Rethinking Civil Disobedience: Uncivility, Disruption, and Dirty Disobedience

Derek Edyvane (University of Leeds); Jonathan Havercroft (University of Southampton); Enes Kulenović (University of Zagreb)

Recent years have seen growing interest in, and a growing body of research on, the question of uncivil disobedience – namely, forms of overt political resistance that do not conform to or meet the stringent justificatory criteria for legitimate democratic civil disobedience (Delmas, 2001, Shelby 2007, Kirkpatrick 2009, D’Arcy 2014, Hooker 2016). By starting from the well-established theory of civil disobedience (Bedau 1961, Rawls 1971), and interpreting uncivil disobedience in relation to it, this body of work has focused on re-examination of different normative justifications and preconditions of legitimate law-breaking, as well as different forms that such acts of disobedience can take.

In recent political theory literature, apart from debates on justifiable forms of resistance, there has been a re-examination of the concept of civil disobedience itself and what that concept entails (Markovits 2005, Forrester, 2019, Livingstone 2020 and Pineda 2021). These innovative reinterpretations of civil disobedience rely on expanding the concept of legitimate law-breaking in the light of different strategies and tactics of resistance utilized by new social movements.

Apart from these two new trends in rethinking the acts of disobedience in democracies, there is also growing scholarly interest in forms of disobedience that fall outside or beyond the pale of normally recognised styles of political contestation. These forms of ‘impure resistance’, or ‘dirty disobedience’ – rioting, vandalism, rudeness, disruption – are often overlooked and dismissed simply as plain disobedience, hooliganism, unjustifiable acts of violent resistance or as antisocial or criminal behaviour. But, as current research on normative aspects of riots (Pasternak 2018, Havercroft 2021), hacktivism (Edyvane and Kulenović, 2017) or direct action and disruption (Celikates 2016, Smith 2018, Hayward 2020) suggests, this characterisation might be overly simplistic. These impure forms of resistance – we refer to them as dirty disobedience – can have very profound political effects, and so a comprehensive study of resistance in democracies needs to take them seriously. By designating it as ‘dirty’, we seek to connect this discussion with the acknowledgement of moral messiness, conflict and complexity as investigated in the literature on ‘dirty hands’. That literature has traditionally concentrated on the ethics of political leadership, but the concept of dirty hands can be utilized to cast valuable light on the ethics of impure resistance (Tillyris 2023).

We invite paper proposals on all aspects of rethinking disobedience in democratic societies, including (but not limited to) the following possible topics:

• Rethinking the concept of civil disobedience, its justification, and forms
• Contrast between civil disobedience and uncivil disobedience, disruption, direct action, and dirty disobedience
• Normative aspects of different forms of democratic resistance
• Justification and analysis of different types of impure resistance or dirty disobedience
• Interpreting and evaluating disobedience as a practice of citizenship
• We also welcome interdisciplinary interventions seeking, for instance, to deploy empirical and/or historical studies of disobedience as an aid/corrective to conceptual and normative reflection.