A Radical Reframing of Civil Disobedience: “Illegal” Migration and Whistleblowing

According to a widely accepted understanding of civil disobedience, it is enacted only by citizens and only in order to address an unjust law or policy of the government, but not to contest state institutions as such. However, this framework overlooks two key features of civil disobedience: that it has been practiced by people not fully included into the category of citizen and that they challenged the authority of institutions by breaching specific laws or policies. In this chapter, we make visible the political significance of these two aspects of civil disobedience by zooming in on two cases: unauthorized migration and illegal whistleblowing. These contemporary cases of contestation show that with increased globalization and digitalization, the liberal conception of civil disobedience as explained by John Rawls is problematic.