Civil disobedience is, as we have seen, strongly associated with non-violence in both its conceptual framework and its activist practice. This is axiomatic where civil disobedience is enacted as a refusal to cooperate, where resistant agency lies in non-compliance: most obviously where the disobedient withholds a payment, or their acquiescence in a specified, compulsory action or order. Yet where non-compliance takes place in a public space (such as, for instance, as a sit-in, or other type of occupation), it becomes embodied, and draws the enactment of civil disobedience into a relational interdependence with a public authority, who must solve two interrelated problems. These are the logistical problem of the management of the action, so that the public space is cleared for the resumption of activities designated as legitimate, and the problem presented by the threat to the legitimacy of public authority by the open refusal of the activists to uphold the social contract, and maintain norms of acceptable public conduct. These problems are interrelated for the state agent, because an ill-judged response to the first problem may exacerbate the second, through the production of backfire, as we have already discussed. In this sense, the construction of the opposition between the ‘non-violent’ activists and the ‘violent’ agents of law enforcement can be said to be constitutive of the problem of civil disobedience.

However, if disobedient actions of physical intervention (claiming of space) and actions of non-cooperation (refusal to withdraw from space) are intimately linked through temporal sequencing, actions of intervention characteristically raise different problems from those of non-cooperation. This is especially the case where the former are proactive actions designed to stop an opponent from accomplishing something which is formally authorized in law but considered politically or morally illegitimate by the activist or group. Here, disobedient actions may typically involve the use of physical constraint on an adversary, and/or the destruction of property. Indeed, it is common that groups claiming to commit acts of civil disobedience undertake actions where the destruction of a specific item is the central goal of the action, such as when 3500 members of the Catholic anti-war movement burnt their draft cards, or covered conscription offices in blood, in opposition to the US invasion of Vietnam.