The Right to Resistance and Dissent

In one line

Resistance, revolution, civil disobedience and dissent are four different responses to an unjust law, they differ in what is broken, whether force is used and whether punishment is accepted, and the five men MU names chose differently between them.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the right of resistance is the claim that a citizen is entitled, and in some accounts obliged, to refuse obedience to a government that has exceeded or betrayed the purpose for which authority was conferred; it ranges from dissent, which uses lawful means to oppose, through civil disobedience, which breaks the law openly and non-violently and accepts the penalty, to revolution, which seeks to replace the government by force.

The four things, kept apart

This is the whole value of the chapter, and the table at the end is what an answer should reproduce.

Dissent. Disagreement expressed by lawful means: speech, writing, assembly, petition, voting, litigation, a strike within the law. No law is broken. In India dissent is not merely tolerated; it is a fundamental right under article 19(1)(a) and 19(1)(b), and the courts have repeatedly said that the space for it is what distinguishes a democracy.

Conscientious refusal. A person refuses to do a particular thing because their conscience forbids it: a doctor who will not perform a procedure, a person who will not take an oath in a particular form, a soldier who will not fire on a crowd. It is personal rather than persuasive: the object is to keep one's own hands clean, not to change public policy.

Civil disobedience. A public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law, undertaken to change a law or policy, by a person who accepts the legal consequences. Each of those four features is doing work, and dropping any one of them turns it into something else. It is not secret, or it could not persuade. It is not violent, or it destroys the moral advantage it depends on. It is not self interested. And the penalty is accepted, which is what demonstrates that the disobedient still accepts the legal order as a whole while rejecting one part of it.

Revolution or rebellion. An attempt to overthrow the government or the constitutional order itself, usually by force. The target is not one law but the regime.

The single most useful distinction for an examination. Civil disobedience breaks a law and accepts the system. Revolution rejects the system. That is why civil disobedience can be argued for inside a constitutional order and revolution cannot.

Where the right of resistance comes from

Every theory of obligation in chapter 280 produces a different answer, and the differences are worth a paragraph.