Resisting in Times of Law and Order

Abstract

Resisting in Times of Law and Order

The history of civil disobedience up to the 1960s, as historians and political theorists have shown, is the history of a fundamentally anti -colonial, anti -capitalist and antimilitarian political practice. This story was gradually erased from our political imagination when the term was redesigned by liberal American lawyers and scientists in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These liberals argued that civil disobedience was not a revolutionary, but an essentially reformist form of action, at a time, as social movements were accused of endangering US democracy in the face of increasing crime rates. According to the argument, civil disobedience would promote a criminal attitude towards a legally elected government. In the midst of conservative calls rightly and order and the election of Richard Nixon as president, the claim that civil disobedience was not a radical form of political action, a central rhetorical strategy of American liberal during the so -called War on Crime. In this article I trace the debates about civil disobedience and crime in this context. Finally, I go into how liberal conceptualizations of peaceful protest are still used to delegitimize and criminalize activism.