CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE
IN THE INFORMATION AGE

by Andrew Calabrese

This essay is about how citizens seek to, and often succeed in, exercising their power to articulate and invoke social norms through forms of direct political action that test the legal boundaries of protected expression. It focuses on the complex distinctions among dissent, disobedience, and violence to challenge the limits of both the law and the legally protected actions of corporations. Communitarians have correctly argued that citizenship is not just about rights, but about obligations. Moreover, democratic citizenship is about exercising rights in meaningful ways. The good citizen cannot be defined simply as one who has rights, but rather as one who uses rights effectively, including the creative and insightful use of rights of expression in dissent and protest, when necessary. Such a concept of citizenship also implies, indeed necessitates, not only the use of law as a basis of self-governance, but also the effective use of informal social norms. That is not to say we can or should celebrate norms as an unproblematic form of social regulation. But if we agree with the numerous communitarians who argue that we cannot, and should not attempt to, resolve all of our needs through liberal rights talk, we cannot afford to abandon talk of norms as a meaningful alternative. In essence, their argument says that we cannot afford to reject or underestimate the informal power of norms as means of social regulation. Of course, we need not embrace all of the central tenets of communitarian thought in order to recognize how norms constitute the fabric of civil society in ways that both complement legal rights, and compensate for their shortcomings, as means of regulating society. For better and for worse, norms of civility fit such a description.

Civility has been shown to be a contestable term, and there are times when norms of civility can have the effect of producing silence, even submissiveness, in the face of injustice. Such conditions may become the basis for asking whether civility should necessarily and at all costs be held above other, possibly more compelling, virtues. More importantly, we may recognize that there can be competing norms of civility, and we may find ourselves asking "Whose civility?" Such a question implicitly recognizes the potential of civility to be non-neutral. Whether by design or default, at times a call for civility can cloak injustice and unfairness in compelling rhetoric of the general interest. Moreover, since what is viewed as civil conduct generally falls under the protective umbrella of what is legal, those who find they are harmed by injustice that is masked by civility are at a disadvantage. One possible response is that they may choose to act in ways that generally are viewed as uncivil, although legal. When treated unfairly, one might yell and scream to bring attention to a problem, hopefully resulting in rectifying the problem. Yelling and screaming may offend some, but unless it amounts to "fighting words," it probably will be treated as protected speech. Rights of free expression and association are not necessarily limited by a code of civility. Moreover, a response to injustice may actually step outside the boundaries of what is legal, and yet the act may still be conducted in a manner that is considered civil. How can this be? How is it possible to break the law and be civil? And why might one choose to do so? Among the possible reasons is to convey a message. For example, to convey one's objection to an unjust law by breaking the law - while doing it in what is accepted as a civil manner - is to commit an act of civil disobedience. It is also an act of political communication. The rights of dissent and nonviolent civil disobedience are a major focus of this essay.

When citizens exercise rights of free speech and association to express their dissent towards an injustice, they are simply seeking to fulfill and enjoy some of the greatest promises that a constitutional democracy can offer. And one of the most effective strategies of expressing dissent is through the politics of shame. To shine light on injustice sometimes means to expose and embarrass those who perpetuate it. And that can be a dangerous thing, not only for those who are shamed, but also for those who would use the means of publicity in such a manner. For better and for worse, the politics of shame are central to nonviolent civil disobedience, as the following discussion illustrates. More generally, the historical and contemporary manifestations of civil disobedience are presented below as vital means of political expression, with particular emphasis given to the strategic and moral value of nonviolence.

Civil disobedience as political communication
A helpful starting place in considering the legacy of civil disobedience is with an explanation of the legal concept of "expressive conduct," a concept that highlights the blurred boundary that sometimes exists between "speech" and "action." Expressive conduct is action that is recognized for its symbolic significance. Some, although not all, expressive conduct can be in violation of the law. Indeed, some symbolic actions are instances of brutal violence, including terrorism. In such cases, the meaning behind the "speech" component of the act can be overshadowed by the impact of the violence itself. In other cases of expressive conduct, such as flag-burning in the United States, harm to others has been officially judged to be minimal or nonexistent, and the speech element stands in the foreground where it is constitutionally protected. As exemplified in the case of flag-burning, the limits of expressive conduct are rigorously tested by those forms of expression known as civil disobedience.

The tradition of civil disobedience has a strong grounding in constitutional democracies. It has been justified as a form of expression - that is, as symbolic action - and not been treated simply as criminal conduct. That is not to say that those who practice civil disobedience suffer no consequences, even in societies in which the government's use of force is closely monitored, tightly controlled, and democratically accountable (in relative terms). Jail sentences are not glorious experiences, even when they are for worthy causes. But what the civil disobedient depends on is that his or her actions will generate meaning beyond the mere fact of breaking a law and being punished for it, and instead that these actions will form the basis of a public discussion about a matter of justice. And it is for this reason - because civil disobedience is an act of public communication - that those who perform such actions are accorded a different, sometimes elevated, status in the criminal justice system.

In granting special status to those who deliberately and possibly break a law in order to provoke a discussion about questions of just law and just applications of the law, we have recognized civil disobedience as a form of expression. And while expression is intrinsic to an act of civil disobedience, such acts are also judged as conduct, such as trespassing or other relatively minor infractions. In recognizing the primacy of the expressive context of the action, rather than the criminal violation, we accept not only that the speech-conduct dichotomy is sometimes not as clear as is supposed, but also that the scale we use to judge such speech-actions can be tipped in favor or recognizing the speech element. The inseparability of the "speech" and "conduct" elements of civil disobedience does not remove the criminal liability from an act, for example, a sit-in that involves the minor crime of trespass. But as Bruce Ledewitz points out, because speech and conduct are so intertwined in an act of civil disobedience, to issue an injunction against the act would imply imposing a prior restraint on free speech. Ledewitz explains from within the framework of American jurisprudence that punishing a civil disobedient for a minor criminal offense after the fact is within the spirit of the First Amendment, while enjoining a would-be civil disobedient with the threat of a severe penalty if he or she chooses to act is a betrayal of that spirit.

Civil disobedience is an honored tradition in Western history, tracing back at least as far as the death of Socrates after his trial and conviction on trumped-up charges, and gaining greater attention through writings and examples set by Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. Barbara Katz characterizes civil disobedience as a vital form of public communication, and the principal aim of civil disobedients "is to communicate to others their concern over some social evil," and for this reason they desire publicity, particularly in the form of press coverage, of their actions. As I argue below, civil disobedience is first and foremost an effective expression of the politics of shame. As new technologies are introduced into the range of possible means of political speech and action, radical political actors are testing the limits of their imaginations by inventing ways to use these technologies to further the causes they advocate. But the very novelty of the forms of speech and action that are possible through the uses of new media - particularly Internet-based - may make it difficult to easily see how the new methods represent continuity (or discontinuity) with the old traditions of civil disobedience. For this reason, an understanding of the tradition is essential.

