.5 Digital Disobedience
o 2.6 Uncivil Disobedience
o 2.7 Revolutionary Action
 3. Justification
o 3.1 The Problem of Disobedience
o 3.2 Justificatory Conditions
o 3.3 Value
 4. Responding to Civil Disobedience
o 4.1 Punishing Civil Disobedience
o 4.2 A Right to Civil Disobedience
o 4.3 Accommodating Civil Disobedience
 5. Conclusion
 Bibliography
 Acknowledgments
 Academic Tools
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. Features of Civil Disobedience

Henry David Thoreau is widely credited with coining the term civil disobedience. For
years, Thoreau refused to pay his state poll tax as a protest against the institution of
slavery, the extermination of Native Americans, and the war against Mexico. When a
Concord, Massachusetts, constable named Sam Staples asked Thoreau to pay his back
taxes in 1846 and Thoreau refused, Staples escorted him to jail. In a public lecture that
Thoreau gave twice in 1848, he justified his tax refusal as a way to withdraw cooperation
with the government and he called on his fellow townspeople to do the same. Thoreau’s
lecture, titled “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government,”
formed the basis of his 1849 essay, “Resistance to Civil Government.” In 1866, four years
after Thoreau’s death, the essay was republished under the title “Civil Disobedience.”
Some scholars believe the new title was provided by Thoreau’s sister Sophia, his sole
literary executor and sole editor of his posthumous edited works (Fedorko 2016). But
others have provided evidence for Thoreau’s authority over the edits in the 1866 text
(Dawson 2007).
Whereas Thoreau understood the “civil” in civil disobedience to characterize the political
relations between civilian subjects and their civil government, today most scholars and
activists understand the “civil” to relate to civility – a kind of self-restraint necessary for
concord under conditions of pluralism. The next sub-sections review central features of
civil disobedience.

1.1 Principled Disobedience

Lawbreaking: First, for an act to be civilly disobedient, it must involve some breach of
law. In democratic societies, civil disobedience as such is not a crime. When an agent
who engages in civil disobedience is punished by the law, it is not for “civil
disobedience,” but for the recognized offenses she commits, such as disturbing the peace,
trespassing, damaging property, picketing, violating official injunctions, intimidation,
and so on.
When civil disobedients directly break the law that they oppose – such as Rosa Parks
violating the Montgomery, Alabama, city ordinance requiring African Americans to sit
at the back of public buses and give up those seats to white riders if the front of the bus
filled up – they engage in direct civil disobedience. By contrast, when disobedients break
a law which, other things being equal, they do not oppose, in order to demonstrate their
protest against another law or policy – such as anti-war protesters staging sit-ins in
government buildings – they engage in indirect civil disobedience. The distinction
between direct and indirect civil disobedience is mainly relevant to the possibility of
mounting constitutional test cases, since one cannot test the constitutionality of a law in
court without actually breaching it. Although some scholars argue that direct civil
disobedience is preferable to its indirect counterpart because it is most clearly legible as
an act of protest against the law breached (C. Cohen 1966, 4–5), most scholars maintain
the acceptability of indirect disobedience given that not all unjust laws or policies can be
disobeyed directly (M. Cohen 1970, 109–110; Rawls 1999, 320; Brownlee 2012, 19–20).
For instance, a same-sex couple living in a jurisdiction that forbids same-sex marriage
cannot get married in violation of the law. Black Lives Matter activists cannot directly
disobey police brutality, stop-and-frisk policing, or the acquittal of police officers who
killed unarmed Blacks. Also, even when a person can engage in direct disobedience of a
law, doing so may be unduly burdensome, such as when the punishment for the breach
would be extreme.
Principledness: An act of lawbreaking must be deliberate, principled, and conscientious,
if it is to be civil and, hence, distinguishable from ordinary criminal offenses. Civil
disobedience cannot be unintentional (say, done in ignorance of the fact that one is
violating the law): it must be undertaken deliberately. Principled disobedience can be
distinguished from ordinary criminal offending by examining the motives that underlie
the disobedient act. The person must intend to protest laws, policies, institutions, or
practices that she believes are unjust on the basis of her sincerely held moral or political
commitments. The agent may not be correct or even entirely reasonable about her
convictions, but she holds them sincerely. In these ways, principled disobedience is
distinct from garden-variety criminal activity, which is generally self-interested and
selfish, opportunistic and unprincipled.
Conscientiousness: The deliberate and principled features of civil disobedience are often
brought together under the umbrella of conscientiousness and equated with seriousness,
sincerity, depth of conviction, and selflessness – again, in order to contrast civil
disobedience with criminal lawbreaking. In response, some scholars highlight the
pervasiveness of self-interested civil disobedience – of the ‘not in my backyard’ variety
(e.g., people protesting against a new highway passing through their neighborhood) – as
a challenge to the supposed conscientiousness of all civil disobedience (Celikates 2016,
38). Others insist that civil disobedience need not be selfless: oppressed groups indeed
have a lot to gain from their anti-oppression struggles, including better life prospects,
improved material conditions, and heightened self-respect (Delmas 2019, 183–4). And,
unsurprisingly, many of the most famous civil disobedients – Mohandas Gandhi, Rosa
Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela – were members of the groups whose
rights they sought to champion. But conscientiousness – understood as sincerity and
seriousness – does not require selflessness, and ordinary crime should not be equated with
selfishness, as the example of Robin Hood illustrates. That said, some thinkers also
challenge the requirement of seriousness by regarding, for example, the DDoS
(distributed denial-of-service) attacks undertaken by Anonymous, such as Operation:
Avenge Assange, as acts of civil disobedience, despite their ‘lulz-seeking’, playful and
non-serious motivations (Celikates and de Zeeuw 2016, 211–3).

