Civil disobedience is a practice of political contestation, of challenging established norms, practices, institutions, and self-understandings that involves deliberately breaking the law while typically stopping short of full-scale revolt in terms of both its ends and its repertoire of actions. It is usually situated between legal protest, on the one hand, and more radical – for example, revolutionary – forms of resistance, on the other. Where exactly the lines are drawn, and, as a result, how radical civil disobedience in fact turns out to be, depends on how the meaning, justification, and role of civil disobedience are understood. As this volume documents, different theoretical paradigms propose rival accounts, ranging from the rather restrictive proposals of mainstream liberal accounts to more expansive positions developed by theorists of radical democracy.1

Why another volume devoted to civil disobedience? Libraries are filled with thick tomes devoted to the topic. Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., canonical figures in the history of civil disobedience, not only inspired countless familiar and not-so-familiar movements but also ignited extensive political and scholarly debate.1 From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, civil disobedience became a fashionable subject for discussion among lawyers, philosophers, political scientists, and many others. Prominent intellectuals, including Hannah Arendt, Ronald Dworkin, Jürgen Habermas, John Rawls, and Bertrand Russell, produced significant theoretical statements about it. What possibly remains to be said about something that fascinated so many of the most innovative and influential political thinkers in the last century?

A liberal theory of civil disobedience aims to address the following question: if social institutions are for the most part just, what should a citizen with a sense of justice do when confronted with an unjust law? Liberal theory responds to this question by arguing that moderately unjust legislation remains legitimate – and the duty of citizens to comply with the law remains effective – only as long as the legislation could be accepted by rational persons reflecting under fair conditions on the justice of their institutions. A liberal theory must therefore offer an account of the conditions under which the duty to comply with laws enacted by the legislature of a nearly just democratic ceases to be binding and the forms of lawbreaking or resistance that may be employed once legislation passes this point. More particularly, a liberal theory of disobedience must address two issues.

Most literature on civil disobedience focuses on defining what it is, philosophical or political justifications for its use, or jurisprudential issues surrounding its use. Much less attention is given to its consequences. After briefly considering methodological challenges in assessing consequences, outcomes, or effects of civil disobedience, I address individual, political, and cultural consequences. Individual consequences of civil disobedience are effects on those who engage in civil disobedience, such as sanctioning by the government or experiencing liberating and empowering emotions. Political consequences are effects of civil disobedience on the political environment, such as initiating public deliberation or debate, mobilizing support for a cause, or tangible change in social practices, law, policy, or government.

Youth circus opportunities are part of a global expansion in circus arts practices. Although defined with different nuances in different locations, Youth circus is generally accepted to include any youth participating in learning circus skills for non-professional reasons, including recreation, physical education, and social contexts. Anecdotes describing the transformative and beneficial effects of learning circus abound. Research indicates that the introduction of circus arts to a broad youth population has been shown to increase motor competence, motor confidence, physical literacy, self-determination, and encourage risk assessment. This chapter describes how research describing the benefits from participating in youth circus can be understood within the framework of risky play. When engaging in risky play, youth test their own physical and emotional limits in order to develop strategies that will benefit them when encountering future risks. The opportunity to participate in risky play enables youth to learn to trust themselves and develop awareness of their strengths and weaknesses. Learning circus offers a context for diverse, incremental, and individualized risk-taking, in environments where instructors and equipment provide risk-management. Looking at research results through the lens of risky play contributes to a description of youth circus as an enriching activity.

The opening of Astley’s Amphitheatre on the outskirts of London in 1770 marked the beginning of the modern circus by providing the essential model that would be refined and expanded as it grew into a global form of entertainment during the nineteenth century. Although many components – equestrian feats, acrobatics, performing animals, rope walking – long antedated Astley’s early displays, it was their combination into a singular show staged within a ring of spectators that gave form to what came to be known as the circus. In this chapter Matthew Wittmann examines the origins of the circus in late eighteenth-century London, contextualising its emergence and tracing its dynamic diffusion across Europe and the Americas during the half century that followed.

This chapter elucidates how – under the umbrella term circus studies – different disciplines define and explore the aesthetic, innovative, transgressive, and intermedial potentials of the circus arts. Disciplines involved in studying circus include cultural and literary studies, artistic research, neurosciences, sports and physical activity science, engineering, science communication, disability studies, humour studies, and many more. Offering a colourful and suggestive, but by no means exhaustive, introduction to the multiple approaches to a unique artistic practice and cultural phenomenon, the chapter focuses on two perspectives in circus research: work that, to understand circus practice, employs a science lens and work that, to understand the circus as a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon, utilises a humanities prism. The chapter presents a mosaic of perspectives and ideas in recent scholarly engagement with the circus and points to some of the crossroads where different disciplines meet.