In the United States, the legacy of civil disobedience is linked for many to the memory of Henry David Thoreau, the essayist who contributed significantly to making virtues of individualism and nonconformity. Thoreau is perhaps best known for his personal experiment in "essential living" at a meager subsistence level for two years on the edge of Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, which he chronicled in the essay Walden or, Life in the Woods. Among the most noteworthy episodes in Thoreau's life was when he spent one night in jail in 1846 for refusing to pay the Massachusetts poll tax, as a way of protesting the U.S. war against Mexico (1846-1848). When Thoreau was visited in jail by his friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, he reportedly was asked "What are you doing in there?" to which he replied, "What are you doing out there?" He was released from jail when his friends paid the tax without his consent. Two years later, Thoreau gave a lecture that was subsequently published as the essay "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience." In that essay, Thoreau expressed disgust toward the practice of citizens who, while privately professing to be opposed to injustice caused by a government, do nothing to publicly register their dissent to their government and their fellow citizens, and in so doing they tacitly support it: "Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support, are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform."

Thoreau's principled position has been a worldwide inspiration to practitioners of civil disobedience ever since, and his influence is evident in the writings and practices of Leo Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., among many others. But Thoreau was not the first to willingly accept punishment as an expression of dissent. Socrates was executed, according to Athenian law, following a trial and condemnation for corrupting the youth of Athens and for blaspheming the gods. Although his death is seen by many as one of the darkest moments in the history of declining Athens, it is seen by others as exemplary because Socrates courageously displayed his fidelity to the rule of law by dutifully accepting his punishment. Socrates refused to escape into exile, despite being offered the opportunity to do so, and even though escape would have been preferable in the eyes of the state, since it would have spared the state from having to follow through on the embarrassing execution of a beloved public figure. As Socrates acknowledged to the court, his death would be seen as a condemnation not of the principle of Athenian law, but of the corruption of those who pervert the law:

I tell you, my executioners, that as soon as I am dead, vengeance shall fall upon you with a punishment far more painful than your killing of me. You have brought about my death in the belief that through it you will be delivered from submitting your conduct to criticism; but I say that the result will be just the opposite.

In making sense of the death of Socrates, we find a principle that remains central to the theory and practice of civil disobedience in democratic societies, and that is the principle of publicity. By accepting his punishment, and by refusing to escape or to beg for mercy, he brought public shame upon his accusers and his executioners.

Although the death of Socrates offers inspiration because of the courage and dignity with which he accepted it, it does not exemplify the contemporary concept of civil disobedience. The example of Socrates is not that of someone who was prosecuted after an open protest of injustice, aimed at provoking a public discussion about it. Rather than one particular action by Socrates, it was his continual presence as a gadfly who undermined state authority that led to his persecution. In the twentieth century, the person whose example comes closest to defining the ideals of modern civil disobedience is Mohandas K. Gandhi, who drew inspiration from The Bhagavad-Gita, Jesus Christ, and Thoreau. The particular, albeit massive, injustice that Gandhi is best known for having opposed was the British colonial domination of India. Through speeches, writings, and by example, Gandhi articulated a set of principles and practices that reflect what seems to be an unimpeachable philosophy of nonviolent civil disobedience, aimed at ending British rule in India. Although Gandhi's role was not the single determinant in bringing an end to British rule, few would argue that his moral and spiritual leadership were not fundamental. The importance of the life of Gandhi was recognized by a younger generation, particularly outside of India, by way of the 1982 film Gandhi, directed by Richard Attenborough, and featuring the actor Ben Kingsley in the title role. What is perhaps the most disturbing scene in the film is when about 2500 Indian volunteers followed the example set by Gandhi, who had previously defied the British monopoly on the manufacture and sale of salt by marching to the sea and illegally and openly making salt from sea water. According to the Salt Tax Act of 1882, no Indian was permitted to produce salt without British permission. Following Gandhi's example, the volunteers marched to the Dharasna Salt Works on May 21, 1930 and were met and brutally beaten with batons and rifle butts by four hundred police, resulting in the injury and hospitalization of more than three hundred persons, and the deaths of two, but they held to the principle of nonviolence and did not fight back. This famous incident in the "Salt Satyagraha" was a decisive moment in discrediting British rule in India in the eyes of the world.

The term satyagraha is derived from Sanskrit, and it means pursuit of truth, but it also translates as "truth-force" or "the force that is generated through adherence to truth." It is the term Gandhi used to refer to the particular form of nonviolent action he advocated, which aimed not only toward civil disobedience, but also toward the spiritual enlightenment of both oppressor and oppressed. To be sure, one motivation underlying these actions was to force a choice upon the oppressor: either end an unjust situation or attempt to suppress civil disobedience through the use of violence. But in either case, the protest would be sustained by nonviolence on the part of the satyagrahis (the participants in the action), and the legitimacy of an unjust authority would be destroyed. Every province of India witnessed some form of salt satyagraha during this period, the cumulative effect of which was to lower the average annual consumption of salt, although that was not the primary goal. According to Judith Brown's account, the goal was to publicly shame the raj:

More important from the satyagrahis' point of view was the publicity value of the raids and the police methods their suppression elicited. The raids were not intended to get salt but to force the government into violent retaliation, even to the extent of firing on unarmed crowds, to show not just to local sightseers but to a world-wide public 'the fangs and the claws of the Government in all its ugliness.'

The seemingly straightforward doctrine of civil disobedience comes to appear even more complex when we recognize that the concepts of "nonviolence" and "civil disobedience" are not necessarily wedded, since it is possible for one to adhere to a nonviolent creed without engaging in civil disobedience. A classic example is the "conscientious refusal" to go to war. In distinguishing conscientious refusal from civil disobedience, John Rawls notes that the former is not a form of public address. It is commonly held that one who engages in conscientious refusal or evasion is not appealing to "the convictions of the community," but rather s/he is acting out of individual conscience. An act of conscientious refusal may be grounded on political principles, but it need not necessarily be so. Whereas civil disobedience appeals to "a commonly shared conception of justice," conscientious refusal may be based on "religious or other principles at variance with the constitutional order." It is sometimes mistakenly thought that pacifism - including the refusal to participate in all wars - is an act of civil disobedience. But there is a difference between the principled avoidance of violence at any cost, which can even result in complicity towards injustice and oppression, and active and nonviolent civil disobedience. Pacifism and nonviolence are not the same concept, and indeed an entire legal apparatus exists to enforce this distinction, to which John Rawls alludes:

In justifying civil disobedience one does not appeal to principles of personal morality or to religious doctrines, though these may coincide with and support one's claims; and it goes without saying that civil disobedience cannot be grounded solely on group or self-interest. Instead one invokes the commonly shared conception of justice that underlies the political order.

The pacifist can be motivated by political principles - for instance, against social injustice - but s/he may not wish to become engaged in the political process. By definition, the nonviolent civil disobedient self-consciously aims to enter the fray of political discourse, for instance, by attempting to publicly shame supporters of an unjust law.

Although the term "passive resistance" is often associated with the legacy of Gandhi, there is nothing passive about his doctrine of nonviolence. Nonviolence is not inaction, but rather it is "action that is nonviolent." One of the critically important methods of nonviolent action is noncooperation, which Mark Shepard defines as "refusing to cooperate with the opponent, refusing to submit to the injustice being fought. It took such forms as strikes, economic boycotts, and tax refusals." As the discussion below of "conscientious refusal" illustrates, there is a significant difference between privately refusing to accede to an authority's demand that we commit acts we consider immoral, and the choice to vigorously assert one's choice in an open and public manner as a form of nonviolent civil disobedience and political communication. To be sure, although noncooperation is a form of "action," we may think of it differently from how we would apply the term action to open resistance or rebellion.