1.2 Civility
What makes an act of disobedience civil? Scholars commonly consider all or some of the
five features below to define civil disobedience.
1.2.1 Communication
Typically, a person who commits an offense has no wish to communicate with her
government or society. This is evinced by the fact that usually such a person does not
intend to make it known that she has offended. In contrast, civil disobedience is
understood as a communicative act – a kind of symbolic speech, which aims to convey a
message to a certain audience, such as the government and public. Civil disobedients are
thought to contribute arguments to the public sphere. Typically, their message is a call
for reform or redress; and their audience is the majority. Civil disobedience is variously
described as an act by which “one addresses the sense of justice of the majority of the
community” (Rawls 1999, 320), as “a plea for reconsideration” (Singer 1973, 84–92),
and as a “symbolic… appeal to the capacity for reason and sense of justice of the
majority” (Habermas 1985, 99). Even when scholars expand the central criteria for civil
disobedience, they agree that civil disobedience is essentially communicative. In
comparison, other types of principled disobedience are not necessarily communicative.
For instance, animal rescue primarily seeks to relieve the suffering of the rescued animals;
the tactic of environmental sabotage known as ‘tree-spiking’ primarily seeks to prevent
or stall the cutting down of trees (Delmas 2018a, 44–45). Both types of action can of
course be understood in terms of their messages, too, but communicating such a message
is not their primary aim in each case.
1.2.2 Publicity
On many accounts, civil disobedience must be not only communicative, but also public
in a specific way. Publicity may designate different features: (i) the openness of the act,
(ii) non-anonymity of the agent, (iii) advance warning of planned action, (iv)
responsibility-taking for the action, or (v) an appeal based in publicly shared principles
of justice. The first four requirements may be classified together under the umbrella
of publicity-as-visibility, while the fifth can be dubbed publicity-as-appeal. Since the
latter requirement matters mainly for the justification of civil disobedience, it is discussed
below (§3.2). That said, Rawls (1999, 321), for one, clarifies the publicity of civil
disobedience by describing it as a “political act,” to wit, “an act guided and justified by
political principles, that is, by the principles of justice which regulate the constitution and
social institutions generally,” thereby suggesting that publicity-as-appeal is in fact part of
the definition of civil disobedience.
Rawls and Hugo Bedau (1961, 655), on whom Rawls relies, defend all of the features of
publicity-as-visibility, arguing that civil disobedience could never be covert or secretive
but could only ever be committed in public, openly, and with advance warning to
authorities (per (i)–(iii); and additionally that it involves responsibility-taking (iv). The
thought is that publicity is crucial to the civil disobedient’s communicative aims and that
any violation of these features of publicity would obscure or muddy the nature of civil
disobedience as a communicative act. Critics have rejected the requirement to give
advance warning as a defining criterion of civil disobedience. If a person publicizes her
intention to breach the law, by giving advance notice about it, then she provides legal
authorities with the opportunity to abort her action (Dworkin 1985, 115; Smart 1991,
206–7). For instance, anti-nuclear activists who advertise their planned trespass on
military property would simply be prevented from executing their action. In this case, not
giving advance warning is necessary to accomplish the communicative act.
Some theorists have also denied the first two publicity requirements above that civil
disobedients need to act openly and non-anonymously. Some argue that publicity is
compatible with covertness and anonymity, so long as agents claim responsibility for
their actions after the fact (Greenawalt 1987, 239; Brownlee 2012, 160; Scheuerman
2018, 43–5). For instance, Edward Snowden’s leaks of classified information about the
National Security Agency (NSA)’s massive surveillance programs constitute acts of civil
disobedience in this view because, although Snowden obtained and leaked the documents
covertly, he eventually claimed responsibility and sought to publicly justify his actions
(Scheuerman 2014, 617–21; Brownlee 2016, 966). In this view, the only publicity
requirement is (iv) that agents take self-identifying responsibility for their actions after
the fact. The other requirements of publicity-as-visibility – openness, non-anonymity,
and advance warning – can in fact detract from or undermine the attempt to communicate
through civil disobedience and are therefore not necessary to identify civil disobedience.
Given, however, that there is often widespread reluctance to regard as “civil” covert and
anonymous acts of disobedience such as assistance to undocumented migrants or
anonymous hacktivism, other thinkers accept (i), (ii), and (iv) as standard requirements
of publicity-as-visibility and deem covert acts to be uncivil without pre-judging their
degree of justifiability (Delmas 2018a, 44–5).
1.2.3 Non-violence
Like publicity, non-violence is supposed to be essential to the communicativeness of a
civilly disobedient act, non-violence being part of its legibility as a mode of address. “To
engage in violent acts likely to injure and to hurt is incompatible with civil disobedience
as a mode of address. Indeed, any interference with the civil liberties of others tends to
obscure the civilly disobedient quality of one’s act” (Rawls 1999, 321). (The strategic
and tactical value of non-violence is discussed in §3.3.) Critics have objected to the
supposed incompatibility between violence and communication, arguing that violence,
depending on its form and targets, does not necessarily obscure the communicative
quality of a disobedient’s act. Burning a police car or vandalizing a Confederate
monument, as some protesters did under the Black Lives Matter banner, conveys a clear
message of opposition to police brutality and anger at the state’s failure to address
systemic racism. The compatibility between violence and communication is further
underscored in cases of self-directed violence: self-immolation may provide “an eloquent
statement of both the dissenter’s frustration and the importance of the issues he
addresses” (Brownlee 2012, 21–2). On this basis, some scholars deny altogether the
requirement that civil disobedience be non-violent (M. Cohen 1970, 103; Brownlee 2012,
198–9; Moraro 2019, 96–101).
Some scholars also see nothing inherently contradictory in the notion of “violent civil
disobedience” independent of its communicative aims. John Morreall views a person’s
physical assault on a slave owner chasing a runaway slave, in violation of the Fugitive
Slave Act of 1850, as a case of “justifiable violent civil disobedience” (1976, 42–3).
Jennifer Welchman considers “violence, threats of violence, covert acts of sabotage,
blackmail, and even assault” as means that civil disobedients can justifiably use to
obstruct and frustrate injustice (2001, 105). But, arguably this route is too hasty, as it
disregards what seems to be an essential and powerful association between civil
disobedience and non-violence: the civility of civil disobedience seems to entail non-
violence. The difficulty is to specify the appropriate notions of violence and non-
violence.
This is a difficult task in part given its high political stakes: protests labeled as non-violent
are more likely to be perceived favorably; protests labeled as violent are more likely to
alienate the public and to be met with violent repression. In addition, the labeling of
protests, as Robin Celikates notes, “far from being a neutral observation, is always a
politically charged speech act that can reproduce forms of marginalization and exclusion
that are often racialized and gendered” and tends to serve the interests of socially
dominant or mainstream voices (2016, 983). On this basis, Celikates casts doubt on the
usefulness of “a fixed category of non-violence … for a philosophical analysis of
disobedience informed by its social and political reality” (ibid.). Nonetheless, specifying
the categories of violence and non-violence is important to push back against
disingenuous uses of these categories, as when the police declare a peaceful protest a
‘riot’ – a common occurrence in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests (ACLED 2020).
One way to conceive of violence is as the use of physical force causing or likely to cause
injury (Rawls 1999, 321). However, non-violent acts or even legal acts may indirectly
yet foreseeably cause more harm to others than do direct acts of physical force. A legal
strike by ambulance workers or a roadblock on an important highway may well have
more severe consequences than minor acts of vandalism (Raz 1979, 267). Psychological
violence can also cause injury to others. Philosophers typically reject the childhood chant
that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” recognizing
that harm and injury do not come solely from the use of physical force. For one thing,
words can incite physical violence. Words can also hurt even without the threat of
physical injury, such as verbal insult and harassment, which can undermine the recipient’s
sense of equal standing, self-worth, and safety. The implication for civil disobedience is
that the requirement of non-violence prohibits the use of tactics likely to inflict
psychological violence on one’s opponents. Aggressive confrontations designed to
denigrate and humiliate (distinct from attempts to elicit shame through displays of
unearned suffering and appeals to conscience) are incompatible with the civility and non-
violence of civil disobedience.
Rawls does not mention, and it is unclear whether, non-violence prohibits certain actions
that don’t physically or psychologically injure others but still cause harms, such as
property damage (e.g., vandalism), violence to self (e.g., hunger strikes), and coercion
(e.g., forceful occupation).
Property damage: Authorities, much of the public, and many scholars tend to conceive
of non-violence strictly, as excluding any damage to property (Fortas 1968, 48–9, 123–
6; Smith 2013, 3, 33; Smith and Brownlee 2017, 5; Regan 2004). Two broad reasons may
explain the inclusion of property damage within the category of violence. One is the
classical liberal understanding of private property as an extension of one’s person; the
other is the assumption that property damage is likely to lead to violence against persons.
John Locke formulates both when he argues it is “lawful for a man to kill a thief, who
has not in the least hurt him, nor declared any design upon his life … [because] I have no
reason to suppose, that he, who would take away my liberty, would not, when he had me
in his power, take away every thing else” (Locke 1690, III §18). By counting all instances
of property destruction as violent, such a view dissuades one from drawing evaluative
distinctions among different cases, methods, targets, and aims. However, not all property
damage is or should be viewed as equal: burning one’s Selective Service card to protest
the military draft is not equivalent to burning crosses to intimidate African Americans
and Jews; smashing a stained-glass window depicting enslaved persons in a cotton field
(as a Yale janitor did in 2016) is not equivalent to smashing the windows of a store in
order to loot it. For some thinkers, such differences are not only issues of justification.
They insist that violence and non-violence simply do not exhaust the descriptive
possibilities and that we should think of property damage as a third conceptual category
distinct from the other two and requiring its own evaluative assessment (Sharp 2012a,
307; Delmas 2018a, 49, 244–5). Other scholars have instead argued that non-violence
can encompass property damage (Milligan 2013, ch. 2; Scheuerman 2018, 46–7, 77, 87).
They hold that civil disobedients can remain non-violent while engaging in selective
destruction of property, assuming the damage is minor and relates clearly to the civil
disobedient’s message, such as when pacifists hammer warhead nose cones.
Self-violence: Self-violent protests include tactics such as lip-sewing, self-cutting, hunger
strikes, self-exposure to the elements, and self-immolation. When theorists list hunger
strikes among the tactics of civil disobedience, they often do not address the question of
whether self-violence is compatible with non-violence properly conceived, but simply
assume an affirmative answer. Some scholars cast doubt on this notion, given the violence
of self-destructive protests and given activists’ self-understanding of their own actions
(see Bargu’s 2014 critical ethnographic study on the 2000–2007 death fast by left-wing
militants in Turkish prisons). A notable exception to the theoretical neglect of self-
violence is Gandhi (1973, 103–5, 120–5), who thought that hunger strikes were coercive
and violent but that fasts of moral pressure and Satyagrahic fasts were persuasive and
non-violent (Sharp 2012a, 134, 151, 262); and likewise, that self-immolation could
accord with non-violence (ahimsa) and be fueled by satyagraha (‘Truth-force’ in
Sanskrit) under the right circumstances (Gandhi 1999, 79.177; Milligan 2014, 295–9).
Coercion and persuasion: Theorists often complete the dichotomy between violence and
non-violence by seeing violence as a means of coercion, non-violence as a means of
persuasion, and the two as incompatible. Coercion can be defined as “any interference by
an agent, A, in the choices of another agent, B, with the aim of compelling B to behave
in a way that they would not otherwise do” (Aitchison 2018a, 668; see also entry
on coercion). Persuasion, by contrast, requires initiating a dialogue with an interlocutor
and aiming to elicit a change of position or even their moral conversion. Coercive tactics
impose costs on opponents. For instance, land occupation by environmental activists is
designed to prevent or delay oil pipeline construction. Boycotts are also considered to be
coercive tactics to the extent that they impose acute costs on businesses (through lost
revenue) and sometimes involve intimidation and the threat of force to ensure maximum
compliance with the boycott (Umoja 2013, 135–42). Some theorists of civil disobedience
hold that civil disobedients cannot resort to coercion; they can only seek to persuade and
appeal to their opponent’s moral conscience, which excludes confrontational and
coercive tactics (Lefkowitz 2007, 216; Brownlee 2012, 24).
Practitioners and other critics maintain that this dichotomy between non-violent
persuasion and violent coercion is false on the grounds that there is such a thing as ‘non-
violent coercion’, which is furthermore compatible with the goal of moral suasion. Non-
violence appeals to the conscience of the public, by eliciting shame and indignation at the
witnessing of civil disobedients’ suffering and their discipline in the face of violent
repression. After the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott, which unleashed spectacular
white retaliatory violence, Martin Luther King, Jr., saw appeals to conscience as
insufficient without disruption and “some form of constructive coercive power” (King
1968, 137). “Nonviolent coercion always brings tension to the surface”, he wrote (ibid.),
affirming “the coercive face of nonviolence” along with its persuasive face (Livingston
2020a, 704; see also Terry 2018, 305). “The purpose of our direct action program,” King
proclaimed in his ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’, “is to create a situation so crisis
packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation” (King 1991). Non-violent
action is thus the means to the goal of both forcing negotiations – an essential
“mechanism for social change” (Atack 2012, 139) – and of persuading – its corresponding
mechanism for moral and cultural change. This leaves open the question whether
confrontational attacks that single out particular persons through harassment, doxing, and
‘calling out’ are compatible with non-violence. Such acts are coercive and, like verbal
insults, they may be said to inflict psychological violence on the target.
1.2.4 Non-evasion
Civil disobedients are standardly expected to take responsibility for, and accept the legal
consequences of, their lawbreaking. Their evading punishment would make their acts
ordinary crimes or acts of rebellion; their willingness to invite punishment is supposed to
demonstrate their endorsement of the legal system’s legitimacy and their “intense concern
over the issue at hand” (C. Cohen 1966, 6; see also Brownlee 2012 ch. 1; Tai 2017, 146).
Non-evasion is an essential correlate of the conscientiousness and non-violence of civil
disobedience: submitting to law enforcement is part of the dramatic display of suffering
required by non-violence. That said, theorists have fleshed out this requirement of non-
evasion in different ways, arguing variously that the agent must (i) willingly submit to
arrest and prosecution, (ii) plead guilty in court, (iii) not try to defend her crime, and/or
(iv) not complain about the punishment received (Delmas 2019, arguing that only (i) is
necessarily entailed by non-evasion). Some theorists reject (ii) and (iii), proposing instead
that agents plead ‘not guilty’ in court, so as to deny the state’s characterization of the civil
disobedient act as a public wrong (in this view, disobedients should either deny
responsibility of having committed the action as alleged by the prosecutor or admit
responsibility but deny criminal liability) (Moraro 2019, 143–7). Indeed, while the civil
disobedient who pleads ‘guilty’ and does not try to defend her ‘crime’ highlights her
willingness to self-sacrifice, a ‘not guilty’ plea accompanied by a defense of her action
might be more effective at communicating her convictions and persuading others,
including by inviting jury nullification. By contrast, some thinkers reject (i) and (iv) on
the grounds that when civil disobedience is morally justified, the state’s imposition of
punishment is itself problematic and arguably impermissible, so that further protests
against civil disobedients’ arrests, prosecutions, and sentences are justified (Zinn 2002,
27–31). Critics have also noted that punishment can be detrimental to dissenters’ efforts
by compromising future attempts to assist others through protest (Greenawalt 1987, 239)
and that willingness to accept punishment cannot be reasonably expected when agents
know they risk heavy fines or very long sentences for their actions (Scheuerman 2018,
49–51).
1.2.5 Decorum
In some views, being civil means that civil disobedients behave in a dignified and
respectful manner by following the conventional social scripts that spell out displays of
dignity and ways of showing respect in their society. Some theorists understand civility
itself as respect for “minimal civil norms” (Milligan 2013, ch. 2); others count decorum
as an additional, implicit requirement of civility in line with manifestations of self-
restraint (Delmas in Çıdam, et al. 2020, 524–5). Decorum may be understood to prohibit
conduct that would be seen as offensive, insulting, or obscene (with the standards for
each varying widely across cultures). In Scheuerman’s view, Gandhi and King, but not
liberals and democrats, thought that politeness and decorum had a role to play (2018, 11–
31). Yet one reason to think that decorum has seeped into the common understanding of
civil disobedience is that it helps to explain why some protests by Pussy Riot, ACT UP,
and Black Lives Matter, among others, which were conscientious, communicative,
public, non-violent, and non-evasive, were denied the label civil: to wit, because
protesters shouted down their opponents, expressed anger, used offensive language, or
disrespected religious sites (Delmas 2020, 18–9). Critics, however, deny that civil
disobedience needs to be decorous and push back against denials of civility, insofar as
these are often deployed to silence activists (Harcourt 2012; Zerilli 2014). They deem
expressions of anger and offensive or obscene displays to be compatible with civility
(Scheuerman 2019, 5–7; Çıdam, et al. 2020, 517–8) and insist on dissociating the politics
of ‘respectability’ from civil disobedience (Pineda 2021a, 161–3).

