Social movements often impose nontrivial costs on others against their wills. Civil disobedience is no exception. How can social movements in general, and civil disobedience in particular, be justifiable despite this apparent wrong-making feature? We examine an intuitively plausible account—it is fair that everyone should bear the burdens of tackling injustice. We extend this fairness-based argument for civil disobedience to defend some acts of uncivil disobedience. Focusing on uncivil environmental activism—such as ecotage (sabotage with the aim of protecting the environment)—we argue that some acts of uncivil disobedience can be morally superior to their civil counterparts, when and because such acts target people who are responsible for environmental threats. Indeed, insofar as some acts of uncivil disobedience can more accurately target responsible people, they can better satisfy the demands of fairness compared to their civil counterparts. In some circumstances, our argument may require activists to engage in uncivil disobedience even when civil disobedience is available.

Civil disobedience is a conscientious, unlawful, and broadly nonviolent form of protest, which most political philosophers and many non-philosophers are inclined to treat as potentially defensible in democratic societies. In recent years, philosophers have become more receptive to long-standing complaints from activists that civil disobedience is an unduly restrictive framework for considering the ethics of dissent. Candice Delmas and Jason Brennan have written important books that illustrate and strengthen this trend, both defending forms of “uncivil” resistance that go beyond the narrow confines of civil disobedience. Their books offer contrasting but complementary philosophical defences of incivility as a tactic of resistance, but it is nonetheless a mistake to conclude that the rich tradition associated with civil disobedience no longer has any relevance for resistance in national, transnational, and global contexts.

The first two decades of the twenty-first century witnessed expanded digital connectivity, with important political implications, evident in the way activists used Facebook and Twitter to mobilize for political change in North Africa and beyond in 2010/2011, and in Sudan, including in 2018 and 2019. These platforms are also often sites where women may articulate narratives on the body and the body politic. Through digital ethnographic research, this study explores social and cultural narratives on everyday body aesthetics that Sudanese women articulate in selected groups on Facebook. I argue that the role some of these groups played in organizing civil disobedience in Sudan in November 2016 disrupts the binary inherent in the question: Nairat or Thairat?

This article provides a fresh interpretation of John Rawls's discussion of civil disobedience in A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press 1971). It focuses on an original feature in Rawls's analysis: civil disobedience as a form of speech deployed by a well-defined minority in an effort to correct an injustice perpetrated by a majority. For Rawls, civil disobedience as a speech function departs from the principle of protected free speech. Only certain expressions of civil disobedience are capable of producing genuine legal reform. Rawls gains new importance as part of a larger effort to understand and evaluate the outbreak of recent movements of mass dissent and protest from the Arab Spring to Ukraine to Hong Kong to the United States. A reconsideration of Rawls may be used to assess the likely success of these various expressions of dissent and protest.

Rawls's discussion of civil disobedience circumvents arguments in the legal literature that attempt to justify certain types of illegal activity with reference to moral conscience or natural law. Nevertheless, the focus on civil disobedience as speech encounters forms of coercive, resistant public opinion in the public sphere. Detailed, exemplary narratives by Martin Luther King and Norman Mailer on acts of civil disobedience illuminate forms of coercion that must be considered in extending and re-evaluating Rawls's original contributions.

The familiar irony of ‘real existing socialism’ is that it never was. Socialist ideals were used to legitimize regimes that fell far short of realizing those ideals—indeed, that violently repressed anyone who tried to realize them. This paper suggests that the derogatory concept of ‘the criminal’ may be allowing liberal ideals to operate in contemporary political philosophy and real politics in a worryingly similar manner. By depoliticizing deep dissent from the prevailing order of property, this concept can obscure what I call the ‘legitimation gap’. This is the gulf between (a) liberal accounts of state legitimacy, and (b) the actual functioning of liberal states. Feminists have long pointed out that the exclusion of what is deemed ‘personal’ from political consideration is itself a political move. I propose that the construction of the criminal as a category opposed to the political works similarly to perpetuate unjust forms of social power.

Civil disobedience has been theorised as an informal guardian of the constitution in democratic societies, but such accounts struggle to accommodate protest that has an international or global dimension. This article addresses this issue through offering a theory of civil disobedience as transnational disruption. Civil disobedience is ‘transnational’ insofar as it is an appeal to a national, international or global public that highlights failures to observe moral, political or legal values that are an appropriate source of normative authority in global contexts. Civil disobedience is ‘disruptive’ insofar as it obstructs the routine activities of relevant parties in order to draw attention to the demands of protesters. The core argument is that civil disobedience can uphold normative standards that have been incorporated into a dense network of treaties, conventions and global regulatory frameworks. It can thus make a modest but valuable contribution to the processes through which publics deliberate about the meaning and interpretation of these contested norms.

The spread of demands by physicians and allied health professionals for accommodation of their private ethical, usually religiously based, objections to providing care of a particular type, or to a particular class of persons, suggests the need for a re-evaluation of conscientious objection in healthcare and how it should be regulated. I argue on Kantian grounds that respect for conscience and protection of freedom of conscience is consistent with fairly stringent limitations and regulations governing refusal of service in healthcare settings. Respect for conscience does not entail that refusal of service should be cost free to the objector. I suggest that conscientious objection in medicine should be conceptualized and treated analogously to civil disobedience.

This article develops a concept of transnational civil dis/obedience. It provides a framework for interpreting and evaluating practices of cross-border movement by citizens and migrants, who mobilize international or supranational law to sidestep and challenge domestic rules deemed illegitimate. Such acts are made possible by, but also enact, complex, overlapping and competing legal orders in Europe and elsewhere. In contrast to analyses stressing the private and market-based nature of these actions, the conceptual lens introduced here draws out their potentially civic and political character. To construct and illustrate my argument, I engage with an in-depth case study of EU citizenship and cross-border movement in the area of marriage migration, where individual liberty and political membership are fiercely contested. The paper draws on narrative interviews with Danish-international couples who in response to Denmark’s restrictive family unification rules have used EU-law to protest against what they see as unjust interference in their private lives.

Lawyers and priests are both vested in their office by a licensing authority and take oaths to obey the law, whether civil or ecclesiastical, that governs. Within these similar settings, the appropriate authority may need to judge disobedience by the lawyer or priest. If obedience is not enforced, respect for the law will decline and lawlessness ensues. In the Episcopal Church, it is black-letter law that only the baptised may receive communion. Notwithstanding the law, priests in ever-increasing numbers are inviting all to the table. Against what standard is such conduct to be judged? The Constitution and Canons are silent. Is the standard therefore to be merely the fact that the priest thinks he or she is following the dictates of the Holy Spirit? Or is there a real standard for judgment? Perhaps the gloss around civil disobedience and the rules of professional responsibility of lawyers may provide a more objective guide. This article discusses the debate over open table and the current black-letter law, and considers ecclesiastical disobedience under the guidance of the standards for legitimate civil disobedience. In addition, it considers the apparent desire of the bishops for the best of all possible worlds – having a law that the greater Church will appreciate, but then not enforcing it. The result may be more table fellowship but also anarchy.