In the United States, this strategy of publicly shaming a government that perpetuates, or fails to discourage, injustice was central to the political theory and practice of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the Baptist minister and spiritual and symbolic leader in the American civil rights movement. King's political involvement began with the 1955 arrest of Rosa Parks, a forty-three year old seamstress who refused to sit in the designated blacks-only section of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The incident led to the famous bus boycott by blacks in Montgomery, resulting in the indictment of one hundred black leaders, many of whom were jailed, and in violence against blacks by white segregationists, including the bombing of Rev. King's home. Speaking at a mass meeting during the boycott, and reflecting the views of Gandhi, whom he greatly admired, King preached the doctrine of love and nonviolence. Although King was not the sole force in defining the meaning of "nonviolence" or "civil disobedience" for the civil rights movement, his moral leadership was great.

In the Spring of 1963, King was arrested for participating in a demonstration in Birmingham, Alabama. On April 16, he wrote from his jail cell a letter to fellow clergy members from Alabama, responding to their published statement that his activities were "unwise and untimely." In his famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail," King calls for nonviolent civil disobedience now - that it cannot wait - because to wait and heed calls for greater patience is to accept and suffer injustice while clinging to the hope that history will right today's wrongs: "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed... We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that 'justice too long delayed is justice denied.'" In arguing in defense of when to practice civil disobedience, King distinguishes between just and unjust laws, and he states that just as one has a moral responsibility to obey just laws, one also is morally responsible to disobey unjust laws. He also articulates what are the accompanying duties of one engaged in such action, including reverence for just law:

One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

In reflecting on when civil disobedience is justified, John Rawls states that if a law is unjust, but "the basic structure of society is reasonably just," then in most cases we should not engage in civil disobedience. Rawls states that in a democracy run by majority rule, "the parties accept the risks of suffering the defects of one another's knowledge and sense of justice in order to gain the advantages of an effective legislative procedure." However, he argues, civil disobedience may be required to transform or even overturn laws that exceed certain limits of injustice, and he admits that the norms he specifies are certainly arguable: "The difficulty is one of conflict of duties. At what point does the duty to comply with laws enacted by a legislative majority (or with executive acts supported by such a majority) cease to be binding in view of the right to defend one's liberties and the duty to oppose injustice?" Consistent with the views of Gandhi and King, Rawls considers civil disobedience a mode of public address that is, by definition, nonviolent. According to this view, if an act is violent, then it contradicts the duty of civility that underlies the concept of civil disobedience. It should be noted that an act of civil disobedience need not necessarily be in violation of the law being challenged. The point is to communicate publicly about a specific condition of injustice, which may entail breaking an unrelated law in order to make a point. For example, a group may violate laws governing when, where and in what manner a political demonstration may take place, but their motivation in drawing attention to themselves may have had nothing to do with opposing these speech regulations. Instead, they could have been seeking attention due to their opposition to a policy on race matters, or on the production of nuclear weapons. However, it is also important to recognize that civil disobedience generally is not seen as a vague rejection of "the system," but rather it is more focused. That is, it aims at a particular injustice, or type of injustice. In that sense, civil disobedience is generally distinguished from anarchy and revolution. Of course, this distinction is complicated in some cases, such as India, where the focus was British colonial domination, and the results were revolutionary. But even in India, the doctrine of nonviolent civil disobedience was applied in specific actions, as in the "Salt Satyagraha," with the strategic aim of forcing a response to a particular injustice (the British injunction against Indians making their own salt).

Rawls imposes a high threshold in arguing for when civil disobedience is justified because, he argues, civil disobedience is founded on the premise that a democratic regime should be preserved by fidelity to the rule of law. However, he also argues that a truly democratic system of governance must hold a place of tolerance for the ambiguous status of civil disobedience. For Rawls, "the problem of civil disobedience is a crucial test for any theory of the moral basis of democracy," a point that has been elaborated upon by Habermas, who argues that "civil disobedience can only occur under conditions of a constitutional state that remains wholly intact." Likewise, Ronald Dworkin argues that those who practice civil disobedience appeal to, rather than oppose, constitutional legitimacy, and he notes that, since the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, this form of dissent is generally accepted in the United States: "Americans accept that civil disobedience has a legitimate if informal place in the political culture of their community... Civil disobedience is no longer a frightening idea in the United States." The right to disobey also has been extended in limited ways to protect acts of "corporate disobedience," as in the right to strike and the right to collective bargaining. Of course, the concept of civil disobedience articulated by Rawls, Habermas and others excludes a wide range of disobedience that might not be called "civil," but which might be justified on grounds other than fidelity toward a hopelessly unjust system of governance.

The writings and actions of numerous authors have illustrated certain common principles constituting a fairly coherent doctrine that distinguishes civil disobedience from other sorts of civic engagement. According to prevailing thought, an act of civil disobedience is committed under circumstances in which there is hope that relevant interlocutors will come together to reason publicly about what is just. Civil disobedience is aimed at injustice, and it is premised on fidelity to principles of democratic governance. As Gandhi and Martin Luther King have argued and demonstrated, persons who act as civil disobedients also must be willing to publicly present their bodies before the public. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, King wrote about the presentation of protesters bodies "as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community." In doing so, they agree to risk encountering violent responses and/or imprisonment. In the process, it is believed that the injustice to which they are opposed will weigh even more heavily upon the state, given the compounding nature of an unjust law, combined with harm and possibly death to those who openly oppose it. According to the doctrine of civil disobedience, acting in secrecy instead of openly runs counter to the ideal of nonviolent action as a form of public address, and therefore of effective political communication.

Given the demands of the doctrine of nonviolence, it comes as no surprise that those who practice it faithfully are sometimes viewed as saintly. According to Joan Bondurant, Gandhi laid down the following code for volunteers participating in the Salt Satyagraha: 1) Harbour no anger but suffer the anger of the opponent. Refuse to return the assault of the opponent; 2) Do not submit to any order given in anger, even though severe punishment is threatened for disobeying; 3) Refrain from insults and swearing; 4) Protect opponents from insult or attack, even at the risk of life; 5) Do not resist arrest nor the attachment of property, unless holding property as a trustee; 6) Refuse to surrender any property held in trust at the risk of life; 7) If taken prisoner, behave in an exemplary manner; 8) As a member of a satyagraha unit, obey the orders of satyagraha leaders, and resign from the unit in the event of serious disagreement; 9) Do not expect guarantees for maintenance of dependents. Not surprisingly, this code bears some striking resemblances to Christian scripture, particularly the Sermon on the Mount. In light of such requirements, it is difficult to see how mere mortals would be willing to risk provoking terrible harm to themselves and their loved ones through nonviolent civil disobedience. Many have been willing to die for a just cause, but few seem willing to do so by eschewing violence. Although saintliness and a spirit of martyrdom are sometimes associated with nonviolence, the point here is not to suggest that nonviolent civil disobedience needs to be grounded in a religious foundation. Just as secularism is not incompatible with civility, religious devotion is not incompatible with barbarism.

