Decency, the Right to Disobey, and Non-domination

Abstract

This chapter builds upon the idea sketched in the introduction of civil disobedience as a global practice, grounded in commitments to international decency standards. It first lays out the idea of decency as an international standard of accountability for peoples who are reasonable as well as rational. As an international standard, decency does not apply only to the familiar case of domestic disobedience in liberal-democratic states. Neither does it insist upon liberal-democratic premises as paradigmatic of global justice. Instead, it embraces alternative traditional-hierarchical perspectives of justice. The chapter, then, develops this idea as the basis for justifiable disobedient action in the global arena, placing both liberal-democratic and traditional-hierarchical peoples under binding obligations of uptake and reconsideration. This may entail uptake and reconsideration for domestic law and policy binding for either category of people, or uptake and reconsideration for international law and policy binding for all reasonable peoples. The chapter further links the idea of decency to a broad interpretation of non-domination as effective access to legal redress, domestically and internationally, through the protection of dissent and contestation.