Not only did the initial demonstration fail to make its point, it ended an entire civil disobedience movement. Another peaceful protest that resulted in mass death was the Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing, China. The protest started at the city center in April with demonstrators going on hunger strikes and sitting in the public square. Participants were pushing for reform and talks with Communist Party leaders. After two months of protests in the square, the government sent in its military to enforce martial law and move protestors out of the area.
Without warning, the troops opened fire on the peaceful protestors. Thousands of people were wounded, killed, or even later tried and executed for their participation. Today, China considers all talk of this incident taboo and forbids any discussion or remembrance acts.
Famous examples of acts of civil disobedience show how powerful one person can be in starting a movement without force or how powerful certain types of government are. From these examples, you can see that civil disobedience is most effective in democratic governments and largely ineffective in other types of governments.
You can expand your perspective by looking at how modern examples of civil disobedience were influenced by these historical acts. All rights reserved. Rosa Parks, Montgomery, Alabama, Successful Examples of Civil Disobedience in History Some of the most successful famous acts of civil disobedience involve well-known civil rights leaders.
The Massacre in Sharpeville In , a group of unarmed demonstrators gathered in Sharpeville, South Africa to protest a government restriction on travel for non-whites. 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.
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.
On this basis, some scholars deny altogether the requirement that civil disobedience be non-violent M. Cohen , ; Brownlee , —9; Moraro , 96— 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.
One way to conceive of violence is as the use of physical force causing or likely to cause injury Rawls , 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 , 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— 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 a, ; Lai Examples include animal rescue, Sanctuary assistance, sabotage, ecotage e.
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. Identifying some principled disobedient acts as uncivil makes room to focus on their justification. Scholars have defended such uncivil disobedience as political rioting Pasternak , vandalism Lim ; Lai , violent protest Kling and Mitchell , coercive strike tactics Gourevitch , and direct action Smith 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 ; Finlay 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.
As will be discussed in the next section, revolutionary activists and thinkers like Frantz Fanon , ch. 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. 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.
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. 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.
It amounted to a single flat-rate tax on every adult, irrespective of personal income. This resulted in lower income households being compelled to pay more in tax than higher earners. It was widely quoted that the billionaire Duke of Westminster would pay the same tax as his chauffeur. From the day it was implemented, 1st April , the people of Scotland were fiercely opposed to the poll tax, and they fought long and hard to have it abolished.
A campaign of organised resistance made it impossible for the councils to enforce the tax, and physically impossible for police to arrest mass defaulters. The blockading of housing estates and private homes from court-appointed sheriffs was a key part of the Scottish struggle.
The English and Welsh drew inspiration from Scotland's fight but the outcome was not as peaceful. A London march resulted in the worst riots in the city for over a century with people arrested and injured.
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was widely criticised for the political and fiscal disaster, and eventually resigned. Her successor, John Major, replaced the Community Charge with a system of council tax, a local taxation system based on property value. By the end of , an estimated 4 million people had refused to pay their poll tax and many of them spent time in jail.
This was a passionate grass roots protest , which brought together people from all parts of society. As with protestors before them, some saw the only choice being resistance, even if that meant assault, arrest and time spent in jail. It was the refusal to pay the tax that paralysed the system from the inside out. The machine was brought to a halt. Huge corporations seize seeds in a bid to control what we eat.
Brave farmers all over the world risk ruination by refusing to accept this. Little victories can be inspirational. As a result of a global legal offensive, farmers who have grown and shared seeds for thousands of years are fast becoming criminalised for their actions. Environmental and Agricultural activist Vandana Shiva urges the refusal to recognise unethical laws that rob people of the right to save and exchange seeds.
In this environment, farmers lose their autonomy. They must purchase seeds determined by seed corporations. Terminator seeds, for example, are genetically modified to become sterile after the first germination. They are expensive and require herbicides and artificial fertilisers all provided, at huge cost, by the corporations.
The following year the farmer must purchase more seeds and more fertiliser. Those that are not ruined by inescapable debt become part of a corporate production chain. Agricultural biodiversity is vital given the global challenges the world now faces; new strains of disease, environmental stresses in the face of climate change, and socio-economic challenges. Resistance against seed privatisation is global.