The transatlantic circulation of circus acts during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries created opportunities for circus’s somatically spectacular acts to appear on pantomime and variety theatre stages. This chapter assesses a neglected aspect of circus scholarship: understanding how and why circus acts appeared in other popular entertainment forms. Circus, pantomime, and variety cultivated unity through their reliance on novelty. By tracing the performance engagements of a major circus-style act, Lockhart’s Elephants, in iconic variety venues in London, Paris, and New York City, I demonstrate the deep interrelatedness of modern circus and music hall/vaudeville. Performers frequently established and sustained their reputations in these economically powerful cosmopolitan centres, where heightened competition in the leisure marketplace increased circulation of circus performers. Nineteenth-century industrialisation and changing theatre regulations had transformed genres, allowing audiences more opportunity for leisure activities and theatres more opportunity to blur spoken drama and spectacle. The somatic spectacularity of circus acts provided essential counterpoints to pantomime and variety’s dominant performance modes. This dynamic relationship complicates our understanding of circus, pantomime, and variety as distinct genres, pressing scholars to reconsider the relative stability with which we deploy the terms and write their histories.

Circus has been an inherent part of the Czech cultural milieu since the nineteenth century when emerging circus arts were closely associated with folk puppetry. From humble beginnings as street acts, Czech circuses developed into large-scale business operations that were nationalised in the 1950s during the Communist regime and then transformed into freely functioning communities and enterprises after the Velvet Revolution of 1989. A distinct Czech variant of contemporary circus has emerged recently, born of and significantly influenced by the world of theatre. In the Czech Republic one may observe, side by side, traditional circus, which has largely continued to adhere to its original artistic code, and contemporary circus, which is currently attempting to create an innovative code well-suited to the twenty-first century. This chapter focuses on the origin and transformation of traditional and contemporary circus forms, their characteristics, and their status (both artistic and economic) in the current Czech sociopolitical milieu. There are overlaps with Polish, Slovak, and Hungarian circus environments because, as with the present-day Czech Republic, all of these countries have undergone significant cultural and political transformations since the fall of Communism in 1989. It is precisely this shared history which provides the authors with a unique perspective upon Central European circus.

Following the establishment of the modern circus in London and Paris during the later decades of the eighteenth century, the circus began its steady dispersion around the world. The global transmission of this new sort of public entertainment by peripatetic performers and entrepreneurs was in no small measure attributable to waves of colonialism, industrial advances in transportation and communication, and motivations arising from commercial interests. This chapter charts the transference of the circus to Australasia (Australia and New Zealand), the territories of Southeast Asia (including present-day Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines), and the South Asian territories of the Indian subcontinent and China in the nineteenth century. What is little understood about the processes of circus transculturation in these regions is that circus companies originating from colonial territories undertook transnational touring projects, thus enacting aesthetic and transcultural movements between territories on the periphery of empire. This chapter brings to light the ways that circuses were agents of colonialism and empire, as well as transcultural transmitters of aesthetic innovation in the period that was both the Age of Empire and the Age of Modernity.

In 2018 we marked the 250th anniversary of the founding of the modern circus, an event traced to the entrepreneurial initiatives of Philip Astley (1742–1814). Astley enclosed a circle of ground on the south side of the Thames in 1768 where he exhibited his unusual equestrian skills for a paying public. The circus’s specialised history in different parts of the globe reveals that for just over 250 years this hybrid entertainment, with its own codes of physical and comic performance, visuality, and business management, has developed and diversified through multiple cycles of reinvention. Oscillating through phases of illegitimacy on the fringes of society and validation for its aesthetic and entertainment appeal, the circus’s restless evolution has always been influenced by unique confluences of the political environment, artistic heritage, and aesthetic trends particular to its geographic context.

Equestrian acts were the foundation of the early circus and distinguished this new institution from other theatrical entertainments in the late eighteenth century. Although the advent of new circus has normalised an idea of an animal-free circus, the present century is enjoying a resurgence in performance with horses.Contemporary companies, such as Theatre Zingaro and Cavalia, present new narratives for a contemporary age, while performing acts with a long history. In this chapter Kim Baston considers the legacy of practices that continue to inform contemporary performance through the examination of specific case studies from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Examples include the Edinburgh Equestrian Circus as a representative example of acts in the early modern circus; Jenny de Rahden’s classic high school act of the nineteenth century; the trick riding of the Loyal-Repenskys, a large family troupe of the early twentieth century; the mid-twentieth-century liberty act by Yasmine Smart; and the contemporary equestrian company La Luna Caballera. This chapter provides a snapshot, as it were, of classic equestrian acts as they were performed at a particular historical moment, focusing on the conjunction of the repeated skills of the repertoire and their re-imagination in contemporary practice.