There are few movements more firmly associated with civil disobedience than the civil rights movement. In the mainstream imagination, civil rights activists eschewed coercion, appealed to the majority's principles, and submitted willingly to legal punishment in order to demand necessary legislative reforms and facilitate the realization of core constitutional and democratic principles. However, as political theorist Erin R. Pineda argues below, this familiar account of civil rights disobedience not only misremembers history; it also distorts our political judgements about how civil disobedience might fit into democratic politics. This conversation coincided with the publication of Pineda's book, Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement. It looks at civil disobedience from the perspective of an activist rather than the dominant liberal political theorists, raising numerous important questions about how civil disobedience ought to unfold in the present.

ERIN R. PINEDA is Assistant Professor of Government at Smith College, Massachusetts. Her research interests include the politics of protest and social movements, Black political thought, race and politics, radical democracy and twentieth-century American political development.

ROBIN CELIKATES is Professor of Social Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin and a member of the editorial team of Critical Times. He specializes in critical theory, civil disobedience, democracy, collective action, recognition, migration and citizenship, and methodological questions in political and social philosophy.

Robin Celikates (RC): I think it is fair to say that civil disobedience is back on the agenda, both on the streets – with Black Lives Matter, the climate justice movement, anti-austerity movements, and so on – and as a topic for philosophical discussion. And it raises a lot of fascinating theoretical questions, from definitional questions that ask what civil disobedience is and how it differs from other forms of protest, to questions of justification and legitimacy, to questions about its role within more or less democratic systems. Your recent work has focused around a critique of mainstream political theory, especially of liberalism. Despite being a very narrow perspective, liberalism has been hegemonic in political theory for quite some time. But it appears to be losing its hegemonic grip.