Political Resistance in Dark Times
Thursday, September 3, 10:00 am to 11:30 am
2026 APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition — Boston, MA | Register here
In-Person | Roundtable
Participants:
- (Chair) Candice Delmas, Northeastern University
- (Presenter) William E. Scheuerman, Indiana University, Bloomington
- (Presenter) Erin Pineda, Smith College
- (Presenter) Alexander Livingston, Cornell University
- (Presenter) Cigdem Cidam, Union College
- (Presenter) David Lefkowitz, University of Richmond
- (Presenter) Kimberley Brownlee, University of British Columbia
Session Description:
Standard theories of civil disobedience typically presuppose what John Rawls famously called a “nearly just” (i.e., basically liberal) society. Defenses of violent resistance and/or revolution usually target authoritarian and/or profoundly unjust political contexts. Unfortunately, neither position speaks with sufficient clarity to the puzzles of political disobedience amid democratic backsliding, where boundaries between basically liberal and authoritarian political settings become badly blurred. The proposed roundtable brings together major theorists of civil disobedience, political protest, and resistance to discuss the specific challenges posed by ongoing democratic backsliding, in the US and elsewhere. What forms can and should political resistance to backsliding take? What moral, prudential, and principled political questions are raised by those who argue that resistance should entail not only familiar legal but also potentially illegal forms? And what types of political illegality (e.g., nonviolent vs. nonviolent), if any, are justifiable as well as appropriate? The traditional view among defenders of civil disobedience is that participants should usually be expected to demonstrate “respect for” (Martin Luther King, Jr.) or “fidelity” (Rawls) to law. But does that condition still hold in increasingly authoritarian settings? Which, if any, existing normative approaches (e.g., liberal, republican, radical democratic) best allows us to shed light on the difficult questions at hand? What can and should normative attempts to answer these questions borrow from empirical research? What, in turn, might empirical researchers take from their normative colleagues? The roundtable aims to address, in sum, a series of urgent political and intellectual questions and should be of interest to many political scientists.
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