1.3 Fidelity to Law

What makes an act of civil disobedience special? On some accounts, an act that satisfies
the criteria of civility identified above, especially non-evasion, signals disobedients’
respect for and fidelity to the legal system in which they carry out their protest, in contrast
with ordinary offenders and revolutionary agents (Rawls 1999, 322). Signaling one’s
fidelity to law by abiding the demands of civility is seen as necessary to thwart fears of
disorder or counter the impression that civil disobedients are contemptuous of democratic
procedures. Critics point out that agents do not necessarily respect, nor have any reasons
to respect, the legal system in which they carry out their civil disobedience (Lyons 1998,
33–6). It is thus useful to distinguish the outward features of the civilly disobedient act
from the inward attitudes of the civilly disobedient agent.
Many thinkers argue that the link between the disobedient act’s civility and her fidelity
to law or endorsement of the legal system can indeed be pulled apart. For one thing,
agents intent on overthrowing their government may well resort to civil tactics simply
because civil disobedience works (Sharp 2012b). Some theorists nonetheless hold on to
the connection between civility and fidelity to law. For instance, some discard some of
the requirements of civility but maintain that the civilly disobedient agent can still be
motivated by respect for law and act within the limits of fidelity to law while disobeying
covertly, evading punishment, damaging property, or offending the public (Brownlee
2012, 24–9; Scheuerman 2018, 49–53; Moraro 2019, 96–101). Others hold that it is
worthwhile to maintain the link between the act’s civility and its conveying fidelity to
law, whether or not agents actually endorse the system’s legitimacy, insofar as its self-
restraint holds the key to civil disobedience’s place in democratic culture (Smith 2013,
32–5; Delmas 2019, 173–4).
Other theorists deny that civil disobedients need to demonstrate fidelity to law, taking
what Scheuerman (2015) dubs an anti-legal turn. Civility, on a number of recent accounts
(Brownlee 2012 ch. 1; Moraro 2019, ch. 2; M. Cooke 2021), is satisfied when agents aim
to communicate with an audience and engage with the public sphere. On a radical
understanding, the civility of civil disobedience is compatible with tactics “that will be
regarded as uncivil because of their confrontational or even violent character, including
massive disruption, the destruction of property, and the use of restrained force in self-
defense,” only excluding para-military confrontation (Celikates 2021, 143).
This anti-legal turn goes along with what we may call a critical turn in scholarship on
civil disobedience. Not only do theorists critique the liberal account of civil disobedience
as unduly narrow and restrictive (as contemporary critics of Rawls already did) and
articulate a more inclusive concept; but they also critique the ideology that undergirds the
common account, uncovering the ways in which it distorts the reality of the practice,
deters resistance, and buttresses the status quo (Celikates 2014, 2016; Delmas 2018a, ch.
1; Pineda 2021b, ch. 1). In this vein, several scholars have reassessed the complex legacy
of Thoreau and Gandhi to the civil disobedience tradition, in order to both show the
misappropriation of their writings on political resistance and to call for a reappropriation
and appreciation of their visions (Mantena 2012; Hanson 2021; Livingston 2018;
Scheuerman 2018, ch. 1, 4). Scholars have also reconsidered the historical record of the
American Civil Rights Movement to excavate the radical understanding of civil
disobedience forged by actors themselves, in lieu of the romantic and sanitized version
that dominates public perception of the Movement (Hooker 2016; Livingston 2020a,
2020b; Pineda 2021b, ch. 2–5; Mantena 2018; and Shelby and Terry 2018). Setting the
record straight matters not just for historical accuracy but also because the Civil Rights
Movement is used as the benchmark to judge contemporary protest movements such as
Black Lives Matter, unfavorably comparing today’s activists with an idealized standard
with the effect of prejudicing the public against them.

