Civil disobedience

Civil disobedience is a deliberate, public breach of law intended to oppose injustice while rejecting the law or legal order only in the specific instance, not as a whole.

Nonviolent resistance: Political action that seeks change without using physical violence. Civil disobedience is one way nonviolent resistance confronts unjust authority.
Rule of law: The principle that public power is constrained by publicly known laws applied through established procedures. Civil disobedience challenges particular laws while often appealing to the legal order's own standards.
Henry David Thoreau: American writer whose 1849 essay argued that conscience can require refusing support for unjust government. His essay helped establish the modern language of conscientious lawbreaking.
Salt March: A 1930 campaign in which Gandhi and followers marched to the sea and openly made salt in defiance of British law. It turned a colonial monopoly into a visible, mass act of deliberate lawbreaking.
Revolution: A fundamental transformation of a political order, often involving the replacement of its institutions or governing authority. Civil disobedience seeks to correct injustice without necessarily replacing the legal order.
Publicity: The quality of being open and visible to the public. Openly accepting responsibility distinguishes civil disobedience from evasion or covert sabotage.
Political obligation: The moral question of whether and why people ought to obey the laws of a political community. Civil disobedience tests whether legal authority creates an overriding duty to obey.
Mahatma Gandhi: Indian anti-colonial leader who developed mass campaigns of nonviolent resistance against British rule. His satyagraha campaigns made disciplined, public lawbreaking a method of collective struggle.
Montgomery bus boycott: A 1955–1956 protest campaign against racial segregation on public buses in Montgomery, Alabama. Its coordinated refusal of segregated transit laws helped bring civil rights resistance to national attention.
Conscientious refusal: Refusal to perform a specific act because it violates a person's moral or religious convictions. Unlike political civil disobedience, conscientious refusal can be private and need not seek public reform.

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