5 - Radical Democratic Disobedience

Summary

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