Overview – Dossier: Civil disobedience and politically motivated illegalities: cases and experiences from the global south. (Mediações, vol. 31, n.3 – 2026/3)
Organizers: Bruno Camilloto (UFOP) and Guilherme Cardoso de Moraes (USP).
The protests against the Vietnam War and the civil rights mobilization in the United States can be mentioned as some of the political events that pushed the idea of civil disobedience to the forefront of the concerns of some of the most prominent political theorists, moral philosophers, and jurists during the 1960s and 1970s. Hannah Arendt (2010), Ronald Dworkin (2010), Jürgen Habermas (2015, 2020), and John Rawls (2008) were some of the voices responsible for delineating the conceptual contours that have guided and continue to guide the current theoretical understanding, as well as offering a defense of the practice of civil disobedience as a type of politically motivated illegality that is compatible with the democratic grammar of contestation and resistance to various forms of injustice and oppression. Following William E. Scheuerman (2021, p. 1), we might ask: “What remains to be said about something that fascinated some of the most influential political thinkers of the past century?”
Civil disobedience is a particular form of politically motivated illegality. In the most widely accepted account, civil disobedience is a public, nonviolent, and conscientious violation of the law, carried out with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies (RAWLS, 2008, p. 453). It is also a collective action, conducted in a group or on behalf of a social group (ARENDT, 2010, p. 54-5). In the theoretical debate, practically all aspects of this definition have proven controversial and have been the subject of contention by different authors and traditions of thought. Ideas such as (non)violence and (in)civility are at the center of contemporary disputes, which seek to debate the role these ideas should play in the broader notion of civil disobedience and how we should interpret them (CELIKATES, 2016; DELMAS, 2018).
Beyond the disputes about the best definition of civil disobedience, there are other repertoires of illegal political action that can be understood within the grammar of democratic struggle and resistance. In this case, “conscientious objection” is perhaps the most widely theorized example of an individual violation of the law, which may or may not be public and politically motivated (RAWLS, 2008, p. 458; ARENDT, 2010, p. 55). However, in recent years, other politically motivated illegalities have been receiving the attention of social scientists and political theorists, such as “hacktivism,” a term used to refer to hackers who, for political purposes, invade protected networks and computer systems, or “ecosabotage,” which specifically refers to the sometimes illegal practices of environmental groups like Just Stop Oil and Greenpeace (SCHEUERMAN, p. 2021, p.7).
Common to the repertoires of illegal political action that integrate the democratic grammar of struggle and contestation is that they must be situated within constitutional limits; that is, their extent or ambition should not be such as to threaten the constitutional order or propose a democratic rupture. In other words, in a liberal and democratic politics, politically motivated illegalities reinforce the commitment of free and equal citizens in combating unjust laws. It is not a rupture with the legal democratic order but rather a strong tensioning of the social and legal order aimed at promoting justice, so that we might understand it as illegal but normatively legitimate (SCHEUERMAN, 2018, p. 35).
Although Arendt (2010, p. 75) recognized that civil disobedience had been incorporated into the repertoire of democratic struggles worldwide, she referred to the phenomenon as something prominently Anglo-American “in origin and substance” and difficult to “translate” to other societies. In the 1980s, Habermas (2015) already associated the idea of “civil disobedience” with what he called “the new protest scene,” basing his reflection on cases that occurred in Germany during the previous decade.
If the political events of the 1960s and 1970s were fundamental in drawing the attention of political theory of the time to civil disobedience, the current street practices and political trends seem once again to justify a revival of this idea. After decades of “forgetfulness,” political theory is once again turning to the idea of civil disobedience as a way of interpreting some political manifestations that, although diverse in their demands, share the common feature of the illegality of their acts. Authors like Candice Delmas (2018) and William E. Scheuerman (2018) have found in the philosophical debate on civil disobedience an important tool for understanding phenomena such as the mobilizations initiated in the United States under the name of Black Lives Matter (DELMAS, 2018), as well as the growing and blatant dissatisfaction of citizens with the imperfect performance of democratic regimes in some of the most standardized democracies in the world (SCHEUERMAN, 2018).
The protests against racism and police violence led by the Black Lives Matter group; the leaks of data and confidential information promoted by hackers and activists like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden against US espionage practices; the protests by environmental and climate activists from Just Stop Oil, who drew attention to their cause by gluing their own hands to artworks or throwing tomato soup on paintings in major galleries and museums in Europe, and the graffitiing of monuments in cities such as the statue of Winston Churchill in 2020, are just a few recent examples of politically motivated illegalities occurring in the global North that have been receiving media attention, and the attention of social scientists and philosophers around the world (SCHEUERMAN, 2021). These recent cases gradually join the already classic examples of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and Henry David Thoreau as figures recurrently remembered in the literature as symbols of civil disobedience in the past century (LIVINGSTON, 2020; SCHEUERMAN, 2018).
If Arendt’s (2010, p.75) previously presented statement can be considered controversial even in its time, it is a consensus today that civil disobedience and other politically motivated illegalities compose a repertoire of struggles and contestations that also find “substance” and expression in the political practices of the global South.
In a brief recap, we can mention the use of the black bloc tactic, marked by its virulent actions, by breaking bank and luxury store windows, graffiti, and confrontations with the military police that, after emerging during the so-called “June Journeys of 2013,” especially in São Paulo, are now present in various protests across Brazil (SOLANO; MANSO; NOVAES, 2014). Or the recent wave of “iconoclast” demonstrations that gained worldwide attention by attacking monuments that honored controversial figures, especially those with a slave-owning, colonizing past and connections to the human trafficking. On July 24, 2021, the group Peripheral Revolution claimed responsibility for setting fire to the statue of the bandeirante Borba Gato during a protest in São Paulo. In the same year, in Colombia, at least three acts used similar strategies and justifications. On April 28, a group of indigenous Misak protesters tore down the statue of colonizer Sebastián de Belalcázar in Cali. Later, on May 7, the same group acted again, this time targeting the monument honoring Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada in Bogotá. On June 28, Colombian protesters tore down a statue of explorer Christopher Columbus in Barranquilla.
If the political practices of the past or present, especially in the United States and Europe, were fundamental in drawing the attention of social sciences to the idea of civil disobedience, the current political trends in the global South can also justify the need to revisit this and other politically motivated illegalities. Gathering and inspiring these works and reflections in social sciences and related fields is what this Dossier proposal seeks to do. This is also a way of updating possible answers to William E. Scheuerman’s (2021, p.1) question with which we opened this proposal.
