Why we can’t wait: an identity account of nonviolent civil disobedience

ENIn my dissertation, I develop and defend an identity account of nonviolent civil disobedience. I criticize two neo-Kantian theories of nonviolent civil disobedience and examine key contemporaneous cases of nonviolent civil disobedience that John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas evades. Stating with an examination of key cases of nonviolence in modernity, I discern an intellectual history of nonviolent civil disobedience through an analysis of the historical roots of Lithuania’s civil resistance movement against Soviet occupation during the 1990s and Martin Luther King’s civil rights campaigns during the 1960s that draws upon Kant to Herder and the German Romantics, and on to Jefferson and Thoreau, who influenced King’s views of nonviolent civil disobedience. I argue that civil disobedience presents an identity dilemma for citizens in a modern democracy who identify themselves as civic nationalists expected to follow the decisions of the majority but at the same time to follow one’s moral conscience and disobey the law or a policy, if it violates utopian democratic ideals. From a perspective of social theory, I argue that this modern conception of nonviolent civil disobedience evolved in 19th century America with its federal democracy that enables citizens who identify with Jefferson’s ideal of formal equality among all citizens that is still unrealized and Thoreau’s Romantic ideal of individual authenticity in which one does not have to obey laws that violate of one’s authentic moral conscience to express patriotic defiance.From a related intellectual history other forms of nonviolent democratic protests have evolved and spread worldwide. My analysis of these two cases underscores an important distinction between nonviolent civil resistance which usually aims to achieve a nonviolent transition away from an authoritarian regime to a democracy and nonviolent civil disobedience that often attempts to redress perceived injustices and may contribute to consolidating of a collective identity of civic nationalism among aggrieved, marginalized and alienated citizens whose identification with their democracy is vital to its political legitimacy. My analysis of cases of nonviolence yields a fuller understanding of nonviolence. There is conscientious nonviolence that often involves acts of self-suffering, such as hunger strikes, that seek to transform the moral conscience of one’s rival and a more commonly used strategic nonviolence that often imposes civic sanctions, such as economic boycotts against businesses, action-dilemmas and a public shaming of racists officials to change individual, business and state behavior. This description of nonviolent actions leads to an important theoretical clarification of the meaning of civil disobedience. For Rawls and Habermas civil disobedience is understood as a public, nonviolent and conscientious act contrary to the law usually done to bring changes to laws or policies. However, I conclude that not all expressions of conscientious and strategic nonviolence underlying civil disobedience entails breaking a law hence there is a weaker theoretical demand for a universally agreed upon moral justification for these forms of nonviolent civil disobedience than some political theorists assume.