2. Other Types of Protest

Although civil disobedience often overlaps broadly with other types of dissent,
nevertheless some distinctions may be drawn between the key features of civil
disobedience and the key features of these other practices.

2.1 Legal Protest

The obvious difference between legal protest and civil disobedience is that the former
lies within the bounds of the law, but the latter does not. Legal ways of protesting include,
among many others, making speeches, signing petitions, organizing for a cause, donating
money, taking part in authorized demonstrations, and boycotting. Some of these can
become illegal, for instance when law enforcement declares an assembly unlawful and
orders the crowd to disperse, or under anti-boycott legislation. Some causes may also be
declared illegal, such that one cannot be associated with the cause or donate to it (such as
the Communist Party in the U.S.). Most of the features exemplified in civil disobedience
– other than its illegality – can be found in legal protest: a conscientious and
communicative demonstration of protest, a desire to bring about through moral dialogue
some lasting change in policy or principle, an attempt to educate and to raise awareness,
and so on.

2.2 Rule Departures

A practice distinct from, but related to, civil disobedience is rule departure on the part of
authorities. Rule departure is essentially the deliberate decision by an official, for
conscientious reasons, not to discharge the duties of her office (Feinberg 1992, 152). If
an official’s breach of a specific duty is more in keeping with the spirit and overall aims
of the office than a painstaking respect for its particular duties is, then the former might
be said to adhere better than the latter does to the demands of the office (Greenawalt
1987, 281). Rule departures resemble civil disobedience in that both communicate the
agent’s dissociation from and condemnation of certain policies and practices. Civil
disobedience and rule departure differ mainly in the identity of their practitioners and in
their legality. First, whereas rule departure typically is done by an agent of the state
(including citizens serving in juries), civil disobedience typically is done by citizens
(including officials acting as ordinary citizens and not in the capacity of their official
role). Second, whereas the civil disobedient breaks the law, the official who departs from
the rules associated with her role is not usually violating the law, unless the rule she
breaks is also codified in law. For instance, jurors may refuse to convict a person for
violating an unjust law. When they do, they nullify the law. However, many judges forbid
any mention of jury nullification in their courtroom, so that jurors are not allowed to
advise each other of the possibility to refuse to convict (Brooks 2004).

2.3 Conscientious Objection

Conscientious objection may be defined as a refusal to conform to some rule, mandate,
or legal directive on grounds of personal opposition to it. Examples include conscripts
refusing to serve in the army; public officials refusing to issue same-sex marriage
licenses; and parents refusing to vaccinate their children as mandated by state law. Public
officials’ conscientious objection is indistinguishable from rule departures insofar as the
agent refuses to discharge the set of duties associated with her official role. Conscientious
objectors’ non-conformity may stem from very different kinds of motives: the conscript’s
religious pacifism or moral and political opposition to a particular war or military
occupation, for instance, has little in common with anti-vaxxers’ pseudo-scientific
beliefs. But, in many views, conscientious objection is conscientious in the sense
identified above, that is to say, sincere, serious, and reflecting the depth of the person’s
conviction. In other views, however, when an objector seeks to keep her act private and
to avoid detection, this casts doubt on her sincerity and seriousness (Brownlee 2012, ch.
1). As an objection, conscientious objection also shares with civil disobedience the
agent’s opposition to the law, since the conscientious objector refuses to conform with
the law because she considers it bad or wrong, totally or in part, and thus seeks to
disassociate herself from it.
Conscientious objection is often considered to be the private counterpart of civil
disobedience: where civil disobedients address the public, are motivated by and appeal
to general considerations of justice, and seek to bring about reform, conscientious
objectors are supposed to be animated by personal convictions and to simply seek to
preserve their own moral integrity through exemption (Smith and Brownlee 2017). For
instance, consider that the refusal of Jehovah’s Witnesses to salute the flag is a matter of
private religious morality; they do not seek to abolish the practice of saluting the flag for
all citizens. Their example is instructive in another way: Jehovah’s Witnesses’ refusal is
legally protected. Conscientious objection, unlike civil disobedience, is not necessarily
unlawful. Indeed, the law protects conscientious objectors in many contexts, including in
the military and healthcare, by carving out exemptions for them.
Some thinkers distinguish conscientious objection from conscientious evasion and stress
that we should not overstate the private and personal characteristics of the former.
Conscientious objectors often act openly and non-anonymously and take responsibility
for their non-conforming act by attempting or being willing to justify it to authorities. To
that extent, they may be said to meet the publicity-as-visibility requirement. Some agents,
in contrast, undertake their conscientious objection covertly and evasively as
conscientious evasion. A young man drafted to fight a war he opposes, for instance, may
openly refuse to serve and be arrested and charged for his refusal, or covertly dodge the
draft by going AWOL. While conscientious evasion is incompatible with the intention to
communicate, conscientious objection may have a public or communicative component,
as Thoreau clearly did with his conscientious tax refusal, in a way that blurs the
distinction with civil disobedience. Moreover, when such actions are taken by many
people – as they often are – their collective impact can approximate the kind of
communicative protest exemplified in civil disobedience (Delmas 2018a, ch. 7). In this
vein, Emanuela Ceva (2015) highlights the public and political character of conscientious
objection (what we call publicity-as-appeal above), which she conceives of as ‘a form of
political participation’.

2.4 Immigration Disobedience

Writings on immigration and on civil disobedience have merged into an area of research
devoted to principled disobedience in response to anti-immigration policies. One view,
which focuses on what individual actors should do about immigration, examines various
unlawful tactics of resistance, including evasion, deception, use of force against state
officials, and smuggling (Hidalgo 2019, chs. 5–6). Another view conceives of illegal
migration as a form of resistance to global poverty (Blunt 2019, ch. 4), while a third sees
unauthorized border crossing as a type of conscientious evasion (Cabrera 2010, 136–43,
165). It is further useful to distinguish transnational civil disobedience from global civil
disobedience. Transnational (or trans-state) civil disobedience is the principled violation
of a state’s law or policy (a) by individuals who are not citizens or authorized permanent
residents of that state, such as asylum-seekers marching from Hungary to Austria against
E.U. regulations; or (b) by the state’s own citizens on behalf of outsiders, such as U.S.
citizens active in the Sanctuary movement who provided illegal assistance to asylum-
seekers from Central America in the 1980s. Both kinds of cases involve at root the
“principled claim… that the state’s law is misaligned with the foundational moral
principles of the current global system” (Cabrera 2021, 322). Acts of global civil
disobedience, on this view, involve “claims implicating structural principles of the global
system itself, as misaligned with its foundational moral principles” (Cabrera ibid.). For
instance, when the sans-papiers in France openly protest against their socio-political and
legal exclusion through occupations, demonstrations, and hunger strikes, they may be
viewed as engaged in acts of global civil disobedience. One last useful category of
principled disobedience that relates to immigration restrictions, although it overlaps with
rule departures and conscientious objection, is official or local disobedience, as when
local authorities declare themselves ‘Sanctuary cities’ to protect immigrants by refusing
to cooperate with federal authorities (Blake and Hereth 2020, 468–71. See also Applbaum
1999, ch. 9 on ‘official disobedience’ and Scheuerman 2020 on ‘state-based’ or ‘political
institutional civil disobedience’).

