Civil Disobedience (CD) is the deliberate, open violation of a law held to be unjust and the willing acceptance of the prescribed punishment. CD can also be referred to as Nonviolent Direct Action when the action taken is considered to be illegal or challenges a law. Civil Resistance is also sometimes used interchangeably with CD by those that see the stated law as being in violation of a more fundamental “higher” law; therefore it is not a matter of “disobedience” against a law but of resistance to an injustice.

Those engaged in CD are not necessarily against the Rule of Law which guides and protects members of the society; rather, they are exercising their responsibility to challenge a specific law with the intention of correcting an injustice when other efforts of “legal” persuasion have failed to achieve the desired results. It follows that the resistance must be “civil” in the sense that it is not disrespectful of any person; as with all nonviolence, this technique can only properly be applied in a just cause.

Gandhi did not learn how to undertake civil disobedience from Thoreau, whose famous essay of 1849 entitled Civil Disobedience presented the concept within the context of American Transcendentalism. However, Gandhi found the terminology developed by Thoreau to be useful in describing nonviolent challenges to unjust laws.

A common example of civil disobedience is the risking of arrest through trespassing, blocking entrances or otherwise stopping the operation of “business as usual.” The School of Americas Watch has been using civil disobedience for over a decade when protestors “cross the line” onto the Ft. Benning US military base, demonstrating their opposition to the military’s instruction of Latin American soldiers in inhumane interrogation techniques.

See also: Law of Suffering.