Disobedience as an Expression of Global Solidarity and Redefining Disobedience in a Global Perspective

Abstract

The three preceding cases of civil disobedience in a global perspective are expressions of global solidarity. Besides the addition of a human right to be a political participant, wherever you are, to the minimalist list of human rights in Law of Peoples, such disobedience does not otherwise point to any particular changes or reforms of law and policy. Its function is highlighting the piecewise just and unfair terms of global cooperation and motivating reconsideration by decent peoples that could lead to different kinds of policy outcomes based on the resulting processes of global public communication and deliberation. To this extent, the global civil disobedience practice of diverse cosmopolitan citizens express global solidarity with the undocumented and the global poor. Likewise, executives and disclosers express solidarity with decent peoples whom they see as facing different kinds of existential threats qua decent peoples. They do so in that disobedient cosmopolitan citizens adopt a perspective of concern for the most vulnerable in the system of merely piecewise just or unfair global cooperation. Indeed, this perspective of concern expresses a global solidarity relation. I then build on the discussion of diverse global civil disobedience practices as expressing global solidarity relations by offering an analytical redefinition of civil disobedience in a global perspective. This redefinition synthesizes the various claims of the preceding chapters regarding my extension of Rawls’ state-centered definition and justification of civil disobedience in Theory to the Law of Peoples. It also identifies global solidarity as the principal aim of such an extension of justifiable civil disobedience to the global arena.