Theory Of Civil Disobedience Research Articles

Ketaatan, Ketidaktaatan, dan Keadilan dalam Negara Hukum

Laws are systematic rules that aim to guarantee citizen’s rights and freedom as well as to maintain social order. And yet, legal rules are often not obeyed because the essence and the law-making process do not provide a sense of justice to society. It raises a question: What is the principle for citizens to obey or disobey the law? Through an expository-critical approach, this article seeks to answer this question by reflecting Plato’s notion on obedience, disobedience, and justice in the state based on rule of law. It argues that justice is the main principle for citizens to obey or disobey the law since it is an architectonic principle which unify all other virtues. This theory has become an inspiration of the theory of law and the theory of civil disobedience in the modern democratic states.

Suara Perlawanan: Bagaimana Mahasiswa Menggunakan Pembangkangan Sipil pada Unjuk Rasa Tolak Kenaikan BBM di Indonesia

This research aims to analyze the forms of disobedience that occurred in protests against increased fuel prices in September 2022. The study uses qualitative methods such as interviews, news analysis, and literature review to understand how civil disobedience was used by students as a form of political activism. Findings show that the students employed tactics such as road blockades, gas station boycotts, and tanker/truck takeovers as forms of disobedience. These actions align with the principles of prudence, communication, publicity, and non-violence in the theory of civil disobedience. The study concludes that despite the use of civil disobedience, the protests did not lead to policy reform and highlights the need for strong leadership, support, and determination for success in a protest.

Beyond (and Before) the Transnational Turn

Can civil disobedience be transnationalized? This question presumes civil disobedience to be a fundamentally domestic concept—one constitutively tied to both the nation-state and the normative underpinnings of liberal, constitutional democracies. This article shows how this assumption mistakes one version of civil disobedience’s twentieth-century intellectual history for the whole of it, and risks reproducing binaries (domestic vs. international, democracies vs. non-democracies) that trouble attempts to theorize the transnational. Turning to an alternative intellectual history—a network of civil rights and anticolonial activists—reveals a novel theory of civil disobedience as decolonizing praxis, as well the stakes of these binaries: the disavowal of white supremacy as pervasive and durable global structure of governance, linking the domestic to the international, and democratic rule to domination.

Civil disobedience outside of the liberal democratic framework: The case of Sudan

Civil disobedience is a form of protest consisting in an act contrary to law, whose aim is to bring about a change in laws or policies deemed unjust. In the traditional Western philosophical debate, civil disobedience was mainly discussed and justified within the boundaries of a democratic regime. John Rawls’ theory of civil disobedience is explicitly based on this liberal assumption. He conceptualises civil disobedience as a public, nonviolent, conscientious and political breach of the law, only appropriate to nearly just societies, hence to democratic regimes. This article intends to question Rawls’ premise by considering civil disobedience from a different perspective: when it is undertaken outside of a nearly just framework, precisely in not fully democratic contexts, such as the so-called “anocracies”, regimes that mix democratic and autocratic traits. The emblematic case of Sudan’s most recent actions of civil disobedience is examined to argue that, contrary to the liberal conceptualisation, civil disobedience does have a role and appropriateness in frameworks of this kind, where the aim is not only to oppose unjust laws or policies, but also to achieve a broader structural change through rigorously nonviolent forms of political action.

On a Belief-Relative Moral Right to Civil Disobedience

Acts of civil disobedience are undertaken in defense of a variety of causes ranging from banning GMO crops and prohibiting abortion to fighting inequality and saving the environment. Recently, Brownlee has argued that the merit of a cause is not relevant to the establishment of a moral right to civil disobedience. Instead, it is the fact that a dissenter believes his cause for protest to be morally right that is salient. We may term her and similar such theories belief-relative theories of civil disobedience. In this paper, I first argue that Brownlee’s important argument from conscientious conviction fails in its aim to establish a belief-relative moral right to civil disobedience. I then provide a more general argument that no purely belief-relative theory of civil disobedience grounded in a basic moral value will be tenable. Any moral warrant of civil disobedience that is derived from a value must be limited by the value from which it is derived, as well as by other similarly weighty values. If the moral warrant of civil disobedience is derived from the value of autonomy, then the warrant does not extend to acts of civil disobedience that violate the autonomy of others, or other similarly weighty values. Furthermore, granting a right to disobey in promotion of a grossly unjust view is problematic because civil disobedience ought to serve the role of promoting justice.

State civil disobedience: A republican perspective

The article deals with the question of whether or under which circumstances it is reasonable to interpret some forms of illegal state action as civil disobedience and whether republican political theory can make a difference to the justification of those actions. It is argued that the theory of freedom as non-domination and the interpretation of the right to participation as the “right of rights” in a legitimate state provide a better justificatory scheme for cases in which developing or emerging countries break international trade laws for the purpose of protecting constitutional rights than Rawls’ theory of civil disobedience, because it takes the problem of power asymmetries in international relations and the status of social rights more seriously. However, these republican standards do not offer different practical solutions for a specific type of state disobedience, humanitarian intervention, because transferring the standards of non-domination and the fundamental right to participation to international relations would lead to a “maximalist” interpretation of human rights, which would undermine the function of such interventions as an instrument of last resort against oppressive governments.

Civil disobedience as transformative power under a non-democratic regime: Does the Umbrella Movement undermine the rule of law?

