Rethinking Civil Disobedience as a Practice of Contestation—Beyond the Liberal Paradigm

Across the political spectrum, many people— journalists, politicians, but also activists and theorists— seem to think there is something fundamentally wrong with civil disobedience. Some consider it too radical, as an attempt to procure political power under the mantel of moral principles, as a one-sided renunciation of the duty to obey the law and to uphold order that is not to be tolerated.1 Citizens in more or less functioning democracies, they say, must limit themselves to the legally sanctioned possibilities available to them for expressing dissenting views and influencing the political process. As Anne Applebaum put it, in characteristically simple terms, referring to the disobedience practiced by Occupy Wall Street: “Unlike the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, to whom both the London and New York protesters openly (and ridiculously) compare themselves, we have democratic institutions in the Western world.”2 From this point of view, civil disobedience is little more than political blackmail. On the other extreme we find those who consider it nothing more than the impotent expression of a reformist yearning for cosmetic changes within a given system, as a socially permissible and harmless protest of wellintentioned citizens, which remains purely symbolic and only contributes to the stabilization of the status quo.3 In this article I argue that both of these widespread views miss the specific characteristics of civil disobedience as a genuinely political and democratic practice of contestation. In order to present these specifics in detail, it is first necessary to examine how civil disobedience is understood—in what will turn out to be a very one-sided and sanitized way—in the mainstream liberal paradigm, not least because the definition elaborated in liberal political philosophy4 is either so successful that it has shaped public understandings of civil disobedience, or so uncritical that it more or less systematizes and reproduces these understandings. This first step of my argument will be developed in three short subsections on the definition, justification, and role of civil disobedience. In a second step I address the crucial and complex question of the relation between civil disobedience, a practice often regarded as essentially nonviolent, and violence. In the last part I briefly sketch why understanding civil disobedience as a specifically democratic political practice—one we might also call democratic or political disobedience in order to mark the difference with classical ways of understanding and of practicing civil disobedience—makes it necessary to conceive of the relation between its symbolic and its confrontational (maybe even violent) aspect in a different, more complicated way. This rethinking of civil disobedience seems especially called for today in a situation that poses a series of challenges to traditional understandings of political contestation. Amongst these challenges, the crises-ridden globalization of neoliberal political and economic power structures, the rise of the Internet both as a tool of political action and as a politically contested space, and the troubled resurgence of radical opposition to the status quo, for example, in the form of the Occupy movement,5 can be seen as the most pressing. They urge us to be aware of both the potential and the limits of a conception of civil disobedience that goes beyond its narrowly liberal understanding.6