Civil disobedience what is the meaning

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Grammar Thesaurus. Word Lists. Choose your language. My word lists. Tell us about this example sentence:. Among his many actions in favor of the civil rights of black Americans, one of the most famous using civil disobedience was the boycott of Montgomery buses in At the time, racial segregation was widespread in public transport in the United States.

In the city of Montgomery, a regulation made it very clear that buses should be divided into several parts. At the front, a section of ten seats was reserved for whites; at the back, ten places were reserved for blacks, while the places in the middle were free. However, when blacks were seated in this middle space and whites entered the bus, if there were not enough seats left, they had to give it to them.

On 1 st December , a black woman, Rosa Parks sat in the middle part, refused to give way when four whites boarded the bus. The driver, furious, then informed the police who had her imprisoned. The following night, Martin Luther King, then a little-known young pastor, brought together leaders of the African-American community to discuss actions to be taken against this settlement, advocating non-violence and civil disobedience. A general boycott of buses by the African American community followed.

On the other hand, the whites reacted with violent acts, including damaging the home of Martin Luther King, who was also a victim of physical violence to which he did not respond. Despite all the complexities, the movement had a good end: in November , the Supreme Court declared that segregation on the buses violated the U. Constitution, which put an end to the boycott the next day. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Log in and interact with engaging content: show how they matter to you, share your experience First Name. Last Name. The Six Characteristic Elements Of Civil Disobedience A civil disobedience action is usually characterized by six elements: 1 — The first element of civil disobedience is that an offense must be committed consciously and intentionally A distinction can then be made between direct civil disobedience, which requires the action carried out directly to violate a law as with GMO reapers and indirect civil disobedience when the norm violated is not the one being challenged as is the case for sit-ins in public areas because traffic regulations are not the ones being targeted by the action 2 -The second element is that civil disobedience must be a public act.

Performing a public act gives it symbolic value and allows reaching a widespread with the goal of raising public awareness of the case 3 — The third element of civil disobedience is that the action must be carried out collectively 4 — The fourth element is that a civil disobedience act must be done using peaceful methods 5 -The fifth element is that the action must be carried out while accepting the eventualities of a sanction.

It is the very own existence of these higher principles that give a certain at least moral legitimacy to action Civil Disobedience: A Rediscovered Tool To Fight Climate Change In recent years, the civil disobedience movement has gained momentum, but from a new perspective. Civil Disobedience Today In the end, civil disobedience works as a way of publicly and peacefully showing disagreement.

Civil Disobedience: Some Known Historical Examples Throughout history, many acts that have taken place can be described as civil disobedience. Show how useful this article has been. Cancel reply Comment Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Gig Economy — What Is It? Definition, Examples And Future. They say they are ready for civil disobedience and will not change any of their programs to comply with the law, which bans the depiction of homosexuality to minors.

As I just mentioned, because this uprising is leaderless the civil disobedience movement will continue until this attempted coup ends. They are, to say the least, preparing for civil war the polling stations are stormed by armed gangs. But what is there more irresponsible than playing with the fire of an imagined civil war in the France of today? Compared with neighbors Myanmar, Vietnam, and Laos, Cambodia appears to have a blossoming civil society. Strangio is at his best when exposing what appears to be a flourishing civil society in Cambodia.

Rashad was there to celebrate the release of the Civil Rights drama Selma. His 6, native auxiliaries as it proved later on could not be relied upon in a civil war. 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 , Psychological violence can also cause injury to others.

For one thing, words can incite physical violence. 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.

Property damage : Authorities, much of the public, and many scholars tend to conceive of non-violence strictly, as excluding any damage to property Fortas , 48—9, —6; Smith , 3, 33; Smith and Brownlee , 5; Regan Two broad reasons may explain the inclusion of property damage within the category of violence.

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. 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 a, ; Delmas a, 49, —5.

Other scholars have instead argued that non-violence can encompass property damage Milligan , ch. 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.

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. 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 , — After the —56 Montgomery bus boycott, which unleashed spectacular white retaliatory violence, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Such acts are coercive and, like verbal insults, they may be said to inflict psychological violence on the target. Civil disobedients are standardly expected to take responsibility for, and accept the legal consequences of, their lawbreaking. Cohen , 6; see also Brownlee ch. 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.

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. 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 , 11— 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 , 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 ; Zerilli What makes an act of civil disobedience special? 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 , 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. For one thing, agents intent on overthrowing their government may well resort to civil tactics simply because civil disobedience works Sharp b.

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 , 24—9; Scheuerman , 49—53; Moraro , 96— Other theorists deny that civil disobedients need to demonstrate fidelity to law, taking what Scheuerman dubs an anti-legal turn.

Civility, on a number of recent accounts Brownlee ch. Cooke , is satisfied when agents aim to communicate with an audience and engage with the public sphere. 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 , ; Delmas a, ch.

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 ; Hanson ; Livingston ; Scheuerman , ch.

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 ; Livingston a, b; Pineda b, ch. 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.

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.

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. 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 , 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 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. 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 , ch. 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 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 a, ch.

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 , chs.

Another view conceives of illegal migration as a form of resistance to global poverty Blunt , ch. It is further useful to distinguish transnational civil disobedience from global civil disobedience. 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.

See also Applbaum , ch. 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. 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. Third, some properly digital strategies of principled disobedience have emerged, such as DDoS actions, web defacement, and hacking. 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 [Other Internet Resources]; Delmas b, 79—