Conceptual approaches to civil disobedience in law, political theory, and philosophy typically depend on the determination of a stable and universal set of categories against which collective action can be evaluated; in this way, an action which meets the requirements of a predetermined number of categories can be said to be an act of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is thus constructed normatively, as an exclusive regime of classification, enabling it to be understood as a particular form of social and political action; this correspondingly enables civil disobedients to be recognized in specific practical ways (such as, for example, by the criminal courts), and to place their action within a historical canon of similar actions. In this chapter, we discuss the implications of approaching civil disobedience in this way, tracing its development as a form of action, and considering the relationship between normative and performative understandings of what civil disobedience is. Whilst normative approaches seek abstract, stable, and universal understandings of civil disobedience, a performative approach pays attention to the ways actors develop and legitimize their own action, to the claims they make about it, and to the interactions that shape and surround it. In this sense, civil disobedience is an unfixed and malleable form of action, whose historical and theoretical referents are available to actors for re-signification within the context of their own action.

In order to make this argument, we start by discussing the major theoretical approaches to civil disobedience, focusing on the arguments of John Rawls and Hannah Arendt in particular, before placing their arising conceptual understandings and distinctions in the context of key moments in the genealogy of civil disobedience as an activist practice, discussing the importance and contributions of Quakerism, Thoreau, Gandhi, and the US civil rights movement.

Theorizing Civil Disobedience

In one of the earliest formulations of civil disobedience in political theory, Bedau (1961, p. 661) defines an act of civil disobedience to be committed if, and only if, a given person