Forms of Civil Disobedience
Throughout history, civil disobedience has brought about concrete changes in regime policies and sometimes has even collapsed regimes. The term "civil disobedience" was first articulated by Henry David Thoreau in an eponymous 1848 essay where he defined it as "a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies."
Other People Are Reading
-
Boycotting
-
Boycotting involves a person or group of people abstaining from buying, using, or dealing in an effort to call attention to a specific cause or concern. Boycotting is one of the most common forms of civil disobedience. In 1980, the U.S. Olympic team boycotted the Summer Games in Moscow. Four years later, the Soviet Olympic team boycotted the Summer Games in Los Angeles. Each country was protesting against the other country's policies.
Conscientious Objection
-
Conscientious objection is a form of civil disobedience that involves a person willingly refusing to follow a law out of moral opposition to what the law represents or enacts. The most common example is the pacifist who refuses to be conscripted into the military. A similar form of civil disobedience may be termed "rule departures," in which a person with official duties refuses to engage in those duties as a form of protest.
-
Radical Protest
-
Radical protest is a form of protest taken to extreme measures. It may involve interrupting a formal event, or intimidating a public official with the purpose of bringing attention to a cause. In other words, it is a protest that has not been legally sanctified.
Sit-In
-
A sit-in involves a person or group of people occupying a public place and refusing to leave. Usually a sit-in is enacted in order to protest a specific policy or set of policies. It often has the effect of disrupting either traffic or daily business operations. A notable example of a sit-in occurred in 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina. During this sit-in, a group of four black college students sat down at a segregated lunch counter and refused to leave until the store closed.
-
References
- Photo Credit Comstock Images/Comstock/Getty Images
