Introduction

Why civil disobedience?

A loose collection of activists targeting police racism and brutality, Black Lives Matter (BLM) got its name from Alicia Garza, who first used the term in a July 2013 Facebook post criticizing the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who had shot and killed Trayvon Martin, a black teen. The 2014 police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, followed by other widely publicized incidents of police violence, rapidly ignited protests organized by younger black activists. Beyond the usual mix of demonstrations, marches, and vigils, BLM soon embraced more controversial tactics, including some deemed illegal by public authorities and, not surprisingly, culminating in arrests. Protestors occupied police stations and police union offices, blockaded major highways and mass transit systems, interrupted political speakers (including Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders), and disrupted shoppers in large malls and downtown shopping districts. Though its activities have generally been nonviolent, some have resulted in the destruction of property and scuffles with police (Lowery 2016).

BLM has generated sympathy among political progressives, some of whom view it as a rightful heir to the 1960s US civil rights movements and Martin Luther King's vision of nonviolent civil disobedience. On the political right, in sharp contrast, prominent figures - including President Donald Trump - accuse the group of instigating violence against police officers, describing its actions as reckless and incongruent with the "rule of law," an idea conservatives tend to conflate with "law and order."1 Right-wing pundits often draw clear lines between a saintly King and what they deplore as BLM's propensity for violence and white-bashing.

A third - and more sophisticated - response comes from an older generation of African-American activists, some of whom marched with King yet worry the movement has abandoned his ideas. They accuse its proponents of lacking the requisite spiritual orientation and failing to appreciate why conscientious lawbreaking demands public displays of dignity, decorum, and self-discipline. BLM, on their view, has not done enough to delineate its actions from those of street thugs and looters. It needs to think harder about how to mobilize majority support for its grievances. Recent activists have given lucid expression to legitimate black frustration, but not enough thought as to how best to funnel it in morally sound and politically productive ways (Kennedy 2015; Reynolds 2015).

While also claiming inspiration from King, BLM has responded by distancing itself from his patriarchal and occasionally conservative religious views. The group rejects the "respectability politics ethos" of older civil rights activism, touting its own preference for less hierarchical, centralized organizational forms. In contrast to the electoral reformism of the present-day black political elite (and its close ties to the Democratic Party), the activists doubt that "the American system is salvageable, because it is so deeply rooted in ideas of racial caste."2 Accordingly, the movement has spurned efforts by elected leaders and other political figures to embrace its cause, seeing in them a real danger of cooptation. Its defenders have also pushed back against sanitized readings of King's tactics, pointing out that he and his followers were also frequently accused of fomenting unrest and violence (Sebastian 2015).

What should we make of these competing interpretations? BLM has in fact broken the law and engaged in behavior that has sometimes rattled even sympathizers. Should we highlight the movement's apparent disdain for legality? Does it make sense to view its endeavors as essentially lawless and criminal? Though the movement's participants have by no means always categorized their activities as civil disobedience, the term appears frequently in discussions of them. One reason is that the concept "civil disobedience" possesses a moral and political cachet that alternatives - most obviously, "crime" or "illegality" - lack. With this moral and political capital also come some modest legal gains: when politically motivated lawbreakers convince a judge or jury that their actions constitute civil disobedience, in some jurisdictions they can count on less severe treatment than those who fail to do so.3 Protestors may get off with a reduced sentence, or some realistic expectation of clemency in the not-too-distant future. They can also successfully claim the mantle of iconic practitioners of civil disobedience such as King and Mahatma Gandhi, in the process garnering a valuable measure of public recognition for their actions.

Our answers to these questions, in short, are politically consequential, and the stakes for real-life activists high. BLM's case, to be sure, is of special interest to US citizens (and, of course, people everywhere repulsed by racism).4 Yet parallel questions emerge in many other contexts. We are witnessing a proliferation of politically motivated illegalities, some familiar and some less so, with activists, their supporters, and critics regularly debating whether the illegalities in question deserve to be described as civil disobedience.

A similar controversy, for example, has broken out about whether mass migrations of peoples across state borders, like those that have recently brought millions to Germany, Greece, Turkey, and smaller countries such as Austria and Sweden, might be sensibly characterized as civil disobedience. Those illegally crossing borders in search of a decent job, for example, apparently view legal entry requirements as unjust, and when violating laws prohibiting their free movement do so nonviolently. Even when crossing borders covertly, they may subsequently take on occupations making them visible to a broader public. Their actions also generate public debate about immigration and refugee policies, spurring calls for legal changes. On one interpretation, illegal migrants are implicitly appealing to some nascent idea of global or cosmopolitan justice that favors human rights over national prerogatives (Cabrera 2010: 131-53). Since their acts seem to meet some of the usual tests of legitimate civil disobedience, why not describe them as such?

This and related queries seem increasingly inescapable. Given substantial popular dissatisfaction with the normal workings even of longstanding liberal democracies, large numbers of people are now willing to pursue unconventional and legally suspect protest. In well-functioning liberal democracies, political decisions should be made via normal lawmaking channels; those seeking legal and policy changes should not be driven to break the law in personally risky ways. Unfortunately, it is no longer clear that many liberal democracies are in fact sufficiently well-functioning. The present crisis of democracy, as manifest in burgeoning mass apathy, populist rage against political elites, and the decline of mainstream political parties, likely portends a growing prominence for politically motivated lawbreaking. Alarming authoritarian trends also probably mean that incidents of grassroots or oppositional lawbreaking will increase, as citizens push back against top-down attacks on civil liberties and democracy.

We need to understand civil disobedience, its key components, what they entail, and how and why it involves a special type of lawbreaking, one that in principle may be deserving of our respect even when we find the political cause or activists behind it disagreeable. Why does it matter? Since Gandhi and King, the concept of civil disobedience has appealed especially to those hoping to bring about positive social change. Responsible political action today - as in the past - presupposes conceptual and terminological clarity. We want a notion of civil disobedience that potentially allows us to situate it coherently within a broader field of related political terms, even if messy social realities unavoidably get in the way of airtight conceptual distinctions. For both political and theoretical reasons, to be examined below, one tendency in recent years has been a certain blurring of the lines between notions of civil disobedience, on the one hand, and other politically motivated illegalities, on the other. Both normative and empirical literatures now speak broadly of political resistance, nonviolent or otherwise.5 In contemporary political discourse as well, resistance functions as a diffuse catch-all concept, masking a diversity of competing political tactics and ideological perspectives. Unfortunately, this trend sometimes comes with a hidden price tag: we risk losing a sufficiently precise understanding of civil disobedience and its distinctive traits.6

Unlike those that jettison the term "civil disobedience" for generic and potentially less precise conceptual alternatives, this book tries to hold on to it. To do so successfully, we need to explore the concept's nuances as well as possible ambiguities and frailties.

Which civil disobedience?

One way to proceed would be offer another full-fledged political philosophy of civil disobedience. To their credit, some contemporary authors are pursuing this approach. One of their project's more striking oversights, however, suggests the virtues of a more modest starting point.

Civil disobedience has long been the subject of wide-ranging controversy. Philosophically inclined writers are again revisiting the topic;...