Civil disobedience is a protest strategy, arguably invented and certainly popularized by Mahatma Gandhi during his campaigns first against ‘pass book’ laws in South Africa and then against the principle of British rule in India. The idea is to urge large numbers of protesters very publicly to break some specific law, or defy official authority in some clear-cut way. The dual aims are to draw attention to the evil against which the protest is made, and to attempt to force the government into taking extreme action in defending the object or policy protested at. The action thus forced upon the government may be so distasteful to it, or stretch its resources, as eventually to change its attitude. Even if the position of the authorities is not swayed, the dramatic demonstration of intensity of feeling among those who have protested is expected to increase support for the protesters in the population considerably, thus strengthening the campaign.
A vital element of civil disobedience is that campaigns must be non-violent, and indeed, should be as law-abiding as possible in every way, except with regard to the specific law or policy that is being protested at. The reasoning is strictly tactical, and does not follow from any implicit connection between civil disobedience and pacifism. Thus it was essential that the Indian protesters against British rule accept the consequences of their actions and passively submit to imprisonment, making clear the absence of any challenge to the state in general. Similarly, in the 1960s, white Americans campaigning against racial discrimination towards blacks in the southern states would break specific laws, as law-abidingly as possible. Thus they would, for example, attempt to ride in ‘Negro Only’ rail cars, but would not attempt to evade arrest or avoid punishment. It was particularly important that they did not allow the dominant southern white conservative establishment to hide behind the claim that the protesters were ‘un-American’, or were radicals whose views need not be taken into account. Later, when the Vietnam War was the object of protest, this strategy was crucial. It would have been too easy to brand those who genuinely opposed conscription for what they thought was an immoral war as traitors, and indeed as cowards, had they not attempted to act in due submission to the state apart from their direct actions against conscription.
(This does not mean that all, or even most, anti-war protests in this era were in fact law-abiding or peaceful. The movement might have been more successful had they been.)
As early as the mid-1950s similar tactics were tried in the UK against nuclear weapons policies, by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in its first manifestation. A particularly favoured tactic was to attempt to block traffic routes with a ‘sit-down’, thus disobeying the Traffic Acts, and similar methods have been used in countless student and worker demonstrations and strikes ever since. The most significant recent example in the UK of civil disobedience was the anti-‘poll tax’ campaign in 1989–91. This, akin to the ‘rent strike’ sometimes used in other contexts, involved the intentional non-payment of the poll tax. It is hard to assess the effectiveness of the campaign because the tax proved generally so unpopular that the government moved to abolish it for fear of electoral disaster. Certainly one of the problems influencing government thinking was that the tax came to be seen as uncollectable.
As far as political theory is concerned, it is entirely unclear whether the concept of peaceful disobedience, or of limited and specific civil disobedience, can be handled inside the general theory of legal and political obligation. As long as it is not generally recognized, as it cannot be, that the individual citizen has the right to pick and choose which laws to obey, or for which policies to pay taxes in support of, it is impossible to take account of motivation when dealing with an illegal act. Most would agree that it is not, in principle, very supportive of democratic government for individual policy choices of governments to be overturned because a minority of citizens are prepared to make the cost of enforcing them very high. In fact there are very few clear-cut cases of success attaching to any civil disobedience campaigns, in part because governments have learned not to react too harshly to such protests, and thus the mass waves of sympathy have not followed. It is important not to confuse civil disobedience with the general right, in a democracy, to protest peacefully and in a fully law-abiding way. Such protests may often have much the same impact as is expected of disobedience campaigns, especially in terms of policing them and in the chance of over-reaction by the authorities.
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