ABSTRACTThe article begins with asking two questions. First, does the Umbrella Movement (Movement) undermine the city’s rule of law? Second, is the Movement an act of civil disobedience? One may argue that the Movement breaks the law in order to better adhere to the city’s higher law of universal suffrage and thereby continues to pay respect to the law. Nevertheless, several major surveys find that universal suffrage has not been established as the city’s higher law. The claim of the Movement does not seem justified by a related higher law and is therefore not governed by law. Moreover, major theorists of civil disobedience maintain that civil disobedience only makes sense in a democratic constitutional order. Nevertheless, Hong Kong is not a democratic polity, and the Movement disagrees with parts of the kernel of the city’s constitutional scheme. The Movement cannot rely on the major theories of civil obedience to claim to stay under law. In the past decades, the major events of civil disobedience worldwide, such as the ‘colour revolutions’, mainly took place in non-democratic regimes. Major theories of civil disobedience are unable to describe, explain and evaluate these events. In order to fill this theoretical void, based on the experience of the Umbrella Movement, the article proposes an alternative account of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience in this regard is understood as a legitimacy-building and regime-transformative power. Its nature implies its own rationale to adhere to the rule of law and the major principles of civil disobedience. My account may also apply to the Western democratic societies that encounter legitimacy or regime challenges.

Civil disobedience in the shadows of postnationalization and privatization

Bringing together normative political theory and recent empirical research on the state, the essay examines the challenges posed by the postnationalization and privatization of state authority to conventional accounts of civil disobedience. It does so by taking a careful look at John Rawls’ influential theory of civil disobedience along with its oftentimes neglected implicit assumptions about state and society, assumptions which turn out to have reproduced commonplace postwar statist and Westphalian ideas, including the optimistic view that the liberal democratic nation state should prove up to the task of successfully regulating and perhaps civilizing capitalism. Postnationalization and privatization render those assumptions problematic. Consequently, the Rawlsian model that was partly constructed on them becomes problematic as well. However, some of its features transcend the obsolescent empirical assumptions on which it was implicitly built. Theorists of civil disobedience should not just deconstruct but also reconstruct the Rawlsian account of civil disobedience. Postnationalization and privatization may leave us with a bare-bones version of the Rawlsian original. Yet bare bones arguably remain better than no bones.

A Theory of Civil Disobedience

From the streets of Hong Kong to Ferguson, Missouri, civil disobedience has again become newsworthy. What explains the prevalence and extremity of acts of civil disobedience? This paper presents a model in which protest planners choose the nature of the disturbance hoping to influence voters (or other decision-makers in less democratic regimes) both through the size of the unrest and by generating a response. The model suggests that protesters will either choose a mild epsilon protest, such as a peaceful march, which serves mainly to signal the size of the disgruntled population, or a sweet spot protest, which is painful enough to generate a response but not painful enough so that an aggressive response is universally applauded. Since non-epsilon protests serve primarily to signal the leaders' type, they will occur either when protesters have private information about the leader's type or when the distribution of voters' preferences are convex in a way that leads the revelation of uncertainty to increase the probability of regime change. The requirements needed for rational civil disobedience seem not to hold in many world settings, and so we explore ways in which bounded rationality by protesters, voters, and incumbent leaders can also explain civil disobedience.

Nonideal theory and compliance—A clarification

This paper examines the various ways in which nonideal theory responds to noncompliance with ideal principles of justice. Taking Rawls’ definition of nonideal theory as my point of departure, I propose an understanding of this concept as comprising two subparts: Complementary nonideal theory responds to deliberate and avoidable noncompliance and consists mainly of theories of civil disobedience, rebellion, and retribution. Substitutive nonideal theory responds to nondeliberate and unavoidable noncompliance and consists mainly of theories of transition and caretaking. I further argue that a special case of substitutive nonideal theory may arise when noncompliance is a result of a lack of motivation among citizens. This situation, I suggest, calls for nonideal theorizing (1) when our aim is to evaluate the political actions undertaken by specific members of a society (in particular the ruling elite) whose set of feasible options is constrained as a result of others’ lack of motivation and (2) when a situation of mutually reinforcing distrust and noncooperation—sometimes called a “social trap”—constrains the feasible option set of the entire population. The main advantage of the twofold conceptualization of nonideal theory is that it bridges the theoretical gap between actor-oriented and situation-based accounts of justice: It allows us to preserve the term ideal justice for justice under minimal feasibility constraints, while recognizing that a situation where all agents comply with their duties must in some sense be characterized as just.

Democracy, Deliberation and Disobedience

This paper develops a theory of civil disobedience informed by a deliberative conception of democracy. In particular, it explores the justification of illegal, public and political acts of protest in constitutional deliberative democracies. Civil disobedience becomes justifiable when processes of public deliberation fail to respect the principles of a deliberative democracy in the following three ways: when deliberation is insufficiently inclusive; when it is manipulated by powerful participants; and when it is insufficiently informed. As a contribution to ongoing processes of public deliberation, civil disobedience should be carried out in a way that respects the principles of deliberative democracy, which entails a commitment to persuasive, non-violent forms of protest.

Socratic Civil Disobedience: Some Reflections onMorgentaler

Plato’s dialogueCrito, as is well known, presents Socrates’ response to the question why must one obey the law. The facts surrounding Socrates’ trial, imprisonment and subsequent execution are all well known, I shall not repeat them here. Rather my present task will be to analyze the other side of the Socratic argument, in order to determine Socrates’ possible response to the question of when (or under what circumstances) may we chose to disobey the law. The purpose of this present analysis is three-fold: first, to determine what in fact might be the Socratic response to the question. Second, to show – as against at least one recent writer – that Socrates could be said to have a theory of civil disobedience. My third task, given that such a theory could be attributed to Socrates, is to assess the adequacy of this theory.

The Orthodox Theory of Civil Disobedience

The Orthodox Theory of Civil Disobedience