Farmers are developing local seed systems, risking fines and imprisonment for storing and sharing seeds. They are marching, striking, refusing to roll over. They are paying fines and going to jail, and sometimes they win. The victories may seem small but they are monumental for those involved. These farmers might not change the world immediately, but they continue to change their societies, which can and does lead to global change. This was a symbolic action to protest against globalisation and the loss of food sovereignty to multinationals—that is the right to healthy, diverse and culturally appropriate food produced through sustainable methods.
It was an action taken, not only on behalf of traditional French producers, but for those from all over the world. He tapped into deep fears about the safety of the food supply in France, identifying and challenging what many considered a threat to French cultural identity.
This sheep farmer activist inspired an international protest movement that included Confederation Paysanne, the Associations for the Maintenance of Peasant Agriculture and La Via Campesina , the international peasants movement. These organisations continue to demand protection for human rights, including the right to control the supply and safety of one's food. People take back the power to fight evictions as the government and banks do nothing to help an increasingly desolate population.
Around , seizure orders were served on Spanish properties between and In , there were an average of evictions per day. Anti-eviction organisations, such as the Platform of People Affected by Mortgages PAH , were formed in reaction to the Spanish Government's failure to uphold the constitutional right for all Spaniards to enjoy stable and affordable housing.
The PAH aimed to prevent the systematic eviction of tens of thousands of debtors across Spain and to turn mortgaged homes into affordable rental properties while reforming the Mortgage Act, which previously granted banks the right to claim full payment of debt, even after evicting a property's residents. The strength of this movement was based on its very broad social foundation. Weekly meetings empowered the people by sharing knowledge and experience of the eviction process.
The PAH could call on dozens of protestors to gather at short notice, blocking entrances to properties where eviction orders were being delivered. The PAH re-occupied empty housing owned by banks to provide shelter for evicted families. Eight months after the start of the collective occupation, 20 housing blocks were occupied, sheltering people. These methods of political activism gained widespread legitimacy. Spanish banks had been bailed out with public funds.
The PAH, and their followers, saw this not as illegal occupation but legitimate recuperation. The anti-eviction campaign challenged the rhetoric of the state, the banks, and property developers.
One man loses his freedom to expose what our governments are up to—watching and listening, collecting our data to manipulate and control us. Edward Snowden , cybersecurity expert, copied and handed over a vast cache of close to ten thousand highly classified documents taken from the National Security Agency NSA when employed as a contractor with Booz Allen Hamilton. When his concerns of unethical practice were dismissed, Snowden blew the whistle on secret details of surveillance programs conducted by the United States government with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European Governments.
His objective was to alert the world to widespread, unconstitutional surveillance and invasions of privacy, suggesting that if the governments will not represent the public interests, it is up to the public to champion them. The Snowden leaks inspired five years of technological change within Silicon Valley tech giants, keen to regain their users' trust.
Apple was the first to adjust its privacy policy and encryption and security practices. The Snowden leaks didn't put an end to government surveillance.
They prompted a cultural discussion about government infringement of civil liberties. Having received death threats and branded a traitor by many, Snowden still lives in exile in Moscow. Edward Snowden was one person taking action to expose, with great bravery and potential danger to himself, an injustice that affected us all. After decades of living under a brutal dictatorship, the Sudanese people rise up in a campaign of disobedience and resistance.
It is a hard fight. On 11th April , a pro-democratic, non-violent civil uprising involving thousands of Sudanese people overthrew the most brutal of dictators, Omar al-Bashir. His 30 year rule, supported by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, decimated the economy, split society and placed barbaric controls on women. Starting in the provinces in reaction to rising living costs, the uprising soon moved to the capital, Khartoum.
North and south came together, regardless of class, ethnicity or religious belief in defiance of the regime. Restaurants, banks and businesses were closed down. The streets became desolate. There were eight months of strikes and demonstrations calling for democracy, the dissolution of the National Congress Party NCP , human rights, economic reforms and the repeal of the public order law, designed to exclude and intimidate women from actively participating in public life.
Once Bashir was ousted, the Transitional Military Council TMC took charge and it soon became clear that it was not willing to give up power. On 3rd June, following weeks of peaceful celebration, the Rapid Support Forces opened fire on protestors who were holding a prolonged sit-in outside the military headquarters in Khartoum. The internet was closed down to suppress sharing of information.
Hundreds were killed and raped, in a bid to break the revolution by traumatising its supporters.
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