Civil disobedience
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Illustration:Liberty Leading the People (1831, detail) by Eugène Delacroix.
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Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal of a citizen to obey certain laws, demands, orders or commands of a government. By some definitions, civil disobedience has to be nonviolent to be called "civil". Hence, civil disobedience is sometimes equated with peaceful protests or nonviolent resistance.
Henry David Thoreau popularized the term in the US with his essay Civil Disobedience, although the concept itself has been practiced longer before. It has inspired leaders such as Susan B. Anthony of the U.S. women's suffrage movement in the late 1800s, Saad Zaghloul in the 1910s culminating in Egyptian Revolution of 1919 against British Occupation, and Mahatma Gandhi in 1920s India in their protests for Indian independence against the British Raj. Martin Luther King Jr.'s and James Bevel's peaceful protests during the civil rights movement in the 1960s United States contained important aspects of civil disobedience. Although civil disobedience is considered to be an expression of contempt for law, King regarded civil disobedience to be a display and practice of reverence for law: "Any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for the law."
See also
Ideas
- Civil resistance
- Conscientious objection
- Direct action
- Draft resistance
- Examples of civil disobedience
- Insubordination
- Nonconformism
- Nonviolence
- Nonviolent resistance
- Tax resistance
- Tree sitting
- Hunt sabotage
Groups
- Committee of 100 (United Kingdom)
- Abalone Alliance and Clamshell Alliance, anti-nuclear power groups
- Righteous Among the Nations
- Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, French bread town
- The White Rose
- Trident Ploughshares, anti-nuclear weapons group
- Defiance Campaign, anti-apartheid campaign in South Africa.
People
- Mohandas Gandhi
- Dr Martin Luther King, Jr
- John Lennon
- Rosa Parks, "mother of the civil rights movement"
- James Bevel, the Strategist of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement
- Dalai Lama
- Henry David Thoreau
- Lech Wałęsa
- Dorothy Day co-founder of Catholic Worker Movement
- Philip Berrigan former Josephite priest and nonviolent activist
- Daniel Berrigan Jesuit priest and nonviolent activist
- Sousveillance, passive campaign against surveillance
- Václav Havel
- Anna Hazare, 2011 Civil Disobedience in India for Jan Lokpal Bill (Citizen's ombudsman Bill)