Although many writers have endorsed the right to disobey, few have taken on the task of attempting to argue why we should not disobey state authority. One notable exception is Immanuel Kant, who argued that it was logically impossible to justify such resistance because, according to Kant, in a democratic constitutional state, the sovereign is "the united will of the people," and the sovereign cannot logically resist its own authority. Kant argues that under popular sovereignty citizens cannot be both lawgivers and revolutionaries against their own laws. Kant argues explicitly that when a constitution is defective, there is no right to rebellion or revolution, but only to legislative reform. Ultimately, what Kant is arguing is that if we were to make it a maxim that there is a right to revolt (as the Declaration of Independence asserts), then we render all constitutions "insecure," and we create a lawless state of nature. Although Kant recognized no right to disobey, he argued vigorously in favor of the right to criticize a ruler, stating in his famous essay on the meaning of enlightenment, "Argue as much as you like and about whatever you like, but obey!" Indeed, Kant argued not only that criticism is a right, but that in the name of enlightenment, citizens should exercise the courage and the will to express their criticism openly, as a matter of public reason.

It seems that Kant saw a bright line dividing speech and conduct, and that he favored the use of the former as a legitimate means to challenge the constitution, but not the latter. However, while some suggest that Kant was absolute in arguing for this distinction, there also appear to be grounds for an interpretation that allows for civil disobedience as a liminal form of expression, lying somewhere between pure speech and pure conduct. Although Kant clearly maintains that it is self-contradictory under popular sovereignty for the people to resist "the sovereign" (who, in a constitutional democracy, is "the people"), in the form of a revolution, he also argues that "negative resistance" is not inconsistent with this purpose, that is, "a refusal of the people to accede to every demand the government puts forth as necessary for administering the state." Wolfgang Schwarz extrapolates from this distinction that while it is true that for Kant "coercive resistance" against state authority is always wrong, "some resistance is not coercive." Put in these terms, we can see how refusing to comply - particularly under circumstances in which one considers an action compelled by the state to be immoral - resembles the principle of "noncooperation" articulated by Gandhi, and later by Martin Luther King. In a statement that captures and embraces the ambiguity of this distinction, and which challenges a strict interpretation of Kant, Habermas states, "The 'right' to civil disobedience remains suspended between legitimacy and legality for good reasons. But the constitutional state which prosecutes civil disobedience as a common crime falls under the spell of an authoritarian regime."

At the turn of the millennium, we have seen an increase in large-scale protest activity in the United States and many other countries, as illustrated in the worldwide campaign against neoliberal globalization policies and for global justice. While most of the people who participated in these demonstrations did so with the knowledge and grudging support of local authorities, some practiced various forms of civil disobedience, and many were arrested. Still others stepped beyond the pale of law-breaking that would be recognized as civil disobedience, sometimes destroying corporate and public property, and in some instances committing acts of assault in response to police provocations. Later in this essay, I discuss the problems of violence as a form of political expression, and I briefly examine its consequences, particularly in the form of surveillance, repression, and infiltration by the state. But before doing so, I turn my attention towards the emergence of a new sphere of activity that requires our understanding in light of claims made about new forms of civic engagement and civil disobedience.

Virtual nonviolence?
The Internet has become an indispensable tool for political activism, its uses including the dissemination of vital information, the maintenance of networks and organizations of activists, fund-raising, and the mobilization and coordination of protest activity. Added to these uses is a recent set of activities that have become an intriguing subject for technologically skilled activists, as well as for law-enforcement authorities. In January of 2001, an MIT graduate student made worldwide news by circulating on the Internet a series of e-mail exchanges he had with a customer service representative of the Nike corporation. The student, Jonah Peretti, played a poker-faced game with Nike by asking if they would kindly fulfill their offer that came with his new shoes and customize them by stitching the word "sweatshop" next to the trademark Nike "swoosh." In a series of back-and-forth messages, the Nike representative tried to maintain the upper hand by justifying a refusal to fulfill the order, despite the company's offer to personalize this particular style of shoe. Not surprisingly, Peretti did not get Nike to fulfill his request, but he probably brought far more negative publicity to the company than either he or Nike had imagined possible. After circulating the correspondence to ten people on January 17, 2001, Peretti became something of an international celebrity. According to his account in The Nation, the story hit the big time, with the correspondence between Peretti and Nike being posted on web sites, and stories about it appearing in prominent mainstream U.S. newspapers, magazines, and online publications. Stories appeared the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Time, the Wall Street Journal, and Business Week. As well, the BBC covered the story, and Peretti was flown to New York to appear on NBC's Today Show so that he could tell his David versus Goliath story to American viewers. There is no doubt that Peretti's forwarded e-mail put smiles on the faces of many who share his view that the success of the Nike brand, with its image of "freedom, revolution and personal exuberance," rests on a foundation of labor exploitation and human rights abuse that have not been tolerated in the United States since before the Great Depression. Regardless of whether the working conditions to which he alludes are better than what existed in many poor countries before the arrival of Nike and other global brands that subcontract there, bringing these conditions to the attention of affluent consumers is no disservice. Although Nike must have had a PR nightmare for a brief period of time, what is remarkable is that a simple act of forwarding some e-mail could draw so much attention. In summing up the experience, Peretti correctly recognized that "in the long run this episode will have a larger impact on how people think about media than how they think about Nike and sweatshop labor." Peretti's "Nike Media Adventure" became noteworthy and widely publicized because of the novelty of it. But who is to say that this type of activism, a high-tech expression of the politics of shame, has exhausted its potential? This sort of "culture jamming," as it is sometimes called, has been the basis of growing optimism about the potential of new media as tools of political empowerment.

Peretti's adventure adds to a long list of stories that can be told about culture jamming, a set of practices that Naomi Klein calls "semiotic Robin-Hoodism." It follows a tradition that includes Dadaism, street theater, and underground publishing. Among the most prominent of the culture jammers is Kalle Lasn, founder of Adbusters Media Foundation and publisher of Adbusters magazine. Adbusters prints slick and provocative responses to the logo-saturated commercial media by creatively appropriating the familiar images of advertising and turning them against their sponsors. Among its more famous examples are its "Joe Chemo" spoof ads that depict the cool, cigarette-smoking cartoon character Joe Camel, now a chemo-therapy patient, bald and sunken-eyed, head drooping, and with an intravenous line to his arm. Adbusters takes the anthropomorphized camel and makes him all the more human.

How do we make sense of the political significance of culture jamming? Borrowing from Umberto Eco, Mark Dery describes culture jammers as "part artistic terrorists, part vernacular critics." In today's political culture, Dery's reference to terrorism is unfortunate, in that it severely stretches the meaning of the term, but it is appropriate in that this sort of "semiological guerrilla warfare" is perceived as such by those who would put any sort of trespass, creative parody, and "subcultural bricolage" on a par with breaking into the Pentagon's computers. Much of what is called culture jamming involves risking legal prosecution by playing with intellectual property, particularly corporate logos and ads. As an electronic form of graffiti, such defacement takes the advertiser's image of cool and one-ups it through ridicule and criticism. Culture jammers mess with the images of powerful corporations, and corporations are wise in their own self-interest when they choose to keep a low profile in response. To respond with overwhelming force to criticism, as McDonald's corporation did in its British lawsuit against two activists, may result in winning a legal battle but it can produce a public relations catastrophe. It should come as no surprise that, from a corporation's perspective, not only is it ill-advised to go the litigious way of McDonald's corporation and end up under a harsh "McSpotlight," but it does not even make much sense to inflate the importance of criticism through public confrontation. Naomi Klein notes that advertisers are generally not inclined to bring charges against "adbusters" to trial, one big reason being that it would put them on the side of censorship in the eyes of the public An ostensively freedom-loving corporation like Nike would need to see the stakes as very high before it seeks entry into such a public relations morass. In short, the Adbusters approach to culture jamming may be a bit of a nuisance, but overall it is fairly benign from the point of view of a corporate target.

