Hrayr Manukyan
Utrecht University
When is it justified and legitimate to resort to civil disobedience? This question confronts citizens who have strong moral objections to their governments’ (in)action. Existing normative theories of civil disobedience in political philosophy are useful but were written for civil disobedience within functioning liberal-democratic states. Being disobedient in such a context means challenging one aspect of the policies and laws of such a society, while the general background constitution of the society accepts fundamental and democratic rights to participation. This is very different for semi-authoritarian regimes. The normative principles that should guide our political thinking about legitimate civil disobedience in such a context must be very different.
In this paper, I suggest a three-level theory of civil disobedience: 1) general theory, 2) regime/context-specific theory, and 3) country-level theory. This approach to civil disobedience is new because existing theories do not distinguish between the general and context-specific features of civil disobedience but work against an assumed background of liberal-democratic societies.
I present a general theory of civil disobedience by demarcating it from other types of protests and practices. Then I present liberal-democratic context-specific features of civil disobedience. Particularly, I argue that civil disobedience in the liberal-democratic context aims to change laws or policies or to (radically) reform the existing democratic political system/order. Eventually, I present semi-authoritarian context-specific features of civil disobedience. Particularly I argue (in light of the 2018 Armenian protests) that civil disobedience in semi-authoritarian regimes aims to change or has the potential to change the existing semi-authoritarian political system/order. In other words, in the semi-authoritarian framework, civil disobedience is a much more radical political practice than in the liberal-democratic context.
Chair: Damiano Ranzenigo
Time: September 8th, 14:00-14:30
Location: SR 1.003
SOPhiA 2026 