Civil disobedience: Challenges and implications

Civil disobedience is a communicative manifestation of resistance against oppression, a nonviolent, conscientious, political act contrary to law which is carried out publicly to usually bring about a change in the laws of or policies of government. Alongside its nonviolent and public character, it is also distinguished from other types of resistance since it does not target the legal system as a whole. However, considering the different and controversial cases of civil disobedience from the past to the present, it is not easy to make a general and normative definition of civil disobedience. The first chapter of our dissertation thereby focuses on the contextual challenges arising from the linguistic analysis and characteristics of civil disobedience as well as its aspects related to the concepts, namely, legal protest, conscientious objection/refusal, ordinary crimes, revolution, and terrorism, to understand the meaning of it. Besides, to reveal the intellectual origins behind these discussions, the first chapter deals with the struggles of Socrates, Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Civil disobedience, nourishing by the tension between legality and legitimacy is also a difficult topic to study for the legal theory. The key challenge is that civil disobedience involves a lawbreaking. Notwithstanding, it claims to derive its power from the law. Such an approach to civil disobedience, which calls into question the nature of the law, leads us to address the legal challenges: the issues of justification and punishment of civil disobedience. The second chapter of our dissertation aims to explore possible foundations for justification of civil disobedience within different theories. Accordingly, civil disobedience is discussed within the framework of natural law theory with its both theocratic and secular understandings; social contract theories of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant; utilitarianism; and contemporary approaches of John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Additionally, the second chapter analyzes the discussions on whether acts of civil disobedience should be punished or not, or whether they deserve a different treatment. In case the view for the differential treatment is adopted, the second chapter also suggests the possible appropriate legal institutions (the use of rights, necessity, mistaken wrongdoing, and the grounds for discretionary mitigation) in the scope of both Turkish law and comparative law, which can be used for setting aside or reducing the criminal liability of civil disobedience. Consequently, a conclusion chapter is included in which the implications on the role and meaning of civil disobedience as well as the whatness of the law, distilled from all chapters, are presented. This dissertation aims to bring a sophisticated impulse for both academics and practitioners, restructuring the theory of civil disobedience.