The brilliance and effectiveness of culture jamming as a force of criticism lies in its ability to step outside the sphere of seriousness, and into the sphere of the comic and the playful. As one web site describes it, "'Culture jamming' sticks where rational discourse slides off. It is, simply, the viral introduction of radical ideas. It is viral in that it uses the enemy's own resources to replicate itself - corporate logos, marketing psychology, clean typography, 'adspeak.' It is radical because - ideally - the message, once deciphered, causes damage to blind belief. Fake ads, fake newspaper articles, parodies, pastiche. The best CJ is totally unexpected, surprising, shocking in its implications." Of course, the ongoing process of cultural appropriation does not grant final word to the culture jammer. In a semiotic jungle dominated by corporations eager to appropriate the symbols of coolness, culture jammers face the creative challenge of resisting having their radical messages and techniques become domesticated and civilized, like so many other forms of conquered cool and commodified dissent. As with past forms of protest, they also face the perpetual challenge of gasping for the oxygen of publicity, which corporate-controlled media systematically seek to deny them. Adbusters is repeatedly turned down when it seeks to buy television ads. In an interview, Kalle Lasn, founder of the Media Foundation and editor of Adbusters: Journal of the Mental Health Environment, laments the difficulty of circulating a message that challenges the fundamental value placed on escalating consumer demand: "We want to buy...spots under the same rules and conditions as Nike or McDonald's, but the networks refuse to sell to us. They have a policy that says they'll sell airtime for product ads, but not for what they call 'advocacy advertising.'" A danger in this is that culture jammers are faced with the prospect of doing little more than preaching to the converted, using channels of communication to which only true believers give their attention. But at least for the present, culture jammers do not seem to have exhausted their capacity to innovate and to occasionally enjoy resounding success in shaming "brand bullies."

Culture jamming is not just about spoof ads and humorous twists on corporate logos. Although Adbusters and other groups certainly do play with and flout corporate intellectual property rights, printing a "Joe Chemo" ad in Adbusters magazine - given its minimal circulation - hardly threatens capitalism as we know it. Culture jamming, Adbusters style, is mostly consistent with the tradition of civil disobedience in that it effectively translates the meaning of the concept into new forms of information-age expression. This is especially true insofar as the action is targeted towards what is seen as a particular form of injustice, it is conducted in a public manner, and those responsible for the action do not seek to conceal their identities. By appropriating and manipulating corporate images, the Adbusters variety of culture jamming tests the limits of legality, but thus far it does not seem to pose a threat to profits. But Adbusters does not define the limit of the practices. Moving along a continuum from less to more threatening is when a culture jammer manages to hijack a corporate web site and post messages or re-design pages to embarrass the company. This has also been done to government web sites in the United States and other countries, and it is one expression of the culture jammer as so-called "hacktivist," and of course the risks are higher when an activist moves from creative spoof ads to trespassing and vandalism.

In the radical environmental journal Earth First!, Stefan Wray, then a New York University graduate student and self-proclaimed hacktivist, describes hacktivism as the electronic equivalent of civil disobedience:

We are witness to a convergence of the computerized activist and the politiczed hacker. This coming together of forces will open up unforeseen doors and possibilities. As a way to envision what this hybridized activist-hacker might engage in, it is instructive to borrow the metaphor of civil disobedience with its tactics of trespass and blockade. When we apply this metaphor to cyberspace we imagine electronic civil disobedience.

Wray's description of hacktivism includes "virtual sit-ins," involving people loading and re-loading their Internet browser at a specific web site, thus overloading the targeted server and effectively denying access to the site. As a technical advance beyond this practice, hacktivists now employ automated "ping engines," computer programs that enable users to repeatedly load and reload a web page without having to continually perform the manual functions of striking and re-striking keys. Wray also highlights other hacktivist practices, including "offshore spam engines," software that enable users "to automatically distribute massive quantities of e-mail to particular addresses," which can overload a targeted recipient's e-mail account. Wray's essay, "Virtual Luddites: Monkeywrenching on the Web," concludes by advocating that activists should "use computers to take political action that goes beyond political communication."

Wray and his fellow hacktivists, who in the late 1990s referred to themselves as the "Electronic Disturbance Theater" (EDT), have been responsible for a number of actions intended to shut down government web sites. Most notably, the EDT made the heady achievement of conducting a web "sit-in" in support of the Mexican Zapatistas by using a ping engine it had developed, called "FloodNet," which enabled a web browser to automatically re-load a targeted web site several times per minute, effectively denying access to Mexican President Zedillo's web site on April 10, 1998. Wray claims that the action was conducted by more than 8,000 participants. The EDT also has attacked Pentagon web sites, the stated reason being that the U.S. government has been a supporter of the Mexican government, which is oppressive in its treatment of Mexico's indigenous populations. Other hacktivist actions have included attacks on Sri Lankan embassies and consulates in several countries, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, the City of London, and India's Atomic Research Center. According to one report, the rate of hacktivist defacements of web sites has grown dramatically in recent years, both because the practice brings publicity to the groups responsible, and because it is not difficult to do.

The hacktivist persona that Wray describes as a blend of "the computerized activist and the politiczed hacker" is a curious one, in that few of the two groups whose identities are involved - progressive activists and computer hackers - endorse such an image or practice. Certainly, many in the hacker community seek to distance themselves from hacktivism, as the legitimacy of the "hacker ethic," borne of a world-view far from that of the vilified "black hat" hacker image of today, is threatened by this association. Not only is it the case that hacker culture tends to be libertarian, and therefore not inclined towards unified political action, but there is nothing particularly skillful about the sort of methods that Wray describes, at least not sufficient to warrant the label "hacking." Hacker culture affirms an intellectual project and a set of technical competencies that are far removed from the criminal element that is so familiar in the popular press construction of hacking. Instead, hacker traditions revolve around invention, innovation, and collaborative efforts at puzzle-solving. For the most part, hacker culture is collaborative, but tends to be apolitical, at least when measured by the bold standards of radical protest. That is not to say that hacker culture lacks political and economic influence. Hacking is best recognized in recent times by the so-called "open source movement," which is largely aimed at finding alternatives to mega-corporate domination of the software industry. One of the open-source movement's prominent spokespersons, Eric Raymond, describes hacker culture in its most positive light, emphasizing the anti-commercial ethos of "hackerdom," its focus on peer-review, humility, professionalism, and a relatively non-hierarchical form of social organization for software development. By contrast, the "politicized hacker," or "hacktivist," bears closer resemblance to what is generally considered a "cracker," of whom Raymond writes disparagingly: "Unfortunately, many journalists and writers have been fooled into using the word 'hacker' to describe crackers; this irritates real hackers no end. The basic difference is: hackers build things, crackers break them."