2.5 Digital disobedience

Digitalization – access to personal computers and the Internet – has transformed not only
our lives and interactions, but also our disobedient practices. From piracy to DDoS
attacks and from open-access coding to Digital Care Packages (which provide tools to
circumvent censorship and surveillance), digital disobedience has emerged as a rich
terrain for theoretical inquiry. Scholars disagree about the application of the defining
features of civil disobedience to the digital, e.g., whether client-sided DDoS actions,
which involve only voluntary botnets, amount to “virtual sit-ins”; whether hacktivists
such as Anonymous may be considered civil disobedients despite their covert and evasive
actions, their penchant for pranks, and their singling out of particular individuals for
doxing and retaliation (such as in Operation Hunt Hunter which targeted ‘revenge porn’
magnate Hunter Moore); or whether the use of zombie botnets in DDoS attacks and the
cost of updating security systems for the target evinces the violation of non-violence (see,
e.g., Critical Art Ensemble 1998; Himma 2006; Scheuerman 2018, ch. 6; Celikates 2015,
2016; Sauter 2016; Delmas 2018b; Züger 2021).
These debates aside, it is useful to distinguish different kinds of digital tools, sites,
strategies, and aims. First, activists use digital technology as tools to organize, document,
communicate, raise funds, and make decisions. For instance, Black Lives Matter activists
use social media to promote their cause, raise consciousness about systemic racism, and
publicize instances of police brutality. They use crowdfunding platforms for fundraising
to cover bail and other legal expenses for those arrested. They encourage people to use
police scanner apps to watch police activity and legal assistance apps to record encounters
with law enforcement officials. Second, the digital is itself a crucial site and object of
activism. Hacktivists envision a different Internet – one that is democratic and
democratically controlled, free, respectful of privacy, and creative. They protest against
the digital architecture of surveillance and control that has been imposed on netizens
without their consent. For instance, a number of websites, search engines, and online
communities launched coordinated actions in 2012 to protest against the Stop Online
Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), whose overbroad scope they saw as
threats to online freedom of speech. Third, some properly digital strategies of principled
disobedience have emerged, such as DDoS actions, web defacement, and hacking. For
instance, the No Border network created a fake Lufthansa website touting its
“Deportation Class service … the most economic way to travel the world” (“special
restrictions apply … no round trips available”). The Open Access Movement, which
advocates for open-source software and an open-source repository of academic and
scientific research, combines all three dimensions of digital disobedience: it uses
networked computers to organize and communicate; it seeks to bring about a free Internet
characterized by the free flow of software, science, and culture and has developed a
coherent political platform in its defense; and it deploys properly digital strategies, such
as illegal downloads and peer-to-peer file sharing (which is illegal when the content
torrented is copyrighted material). The Open Access Movement epitomizes a public,
geeks-and-grassroots mass movement that not only promotes online democratic
governance, but also enacts it within the movement (Swartz 2008 [Other Internet
Resources]; Delmas 2018b, 79–80).

2.6 Uncivil disobedience

Uncivil disobedience is not a distinct category of political action, but a cluster concept or
umbrella term that can be used to designate acts of principled disobedience that may or
may not be communicative, and which violate one or more of the marks of civility by
being covert, violent, evasive, or offensive (Delmas 2018a, 2020; Lai 2019). Examples
include animal rescue, Sanctuary assistance, sabotage, ecotage (e.g., monkeywrenching
and tree-spiking), graffiti, leaks, government whistleblowing, hacktivism (including
DDoS attacks), guerrilla protests, and riots. These various act-types do not share any
essential property, besides violating one or more of the commonly accepted criteria of
civility. Each form of uncivil disobedience must be examined (conceptualized and
assessed) on its own. By conceptualizing uncivil disobedience, scholars intend to counter
the theoretical impetus to make the concept of civil disobedience ever broader to
encompass protests that one approves of, but which do not fit the standard account and
may not even fit activists’ self-understanding either. For instance, in her 1913 speech
“Freedom or Death”, the suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst described herself as a “soldier”
in a “civil war” waged against the state and defended the use of militant tactics, including
heckling, window-smashing, sabotage, arson, and hunger strikes: radical defiance was
the point of such uncivil tactics. Identifying some principled disobedient acts as uncivil
makes room to focus on their justification. Scholars have defended such uncivil
disobedience as political rioting (Pasternak 2019), vandalism (Lim 2020; Lai 2020),
violent protest (Kling and Mitchell 2019), coercive strike tactics (Gourevitch 2018), and
direct action (Smith 2018).

2.7 Revolutionary Action

While a civil disobedient does not necessarily oppose the regime in which she acts, the
revolutionary agent is deeply opposed to that regime (or a core aspect of that regime).
Revolutionary agents may not seek to persuade others of the merits of their position –
communication is usually not their primary aim, although they convey the urgency of a
regime change. When revolution is called for, such as under colonial occupation, there is
no need to justify constrained acts of protest like civil disobedience. Indeed, more forceful
resistance can be justified as we pass into the realm of just war theory (Buchanan 2013;
Finlay 2015). This is not to say that all violent tactics, including terror, are permissible,
since the use of violence must not only pursue a just cause but also accord with
proportionality and necessity (i.e., be undertaken in last resort and with a reasonable
chance of success). As will be discussed in the next section, revolutionary activists and
thinkers like Frantz Fanon (2004, ch. 1) and Gandhi disagreed about the effectiveness of
violence in emancipatory struggles, but not about its justifiability, as Karuna Mantena
(2018, 83–4) has shown.

3. Justification
The task of defending civil disobedience is commonly undertaken with the assumption
that in reasonably just, liberal societies people have a general moral duty to follow the
law (often called political obligation). It is on the basis of such an assumption that civil
disobedience requires justification. This section examines common understandings of the
problem of disobedience (3.1), before presenting prominent accounts and critiques of the
conditions under which civil disobedience may be justified (3.2). Whether or not theorists
assume that civil disobedience is presumptively impermissible and in need of
justification, their analyses also articulate the value and role of civil disobedience in non-
ideal, nearly just or less-than-nearly-just liberal democracies (3.3).

3.1 The Problem of Disobedience

Philosophers have given many arguments in favor of the moral duty to obey the law (see
entry on political obligation). Despite the many critiques of, and general skepticism
toward, arguments for the moral duty to obey the law, most prominently following A.
John Simmons (1979), theorists of civil disobedience have continued to conceive of the
practice’s illegality as a hurdle to surmount (see Lyons 1998 for an analysis of the
endurance of such a problematic assumption). They conceive of principled disobedience
in general as presumptively wrong because it violates political obligation, undermines
the rule of law, and destabilizes society both through example, by signaling to others that
anyone can disobey if they feel the urge, and in principle, by expressing disrespect for
law’s authority. They contend that civil disobedience in particular is presumptively
wrong because of its anti-democratic nature. The agent who violates the outcomes of
democratic decision-making processes because she disapproves of them puts herself
above the law and threatens the legal and democratic order. Some see in it a violation of
reciprocity, a kind of political “blackmail” and a sign of “moral self-indulgence” and
arrogance, insofar as a minority, whose views didn’t prevail, disregards democratic
processes and imposes on the majority its own view of the good and just (C. Cohen 1971,
138–45; Dworkin 1985, 112; Weinstock 2016, 709; for a response to the charge of
‘epistemic arrogance’, see Hindkjær Madsen 2021).
Recent scholarship on civil disobedience has taken what may be dubbed an anarchist
turn, as theorists tend to no longer approach civil disobedience as presumptively wrong
and in tension with political obligation. Although some theorists still defend the latter
(Smith 2013), most start from skepticism vis-à-vis the moral duty to obey the law
(Brownlee 2012; Celikates 2014, 2016). Others defend a disjunctive moral duty to obey
the law or disobey it civilly (Lefkowitz 2007); and still others argue that the grounds
commonly used to support political obligation – the natural duty of justice, the principle
of fairness, the Samaritan duty, and associative obligations – yield duties to resist
injustice, through civil and uncivil disobedience, under non-ideal circumstances, and that
such duties should be considered among our political obligations (Delmas 2018a).
Likewise, on a virtue-ethical account, political obligation can be understood as an
obligation to respect rather than to obey the law, which can sometimes give rise to a duty
to engage in civil disobedience (Moraro 2019, ch. 6).

