(Un)civil Disobedience

The existing categories of liberal political theory are unsuited to a sympathetic, fine-grained analysis of contemporary forms of political protest and disobedience. The five papers in this special issue aim to deepen our understanding of the various forms of principled resistance, developing new justifications and conceptual categories and proposing suitable norms of engagement. The papers examine contentious issues such as hacktivism, bossnapping, ‘illegal’ migration, direct action and coercive protest. In this essay, I offer an overview of the arguments in each paper, situating them in relation to the ‘classical’ civil disobedience debate and the ‘new’ civil disobedience debate in political theory.