To the great frustration of many hackers, the virtues and sentiments Raymond prefers having associated with hackers no longer define the meaning of the term. Contrary to the efforts of Raymond and others to preserve the meaning of the term to describe the professional culture now most visibly associated with the open-source movement, the press has led the way in permanently altering the place of this term in the popular lexicon. According to the new usage, to be a hacker is to be a criminal, if not a terrorist. Moreover, it seems that this criminalization of the hacker image is a convenient move, particularly insofar as it results in re-framing all hacktivism as a menace to society. The spreading of computer viruses, breaking into high security corporate and military servers, defacing government and corporate web sites, causing financial losses to individuals, businesses, and governments through a variety of disabling and destructive tactics, and even threatening public safety and health, are what the public more often is instructed by police and the press to associate with the term "hacker." The message that hackers are developing a new, more innovative, collaborative, and responsive economic model for the software industry does not carry into the mainstream. What the public hears is that their property and their safety are threatened, and that hacker culture must be destroyed. There is no doubt that most of what is called "hacktivism" contributes to the cultivation of the criminal-terrorist image of the hacker in media and law-enforcement circles. More importantly, the consequences of such activity include greater hyperbole among political leaders, heightened police surveillance and forms of disruption aimed at undermining activism of all kinds, and severe penalties for minor legal offenses.

There are good reasons for concluding that much of what falls under this rubric is not faithful to the tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience. In particular, attempts to damage the files of institutions or individuals, through the use of computer viruses and "worms," are indiscriminate in their ability to distinguish among perpetrators of injustice and those who are innocent, let alone those who are victims of the injustice that is being opposed (and who are vulnerable as first targets in a subsequent crackdown). As noted above, civil disobedience generally is expected to target a particular injustice, or type of injustice, and not simply be justified as a challenge to "the system." Moreover, much of so-called hacktivism is conducted anonymously, and yet public accountability is also vital to the common understanding of what civil disobedience means as a form of public expression. If the identity of the attacker is concealed, this clouds the public perception of the purpose of an action, and it undermines the legitimacy of a cause in the eyes of the public. In sum, while in hacker culture, hacktivism looks more like cracking than hacking, in political terms its indiscriminateness makes it look more like wanton havoc than principled protest. In other words, much of hacktivism fails to fit the meaning of civil disobedience, and indeed it has the potential to do little more than reflect a kind of hopelessness and meaninglessness in the lived experience of many "activists" who are so-engaged.

Cyberspace can be used as a means for public deliberation, and as a means to transmit an act of what legal theorists call "expressive conduct." Some, but not all expressive conduct fits the legacy of civil disobedience - a form of political communication that is clearly focused, public, and nonviolent - and some can be accurately described as political violence. To conclude, although I would argue that some of the types of action that fall under the rubric of "electronic civil disobedience" may be justified under certain circumstances, it serves no good purpose claim that such actions honor the legacy of Gandhi and King. The concept of civil disobedience has historically specific connotations that ought to be preserved, if for no other reason that the concept's meaning has relevance to a system of political thought that has evolved in the interest of protecting the rights of individuals and groups to publicly break the law as a way of expressing legitimate interests in creating a more just legal order. To the extent that politically motivated hacking can meet those standards, then it deserves to be called civil disobedience. Otherwise, its advocates should not discredit and politically undermine the meaning of this tradition. Violence, whether or not it is "political," comes in unlimited forms, and cyberspace is a place in which violence can and does take place. This has become a matter of greater and greater attention as commerce, governance, and culture come to rely increasingly on cyberspace.

The concept of hacktivism is important to understand and explain, because it raises new legal, political, and moral questions about the relationship between the so-called "real world" and the "virtual world." When considering this relationship in this context, we should ask if we need corresponding distinctions between violence and nonviolent civil disobedience in cyberspace versus the real world. Does the concept of violence have an equivalent meaning in cyberspace, or does it have strictly metaphorical significance? Is the term violence simply metaphorical when a computer attack takes place? And assuming that valid legal definitions of violence do carry over into cyberspace, what distinguishes run-of-the-mill violence from what is called "terrorism"? Stressing the continuity, rather than the discontinuity, between "cyberterrorism" and other forms of terrorism, one writer states:

A terrorist is an individual who employs terroristic means to achieve political and social ends. A cyberterrorist is a terrorist who uses hacking skills to achieve terroristic ends. Their motivation is the normal terrorist motivation of political change, with a willingness to resort to violence to bring about that change.

So where does this definition place hacktivism? Is hacktivism more like nonviolent political action, or does it more closely resemble political violence? Like other "real world" concepts whose meanings find new expression in the virtual world - love, sex, hate, deceit, trust, friendship, and more - the concept of violence translates into cyberspace. And as our dependency on cyberspace grows, we will need to stretch our ability and willingness to identify the material consequences of some forms of virtual violence. Legal reasoning about the materiality of such forms of expressive conduct will naturally follow.

Lawrence Lessig has highlighted the challenge of translating legal concepts from the "real" world into cyberspace. In particular, he points out how interpretations of the Fourth Amendment have adjusted to new material conditions. The Fourth Amendment, which originally was designed to protect citizens from unlawful search and seizure, has been interpreted to be the principal Constitutional foundation of a right to privacy in the United States. Reflecting on the implications of developments in cyberspace for the American constitution, Lessig puts greater urgency and more of a technological edge on an older discourse about the tensions between "originalism" in constitutional thought - thought that focuses on literal fidelity in interpreting what the founders may have intended - and "translationism," based on a belief that not only is a constitution a living doctrine, but that the spirit of law can only be preserved through conscious efforts to adapt to a changing world. Can we apply "translationism" to an analysis of the relevance of a constitutional theory of civil disobedience for the brave new world of "electronic civil disobedience"? Of course we can. And likewise, we must be able to recognize the concepts of violence, political violence, and terrorism in terms of cyberspace.

One point that Wray makes about hacktivism that warrants attention is that it "goes beyond political communication." This claim highlights the fact that, as the actions of hacktivists illustrate, some uses of computer networks can be more accurately described as "action" rather than "expression," to use a dichotomy discussed above. Sometimes it is quite easy to recognize the denotative and connotative meaning of an act of violence. For example, suicide bombers typically are quite clear about communicating what they are opposed to and why they are committing a horrible act of murder-suicide. We may not accept the political or moral justification for such an act, but that is a matter apart from whether we understand what the intended message was. It is simply inadequate to condemn efforts to explain terrorism by inferring that explanation offers justification. To use a less dramatic example, during the late November-early December 1999 street protests of the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle, Washington, considerable damage was done to the property of certain targeted corporations. These acts of sabotage and vandalism were clearly meaningful to those who know about the Nike corporation's use of sweatshop labor, and about the Starbucks corporation's predatory business practices and reliance on coffee beans supplied by growers who badly exploit their workers. Anyone who follows protests against these companies had no difficulty understanding why the destruction took place (which is not to justify it), and in that sense its symbolic significance was not lost for many who witnessed it live or on television, amid the chaos of broken glass, police sirens, and tear gas. And of course, although such acts can be explained as having a rational basis, it does not mean they are morally justified.