3.2 Justificatory Conditions

Given the assumption that people have a moral duty to obey the law and the concern that
civil disobedience has the potential to destabilize society, Rawls famously raised the bar
for the justified use of the practice, requiring acts of civil disobedience 1) to target serious
and long-standing injustice and at the same time appeal to widely accepted principles of
justice, 2) to be undertaken as a last resort, and 3) to be done in coordination with other
minority groups with similar grievances (Rawls 1999, 326–9). These conditions for the
justification of civil disobedience, which are critically examined in this part, are closely
tied not only to the ostensible need to diffuse its destabilizing potential and discourage
proliferation of the practice, but also to the efficacy and role of civil disobedience in
society (which is explored further in 3.3).
Longstanding Injustice: Why did Rawls restrict the target of civil disobedience to
entrenched, longstanding injustices – in particular, violations of the principle of equal
basic liberties? For Rawls, civil disobedience’s chance of success rests on the clarity of
the injustice: everyone must be able to recognize the violation as an injustice, given
widely accepted principles of political morality. Racial segregation fell in this category,
according to Rawls, but not economic inequality. Rawls thinks that appeals to publicly
shared principles of constitutional morality (per the publicity-as-appeal requirement) are
more likely to persuade the majority and succeed to bring about reform. Rawls, Jürgen
Habermas, and Ronald Dworkin restrict both civil disobedients’ appeals and their
possible targets: they exclude matters of policy, as well as injustices that do not consist
of incontrovertible violations of widely accepted principles of justice.
Critics reject this justificatory condition because it arbitrarily excludes both progressive
but not widely shared conceptions of justice (such as cosmopolitanism) and appeals to
other principles of morality besides justice (say, regarding the ethical treatment of
animals; Singer 1973, 86–92). And whereas Dworkin (1985, 111–2) finds anti-nuclear
protest unjustifiable to the extent that it turns on judgments of policy instead of appealing
to fundamental principles of political morality, Robert Goodin (1987) counters that the
justice/policy distinction is flimsy and arbitrarily drawn and insists that civil disobedients
should pursue the common good by protesting international and climate policies.
Scholars also include in the class of justifiable targets private agents such as trade unions,
banks, health insurance companies, labs, farm factories, and private universities (Walzer
1982, ch.2; Smith 2013, 55–6; Milligan 2013, ch. 11–12; S. Cooke 2016). Finally,
observation of past and present social movements, including the Abolitionist movement,
#MeToo, and Black Lives Matter, suggests that, rather than appealing to the public
principles of political morality, civil disobedients may in fact seek to transform common
sense morality.
Last Resort: What grounds the widely accepted requirement that civil disobedience be
undertaken as a last resort? How do we know agents have met it? One position is that, in
a liberal democracy, citizens should use proper legal channels of political participation to
express their grievances (Raz 1979; though Raz grants that individual acts of
disobedience can be justified in liberal regimes). But, since causes defended by a minority
are often those most opposed by persons in power, legal channels may be less than wholly
effective (Rawls 1999, 327). Moreover, it is unclear when a person could claim to have
reached a situation of last resort; she could continue to use the same tired legal methods
without end. To ward off such challenges, Rawls suggests that, if past actions, including
by others, have shown the majority to be immovable or apathetic, then further attempts
may reasonably be thought fruitless and the dissenter may be confident her civil
disobedience is a last resort (1999, 328).
Minority Group Coordination: The coordination requirement is designed to regulate the
overall level of dissent (Rawls 1999, 327). The idea is that since minority groups are
equally justified in resorting to civil disobedience when they have sufficiently weighty
objections, these groups should avoid undermining each other’s efforts through
simultaneous appeals to the attention of society and government. While there is some
merit to this condition, arguably civil disobedience that does not meet it can still be
justifiable. In some cases, there will be no time or opportunity to coordinate with other
minorities. In other cases, other minority groups may be unable or unwilling to
coordinate. The refusal or inability of other groups to cooperate should arguably not affect
the ultimate defensibility of a person’s or group’s use of civil disobedience.
A reason for Rawls to defend this coordination requirement is that often coordination
serves a more important concern, namely, the achievement of good consequences. It is
often argued that civil disobedience can only be justified if there is a high probability that
it will produce positive change, since only such change can justify exposing society to
the risks of harm usually associated with civil disobedience – namely, its destabilizing
and divisive potential and the risk that it could encourage lawbreaking or escalate into
uncivil disobedience. In response to these challenges, one might question the empirical
claims that civil disobedience is divisive and that it has the consequence of leading others
to use disobedience to achieve changes in policy. One might also question whether it
necessarily would be a bad thing if civil disobedience had these consequences.
Concerning likelihood of success, civil disobedience can seem most justifiable when the
situation appears hopeless and when the government refuses to listen to conventional
forms of communication. Additionally, even when general success seems unlikely, civil
disobedience might be defended for any reprieve from harm that it brings to victims of a
bad law or policy. Tree-hugging, for example, can delay or curtail a clear-cut logging
scheme and thereby prolong the protection of an ecosystem.
3.3 Value
The justification of civil disobedience further articulates the conditions for its effective
role in society. Far from undermining the rule of law or destabilizing society, civil
disobedience could strengthen the social and legal order. Civil disobedience can have a
justice-enhancing value: it can serve “to inhibit departures from justice and to correct
them when they occur” (Rawls 1999, 336). Equally, it can have a legitimacy-enhancing
function, with some thinkers conceiving of civil disobedience as ‘the guardian of
legitimacy’ (Habermas 1985, 103). Both ideas deem the practice of civil disobedience to
be a valuable component of the public political culture of a near-just constitutional
democratic society. Habermas even took the state’s treatment of civil disobedience as a
‘litmus test’ for the maturity of the political culture of a constitutional democracy: “Every
constitutional democracy that is sure of itself considers civil disobedience as a normalized
– because necessary – component of its political culture” (Habermas 1985, 99).
While Habermas’s account resembles Rawls’s liberal approach in many ways, its
distinctive deliberative strand has also influenced democracy-based accounts, which
defend the justification and role of civil disobedience on the basis of its contribution to
democracy. Deliberative democrats (Markovits 2005; Smith 2013, ch. 1–3), republican
democrats (Arendt 1972), and radical democrats (Celikates 2014, 2016) focus on the
potential of civil disobedience to enhance democratic legitimacy and to constitute in itself
a form of democratic empowerment. Agents engaged in civil disobedience can enhance
democratic legitimacy in a number of ways, including by putting a heretofore-neglected
issue on the political agenda and raising awareness about its stakes; contributing to and
informing democratic deliberation; highlighting the outsize influence of powerful players
and the exclusionary effects of certain processes of public deliberation, and working to
make the latter more inclusive. Civil disobedience does not only aim to invigorate
democratic sovereignty, but also can constitute a form of democratic empowerment in
itself – an exercise of political agency that is especially meaningful for marginalized
groups. Through civil disobedience, individuals discover and realize their power. They
work together and forge bonds of solidarity. They engage in democratic politics.
Theorists’ examples to illustrate democratic civil disobedience include: the Occupy
Movement, pro-democracy movements around the world, anti-globalization and anti-
austerity protests, climate justice activism, and Campesino movements for land
redistribution and agrarian reform. Many activists further enact within their movement
the norms and values that guide their struggles, for instance through radical inclusion,
direct democratic decision-making, aspiration to consensus, and leaderless organizational
structures. Some theorists insist on the need to align the means of protest with its aims,
by deploying only persuasive, non-violent forms of protest that reflect democratic ideals
(Habermas 1997, 383–4; M. Cooke 2016), while others contend that civil disobedience
can be confrontational and coercive without betraying its democratic aims (Smith 2021;
Fung 2005, 409).
A third approach to the value of civil disobedience, besides the liberal and democratic
lenses, comes from the political realist perspective. Robert Jubb (2019) critiques
Rawlsian accounts of civil disobedience for the binary theory of political authority they
rest on: they take the whole political order to be either legitimate or illegitimate, and
thereby ignore or deny the possibility that a regime may be authoritative in virtue of
having a democratic mandate, yet fail to protect everyone’s basic liberties or to treat all
its members as equals, for example. Jubb proposes instead to “disaggregate” political
authority, that is, to distinguish between the different forms of authority which a political
order may possess or lack, in order to make sense of the conditions under which different
forms of protest and resistance may be appropriate. Other realists criticize both liberal
and deliberative democratic perspectives for their deductive, top-down approach to moral
analysis, their quest for rational consensus, and their assumption that people can be
persuaded by rational arguments alone (Sabl 2001, 2021; Mantena 2012). Realist
accounts of civil disobedience stress instead “the ubiquity of moral disagreement and the
permanence of political conflict” (Sabl 2021, 153). Andrew Sabl, for instance, envisions
civil disobedience as a properly ‘political technology’ (2021, 165), situated between
submission and revolution, through which agents seek to effect change in the basic
allocation of burdens and benefits by raising costs for adversaries, but without
undermining the state’s basic functions such as its provision of public goods.
For her part, Mantena debunks the common understanding of Gandhi and King as
committed in principle and absolutely to non-violence, showing that their endorsement
of non-violence reflected concerns of political efficacy. They considered political
violence to be “futile”, that is, ineffective for social change and likely to bring about
“dangerous and perverse consequences in politics” (Mantena 2018, 84). In Gandhi’s
view, violence would cultivate the wrong kind of independence for India and breed the
wrong kind of polity, amounting to a mere change of personnel in a violent state and
generating unstable conditions. Mantena identifies “three faces of nonviolent action”,
which we can reframe as realists’ account of the triple value of civil disobedience: 1)
morally, civil disobedience is the right means by which oppressed people can regain
dignity and self-respect; 2) strategically, it is a necessary means to just and stable political
results and future democratic concord; and 3) tactically, the dramatization of civil
disobedients’ discipline works effectively to persuade opponents. Recent social scientific
research has corroborated the effectiveness of non-violence in campaigns of civil
resistance, which seek to topple dictatorships or colonial powers (Chenoweth and
Stephan 2011; Schock 2015).
Many democratic theorists incorporate political realism in their approach as they strive
to think about and “learn from the streets” (Celikates 2014), in a “bottom-up” approach
designed to understand particular contemporary protest movements. This approach
constitutes a stark departure from “top-down” liberal approaches like Rawls’s and
Dworkin’s that require agents justify their disobedient protest before engaging in it. As
Alexander Livingston puts it, many democratic and critical theorists today seek to draw
“theoretical insights from protest movements themselves around the globe rather than
legislating moral guidelines for activist praxis from the sidelines” (Çıdam et al 2020,
540). Guy Aitchison sees this as a central feature of the ‘new civil disobedience debate’,
in which scholars seek to respond to ‘a new era of political protest and unrest’
characterized by “the proliferation and intensification of oppositional political action by
groups challenging economic inequality, racist policing, immigration enforcement,
austerity, war, climate change, financial oligarchy, privatization, and corporate
domination of cyberspace” (Aitchison 2018b, 5, 7–8) – which theorists tend to be in broad
sympathy with. Such bottom-up approach also diverges from David Lefkowitz’s and
Kimberley Brownlee’s defenses of a moral right to civil disobedience that applies
impartially to all acts of civil disobedience, justified or not (see 4.2).

4. Responding to Civil Disobedience

How should the state respond to civil disobedience? The question of appropriate legal
response applies, first, to the actions of law-enforcers when deciding whether and how to
intervene in a civilly disobedient action. It applies, second, to the actions of prosecutors
when deciding whether to file charges and proceed to trial. Finally, it applies to the
actions of judges (and juries) when deciding whether to convict and (for judges) how
much to punish. All three contexts of legal sanctions beg the question of criminal law’s
function.

4.1 Punishing Civil Disobedience

How much punishment is appropriate for civil disobedients? Is punishment appropriate
at all? If there is a right to civil disobedience, then, as we saw, it protects people from
punishment. Even if there isn’t, is punishment indefensible if it sanctions morally
justified civil disobedience? The tensions become clear when we consider the criminal
law’s function, which is to punish and prevent crimes, that is, to tackle wrongful conduct.
Unlike civil wrongs, which are privately brought, criminal wrongs are public wrongs: the
polity, not the victim (there may not be any), prosecutes the alleged wrongdoer.
Punishment, depending on one’s overarching account, serves to: dissuade people from
committing the types of conduct identified as wrongful (Bentham 1789 [1970]);
appropriately respond to those who culpably commit them (Moore 1997), including by
engaging with them in a moral dialogue so that they repent and reform (Duff 1998);
and/or express the community’s moral disapproval of such conduct (Feinberg 1994). So,
we may ask, from the consequentialist, forward-looking standpoint, whether the state
should deter civil disobedience; and, from a retributivist (desert-based) or
communicative, backward-looking perspective, whether civil disobedients deserve the
community’s censure (Bennett and Brownlee 2021).
If civilly disobedient breaches of law are public wrongs, comparable to or worse than
ordinary offenses, then civil disobedients should be punished similarly or more severely
than those who commit ordinary offenses. Kent Greenawalt lays out reasons to hold that
civil disobedients deserve the same punishment as others who breach the same laws. First,
the demands of proportionality would seem to recommend a uniform application of legal
prohibitions. Since trespass is prohibited, persons who breach trespass laws in protest of
either those laws or other laws would seem to be equally liable to persons who breach
trespass laws for private purposes. Second, any principle that officials may use to excuse
justified illegal acts will result in some failures to punish unjustified acts, for which the
purposes of punishment would be more fully served. Even when officials make correct
judgments about which acts to excuse, citizens may draw mistaken inferences, and
restraints of deterrence and norm acceptance may be weakened for unjustified acts that
resemble justified ones (Greenawalt 1987, 273). What follows is that all such violations,
justified and unjustified, should be treated the same.
There also are reasons to believe that civil disobedients should be dealt with more
severely than are others who have offended. First, as mentioned above, disobedients seem
to have put themselves above the law in preferring their own moral judgment about a
certain issue to that of the democratic decision-making process and the rule of law.
Second, the communicative aspect of civil disobedience could be said to aggravate
disobedient offenses since their communication usually is attended by much greater
publicity than most covert violations are. This forces legal authorities to concern
themselves with the possibility that law-abiding citizens will feel distressed, insecure,
and perhaps imposed on, if no action is taken. So, notes Greenawalt, while authorities
may quietly let minor breaches pass, failure to respond to violations performed, in some
respect, in the presence of authority, may undercut claims that the rules and the persons
who administered them deserve respect (1987, 351–2). Third, and related, civil
disobedients often invite, and might inspire, other citizens to do what they do. Such risk
of proliferation of civil disobedience and, further, of its escalation into lawlessness and
violence, may support the imposition of more severe punishment for agents engaged in
civil disobedience.
However, both the models of civil disobedience presented above, which stress its role
and value in liberal democracies, and the arguments for the right to civil disobedience
examined below, strongly push for the opposite view that civil disobedients, if punished
at all, should be dealt with more leniently than others who have offended. The preceding
discussion highlights that civil disobedience is in fact a public good – a crucial component
of democratic culture, in Habermas’s words – and, hence, many theorists defend the
state’s responsibility to treat civil disobedients leniently.
Dworkin argues that the state has a “special responsibility to try to protect [the civil
disobedient], and soften his predicament, whenever it can do so without great damage to
other policies” (Dworkin 1978, 260). The government can exercise its responsibility of
leniency by not prosecuting civil disobedience at all, depending on the balance of reasons,
including individual rights, state interests, social costs, and constitutional benefits.
Reasons for prosecuting in any particular case are ‘practical’, not intrinsic or
deontological, and always potentially defeasible. In general, prosecutors should not
charge disobedients with the most serious offenses applicable and judges should give
them light sentences. Leniency follows from the recognition of the special constitutional
status of civil disobedience.
In this view, officials at all levels have the discretion to not sanction civil disobedients,
and they should use it. Prosecutors have and should use their discretion not to press
charges against civil disobedients in some cases, or to charge them with the least serious
offense possible. Dworkin (1985) urges judges to engage in an open dialogue with civil
disobedients (at least those who articulate legal arguments in defense of their actions) and
dismiss their charges after hearing them, or to use their discretion in sentencing, for
instance by accepting guilty pleas or guilty verdicts but imposing trivial punishments.
However, this proposal could amount to letting judges evaluate the worthiness of
individual civil disobedients’ causes, which would not on its own guarantee judicial
leniency. To the contrary, judges might well systematically decide against civil
disobedients, upholding the special interests of the ruling class of which they are part.
The proceduralist insistence on courts’ neutrality avoids this pitfall, and generally warns
against turning courtrooms into political forums. Yet the transformation of courts into
public fora might not be so insidious, and may indeed be part of a necessary institutional
reform to provide civil disobedients with a platform, perhaps along the lines of Arendt’s
(1972, 101–2) proposal to treat civil disobedients as a kind of people’s lobbyists (see
Smith 2011).