Stefan Wray describes denial of service attacks on government and military web sites as "virtual sit-ins." By overloading a web site, it cannot be accessed by others, and in a sense this is what occurs when a group of protesters occupy a physical space (say, for instance, a sitting room outside a university president's office) and refuse to move so that others may pass through. Student protesters who conduct such actions do so by presenting their bodies in physical space and allowing themselves to be identified, which of course makes it possible for police to come and arrest them, or for them to be identified for possible subsequent prosecution. This is a fair enough characterization, but some important points may be lost in the translation to cyberspace. In cyberspace, a virtual protest aimed at crashing computer servers could in fact be the action of only one or a very small number of individuals. Granted, civil disobedience need not be done by many people at once in order to qualify as such, but there is something different about the scale of "disobedience" that occurs if a vital web site is disabled by a few clever hacktivists. Even assuming that the web site in question is not one that is vitally important, the question of scale remains. When a civil disobedient sits alone or with a few comrades to block the entrance to the office of a politician who is pushing for a bill to place greater restrictions on handgun ownership, the scale of the action is pretty clearly explicable according to the terms of how civil disobedience has been defined. The disobedients let their concerns be known, they target the particular politician who plays a pivotal role in promoting a law they oppose, and they stand at the ready to endure the consequences for their actions. The police come and arrest them, they spend the night in jail, a reporter covers the event, and their purpose has been achieved. Public recognition of the issue is heightened, and perhaps a discussion and further public debate will force the politician to reconsider her position. By contrast, if this politician's web site is effectively shut down for a day or two by the same small number of people, the circumstances and the result might be far different. Perhaps, for example, the attack takes place anonymously. Although it is increasingly difficult, it remains possible to initiate communication on the Internet anonymously, using pseudonymous computer accounts or by relying on an anonymous "remailer," a service that effectively conceals the identity of a sender. So the hacktivists may manage to avoid being identified, which makes it more difficult for police to arrest them. And by remaining anonymous, the public dimension of their action is limited. They risk being called cowards or common criminals, not civil disobedients who stand with the courage of their convictions, and they may do harm to the cause they claim to represent. Under these circumstances, it would seem that the politics of shame have backfired. In this scenario, the meaning of civil disobedience does not translate.

But maybe there are other reasons for pressing forward with a hacktivist venture. Let's assume that the hacktivists are not seeking a moral victory for having carried on with the legacy of Thoreau, Gandhi, and King. Instead, let us imagine that they will be satisfied simply with having temporarily blocked access to a politician's web site, perhaps in the process bringing her some controversial publicity regarding her record on gun control. Let's say that not only was access to the web site denied, but that it was defaced. On the web page that had stated the politician's position against the sale and possession of automatic weapons, a message describing her as a jack-booted fascist now appears, along with a familiar slogan used by many opponents of gun controls in the United States: "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." Some constituents will be gratified to see that the gun ownership issues get more visibility, while others will be outraged that cyber-saboteurs should get away with such a criminal act. In the view of the latter assessment, the act was criminal, pure and simple. Fair enough, say the hacktivists. Perhaps their action doesn't have the pristine character of a saintly act of civil disobedience, but maybe it will be politically effective enough to have made the effort worthwhile. It would be hard to imagine that the Attorney General of the United States would feel compelled to invoke federal law and prosecute such individuals as though they were terrorists. Let's agree that it was not terrorism. Was it violence? No one was harmed. No blood was shed. It certainly was trespass, and we might agree that there was some property destruction involved in the defacement of the web site, but hopefully, if the hacktivists are apprehended, the punishment will fit the crime, which is a minor act of vandalism, a petty crime. All acts of political violence are not equal. Some cyber-crime may deserve to be treated as acts of terrorism, but others may not, and therefore should not.

Of course, we can imagine far graver scenarios in which the denial of access to a web server could result in injury or even death, perhaps to many people. Security experts have described scenarios that move farther along the continuum from the sort of minor offense described above to ones that threaten vital infrastructures, security, emergency response capabilities. The inconveniences posed by hacktivists today are seen by some as early warning signs of what may lie in store in terms of horrible threats to public safety and welfare. Such acts would be far removed from the realm of civil disobedience. Even short of either the noble cause of civil disobedience or the extreme of a terrorist attack, it is not difficult to see why the hacker image has been criminalized, due to acts of "cracking," theft, and the spreading of viruses, all of which have come to be force-fit under the mislabel of "hacker." None of this should be surprising. As the Internet has become more vital as a tool of commerce and government, we have seen a commensurate rise in security concerns. Growing concerns over threats to the sanctity of property interests and public safety have led to a burst of private- and public-sector initiatives aimed at tightening computer security, and we have probably only seen the beginning of such efforts. Bill Joy, chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, aptly captures this view: "Right now, it's the boom phase, the Wild West. But as we depend more and more on the Net, we will need more civility on the frontier." As in the case of "cybercrime," concerns over "cyberterror" as a threat to national security also pre-date the September 11 attacks on the United States. In May of 2001, FBI director Louis Freeh issued a public statement on the "Threat of Terrorism to the United States," in which he wrote:

The FBI believes cyber-terrorism, the use of cyber-tools to shut down, degrade, or deny critical national infrastructures, such as energy, transportation, communications, or government services, for the purpose of coercing or intimidating a government or civilian population, is clearly an emerging threat for which it must develop prevention, deterrence, and response capabilities.

In a number of reports sponsored by the RAND National Defense Research Institute, John Arquilla, David Ronfeldt, and their colleagues describe the potential for new types of conflict in the information age. Of particular relevance in this work are the concepts of "netwar" and "cyberwar." Briefly, the authors use the term netwar to refer to

information-related conflict at a grand level between nations or societies... A netwar may focus on public or elite opinion, or both. It may involve public diplomacy measures, propaganda and psychological campaigns, political and cultural subversion, deception of or interference with local media, infiltration of computer networks and databases, and efforts to promote dissident or opposition movements across computer networks.

This description would encompass campaigns that rely on the Internet to organize collective action, such as the demonstrations that have been held in recent years at various global trade and investment meetings (OECD, WTO, G8, IMF/World Bank, World Economic Forum, etc.). By contrast, the term cyberwar refers to "conducting, and preparing to conduct, military operations according to information-related principles. It means disrupting, if not destroying, information and communication systems, broadly defined to include even military culture." Cyberwar may involve the use of a wide range of systems that are dependent on information technology, including positioning systems and smart weapons, and it may include jamming or blinding an enemy's computer and communications systems. The authors describe cyberwar as signifying a fundamental transformation in the nature of warfare, which they call "postmodern," and which involves more than simply attacking the command, control, communications and intelligence capacities of an enemy, while strengthening one's own. "As an innovation in warfare, we anticipate that cyberwar may be to the twenty-first century what blitzkrieg was to the twentieth century."

To further the comparison, Arquilla and Ronfeldt describe netwar as occurring at "the societal level," and being aimed at "trying to disrupt, damage, or modify what a target population knows or thinks it knows about itself and the world around it." Although a netwar can take place between governments, it can also take place between governments and non-state actors, including groups involved in terrorism or drug trafficking, or it can also take place between non-state actors, such as rival crime or terrorist networks. By contrast, cyberwar refers specifically to military operations, manifested in a combination of using advanced means to maintain a big picture ("topsight") of the theater of war, combined with command and control over decentralized means of engagement. Cyberwarfare requires resources that would generally be out of the reach of non-state actors. But what these authors cite as the common feature of both types of "warfare" is that they each rely on "the network form," which differs from "the institutional form" in that the latter is traditionally built around organizational hierarchy, whereas the former is defined as cutting across organizations in "multi-organizational networks" that rely on communication and information technology to maintain themselves: "The information revolution favors the growth of such networks by making it possible for diverse, dispersed actors to communicate, consult, coordinate, and operate across greater distances, and on the basis of more and better information than ever before." The threat to institutions posed by networks is manifested by their agility and their relatively non-hierarchical structures. According to these authors, a variety of groups, "be they criminals, terrorists, or peaceful social activists," pose significant threats to state legitimacy and power. Included in their profile are ethnic, racial and tribal factions, transnational drug cartels, international terrorists, guerrilla fighters, and NGOs. And, these authors argue, governments must adapt to the network form in order to counter their increasingly effective network adversaries: "It takes networks to fight networks. Governments that would defend against netwar will, increasingly, have to adopt organizational designs and strategies like those of their adversaries." Furthermore, they argue that in order for "counternetwar" to be effective, governments "may require very effective interagency approaches, which by their nature involve networked structures."