4.2 A Right to Civil Disobedience

For Rawls, there is only a moral right to engage in justified civil disobedience. But many
other theorists defend at least a limited right to engage in civil disobedience irrespective
of a particular act’s justification, given the general value of the practice. Dworkin (1978)
outlines what such a right of conduct might look like, analogizing civil disobedients with
Supreme Court justices, who test the constitutional validity of (unjust) law through direct
disobedience of that law. In doing so, they can make law more faithful to the principles
of justice and fairness that justify it (on Dworkin’s theory of law). Some theorists accept
the value of constitutional challenges but argue that once the law is found by a high court
to be constitutional and disobedients’ initial conviction is upheld, disobedients have a
duty to accept their punishment and recognize the law’s validity (Fortas 1968; Nussbaum
2019, 177). In contrast, Dworkin argues that forcing citizens to obey court decisions –
including the Supreme Court’s – would mean forcing them to do something their
conscience forbids them to do, which would contravene the constitutional imperative,
entrenched in the First Amendment and rooted in dignity, to respect individuals’ “right
to conscience” and protect their freedom of speech.
The right to conscience, on this account, thus grounds a weak “right to break the law”. It
is a right in the sense that one “does the right thing to break the law, so that we should all
respect” the agent when she follows her conscientious judgment about doubtful law and
refuses to comply with a law that requires her to do what her conscience forbids (Dworkin
1978, 228–37), but it does not ground a right in the strong sense that the government
would do wrong to stop her from disobeying. In other words, on this view, the right to
disobedience is deemed to be compatible with the state’s right to punish. Contra Cohen
(1966, 6), Rawls (1999, 322), and others, however, Dworkin does not defend agents’
moral duty to accept punishment (1985, 114–5). He considers non-evasion of legal
sanctions to be a good strategy for civil disobedients denouncing unconstitutional law
and unjust policy (justice- and policy-based civil disobedience on his view) but denies
that accepting punishment is a conceptual, moral, or tactical requirement for civil
disobedience motivated by personal convictions (‘integrity-based’ civil disobedience).
For the latter, Dworkin argues that utilitarian reasons for punishing should be weighed
against the fact that the accused acted out of principled convictions, and that the balance
should generally favor leniency.
Joseph Raz puts forward a different account of the right to civil disobedience, insisting
that this right extends to cases in which people ought not to exercise the right: it is part
of the nature and purpose of rights of conduct that they give persons a protected sphere
in which to act rightly or wrongly. To say that there is a right to civil disobedience is to
allow the legitimacy of resorting to this form of political action for causes one opposes
(Raz 1979, 268). That said, Raz places great emphasis on the kind of regime in which a
disobedient acts, arguing that only in an illiberal regime could individuals have a right to
civil disobedience to reclaim their political participation rights which their illiberal state
is violating: they are entitled to “disregard the offending laws and exercise their moral
right as if it were recognized by law.” Raz adds that “members of the illiberal state do
have a right to civil disobedience which is roughly that part of their moral right to political
participation which is not recognized in law” (Raz 1979, 272–3). By contrast, in a liberal
state, the right to political activity is, by hypothesis, adequately protected by law and,
hence, the right to political participation cannot ground a right to civil disobedience.
A different view of rights holds that when a person appeals to political participation rights
to defend her disobedience, she does not necessarily criticize the law for outlawing her
action. Lefkowitz maintains that members of minorities can appreciate that democratic
discussions often must be cut short so that decisions may be taken, and those who engage
in civil disobedience may view current policy as the best compromise between the need
to act and the need to accommodate continued debate. Nonetheless, they also can point
out that, with greater resources or further time for debate, their view might have held
sway. Given this possibility, the right to political participation must include a right to
continue to contest the result after the votes are counted or the decisions taken. And this
right should include suitably constrained civil disobedience because the best conception
of political participation rights is one that reduces as much as possible the impact that
luck has on the popularity of a view (Lefkowitz 2007; see also Smith 2013, ch. 4; Ceva
2015).
An alternative response to Raz questions whether the right to civil disobedience must be
derived from rights to political participation. Brownlee (2012, ch. 4) bases the right to
civil disobedience on a right to object on the basis of sincere conviction. Whether such a
right would fall under participation rights depends on the expansiveness of the latter
rights. When the right to participate is understood to accommodate only legal protest,
then the right conscientiously to object, which commonsensically includes civil
disobedience, must be viewed as distinct from political participation rights.
A further challenge to a regime-focused account is that real societies do not align with a
dichotomy between liberal and illiberal regimes; rather they fall along a spectrum of
liberality and illiberality, being both more or less liberal relative to each other and being
more or less liberal in some domains than in others. Perhaps, in a society that
approximates a liberal regime, the political-participation case for a right to civil
disobedience diminishes, but to make legally protected participation fully adequate, a
liberal society would have to address Bertrand Russell’s charge that controllers of the
media give defenders of unpopular views few opportunities to make their case unless they
resort to sensational methods such as disobedience (1998, 635).
4.3 Accommodating Civil Disobedience
Philosophers have typically focused on the question of how courts should treat civil
disobedients, while neglecting to apply that question to law enforcement. Yet the police
have much discretion in how to deal with civil disobedients. In particular, they have no
obligation to arrest protesters when they commit minor violations of the law such as
traffic obstruction: accommodation of and communication with protesters is something
they can but all too rarely decide to do. Instead, many governments practice militarized
repression of protests. Local police departments in the U.S. often respond to
demonstrations with riot gear and other military equipment. Also, the British government
sought to strengthen public order laws and secure new police powers to crack down on
Extinction Rebellion (XR), the global environmental movement whose street protests,
die-ins, and roadblocks for climate justice have brought cities to a standstill.
One notable exception to the theoretical neglect of law enforcement is Smith’s (2013, ch.
5) articulation of a “policing philosophy” that orientates policing strategies toward
accommodation, rather than prevention or repression, of civil disobedience. On Smith’s
view, “the police should, where possible, cooperate with civilly disobedient activists in
order to assist in their commission of a protest that is effective as an expression of their
grievance against law or policy” (2013, 111). Accommodation requires communication
channels between police and activists and involves strategies such as pre-negotiated
arrests. While the U.S. often implements punitive and strong-handed law enforcement
strategies, the U.K.’s current goal (at the time of writing) is, according to one senior
police source, to develop ‘move forward’ – proactive and preventive – tactics that are
designed to clear the streets of XR demonstrators. Neither approach respects anything
like a right to civil disobedience.
A constitutional government committed to recognizing the right to civil disobedience
would also have to reform part of its criminal laws and make available certain defenses.
Brownlee proposes two. First, disobedients should have access to a “demands-of-
conviction,” excusatory defense to point to the deep and sincere reasons they had for
believing they were justified in acting the way they did (Brownlee 2012, ch. 5). Second,
states should accept necessity as a justificatory defense for civil disobedience undertaken
as a reasonable and parsimonious response to violations of and threats to non-contingent
basic needs (Brownlee 2012, ch. 6). As these defenses suggest, constitutionally
recognizing civil disobedience does not mean making civil disobedience legal.
Disobedients would still be arrested and prosecuted, but they would get to explain and
defend their actions in court. They would be heard.

5. Conclusion
There have been shifts in the paradigm forms and goals of civil disobedience over the
past century, from the suffragettes’ militant activism in pursuit of their basic rights of
citizenship to the youth climate movement’s school walkouts and mass demonstrations
to demand governments take urgent action to combat the climate crisis. Even so, civil
 disobedience remains an enduring, vibrant part of political activism and, increasingly,
benefits from transnational alliances.
Theorists have long assumed that civil disobedience only begs justification in liberal,
democratic societies – the best real-world candidates for legitimate states. However, civil
disobedience also raises questions in undemocratic and illegitimate contexts, regarding
its overall role, strategic value, and tactical efficacy. For instance, disobedient protests in
support of democracy in Hong Kong may not be presumptively impermissible given
China’s authoritarian rule. Yet they still beg significant questions concerning the proper
contours of extra-institutional dissident politics and the justification of uncivil and
forceful tactics in repressive contexts, including violence against police and the
destruction of pro-China shops and Chinese banks.
Finally, whereas theorists have tended to think of civil disobedience as generally
undertaken to achieve worthy public goals, liberal democratic states have recently
witnessed much disobedience in pursuit of anti-democratic and illiberal goals, including
conscientious refusal to abide by antidiscrimination statutes and violations of, and
protests against, laws requiring the provision of reproductive services and the public
health measures enacted to slow the spread of the coronavirus. We may need a different
lens than liberal and democratic theorists have offered to evaluate the full range of
conservative social movements, counter-movements, and reactionary movements which
resort to civil (and other forms of) disobedience.

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