Ronfeldt et al. are to be credited for their prescience in anticipating this move by governments. "By creating effective hybrids, governments may become better prepared to confront the new threats and challenges emerging in the information age, whether generated by terrorists, militias, criminals, or other actors." In the wake of the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, it has become clear that a hybrid of institutional hierarchy and the network form figures prominently in the government's massive counter-terrorism initiative. But now, in addition to the ongoing worries of further terrorism, comes a new worry. Who are the "other actors" that must be combated, and at what cost? Will governments adapt to "the network form" not only in order to fulfill their legitimate missions of preserving peace, but also in order to monitor and disrupt legitimate speech and association? How far will governments go in embracing the network form as a tool to subvert democratic expression?

Political violence and its rationales
The doctrine of nonviolent civil disobedience puts a tremendous burden on those who choose to abide by it. But what about conditions under which the system is so tyrannical and unjust that it would be hopeless to try and reform it by an appeal to reason? Some of the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt, have concluded that the use of violence is a rational choice under some circumstances. Such are the circumstance when we are no longer talking about what Rawls calls a "nearly just" system. For Rawls, violent action is justified when one does not consider the legal foundations of a system to be worthy of respect and obedience. If one does not respect the law sufficiently, this may also be seen as a justification for being secretive about one's responsibility for violating it. In this case, Rawls notes, "militant action is not within the bounds of fidelity to the law, but represents a more profound opposition to the legal order." Arendt argues that it is wrong to think that violence and nonviolence are opposites, which is evident when we relate these two concepts to the question of power. Power, according to Arendt, "corresponds to the human ability not just to act, but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together." Arendt characterizes the civil disobedient as one who is acting on behalf of a group that is secure in its ability to exercise power. By contrast, she argues, violence - which she claims is power's opposite - occurs "where power is in jeopardy." This distinction suggests that authorities lose their grip on power - they de-legitimize their power - by resorting to violent repression. Nevertheless, Arendt argues, there are times when acts of violence are rational, and she concludes that violence may at times be the only effective means of unraveling an unjust system.

The Gandhian idea of nonviolence certainly opposes violent responses to violent injustice, even in self-defense. Whether the Gandhian perspective singularly defines the meaning of civil disobedience, and more importantly whether we must equate civil disobedience and nonviolence, are further issues. As some have argued, these two separate terms mark "a distinction with a difference." In contrast to the Gandhian principle of nonviolence, other conceptions of justified disobedience do not reject the possible use of outright physical violence. Using Rawls's terminology, under what circumstances might it be argued that a political and legal system diverges so widely from what can reasonably be defended as "nearly just" as to lead those who are oppressed by it to conclude that violent opposition is the only answer? Frantz Fanon has argued that at a certain point it becomes convenient for oppressors to preach the doctrine of nonviolence "for the public good." Fanon accurately characterized colonialism as a condition premised on sustained violence, not the consent of the governed: "Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning facilities. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence." On the basis of this assessment, Fanon advocated violent revolution against the French colonialists in Algeria, rather than complicity with a violent and oppressive regime through unilateral nonviolence on the part of the oppressed. We will never know if Algerian liberation from French colonial domination would have been achieved, or if the French withdrawal would have taken longer, without violent resistance. But there is no doubt that the French colonial domination of Algeria constituted a grossly unjust system of governance, not one that was "nearly just."

Lest Fanon's views on justifiable violence be judged far too radical, any defender of American liberty should not forget the violent origins of the United States, and the justifications that were offered in the face of tyranny. We should also not forget that one of the key founding documents of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, argues that when a despotic government denies "the People" the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that the People have the right and a duty to abolish and replace that government. Those words were not written for metaphorical reasons. The Declaration provided a justification for violent revolution. Thomas Jefferson, the man who penned that document, also is remembered for another statement he made in defense of violence. Later in his life, Jefferson famously reaffirmed his view in a private letter, written from Paris in 1787: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure." It also is a view that gets support from time to time by American social and political theorists, although it is hard to imagine circumstances that remotely parallel those of Jefferson's time, as far as the much greater monopoly over the means of violence - and retaliatory power - that the U.S. government now possesses.

There are many who would find it cynical and abhorrent to conclude that there could ever be a situation in which violence should be considered a rational approach to ending oppression. Their numbers include cowards who would not make any sacrifice against injustice, as well as those who would follow a code of nonviolence and make the ultimate sacrifice of giving their lives to oppose injustice. Among them are those whose patience has worn thin, and who agree with Fanon that nonviolence is a concession to domination by one class or race against another. Unlike Martin Luther King, whose impatient call for nonviolent action was premised on the conclusion that "justice too long delayed is justice denied," others reach this conclusion only to justify violent action. Is it rational? Clearly not from the viewpoint of those who would perpetuate injustice and who are in need of ideological cover for their position, nor from the viewpoint of those who categorically oppose violence, but perhaps yes from the viewpoint of those who seek to end extreme injustice. And under such circumstances, it will be in the interest of those who benefit from the status quo to try and make a compelling case as to why violent opposition is irrational, and perhaps even a case for why it is rational to stifle dissent and opposition through violent means.

Certainly, nonviolence is always preferable to violence, but we may have greater difficulty in arguing that all forms of injustice and violent oppression can be dissolved nonviolently. Although some theorists of nonviolence argue that just ends can never be achieved by violent means, few would argue that violence was uncalled for in the belated efforts to bring about an end to the Nazi Holocaust. Noncooperation, obstruction, and circumvention by countless European Jews, and by many non-Jewish supporters, did not prevent or end the Holocaust. Since we cannot rewrite history, assertions by theorists that nonviolence could have worked, had it been given a chance, are nonsensical.

The dilemma of choosing between nonviolence and violence is made murkier by the historical co-presence in many instances of both types of direct action, leading us to question in retrospect whether nonviolence alone did in fact carry the day in cases in which an injustice was brought to an end. In India, the opposition to colonial oppression is generally understood to have been nonviolent, and while most of the reported action was nonviolent, there were at the time growing British fears of violent opposition. According to Judith Brown, in 1930, the year of the Salt Satyagraha, the British government was more concerned about terrorist attacks than about nonviolent protests. Even during the process of making salt, when police came to break up the crowds, more often than not they were pelted with stones. In Calcutta, "Terrorist 'outrages' jumped to thirty-six compared with four in 1929, causing nineteen deaths compared with one the previous year." Among those killed were two high-ranking British police officials. In the United States of the 1960s, Martin Luther King's message favoring nonviolent expression over violent conduct carried great moral authority, but nonviolence alone may not have been the sole impetus behind the passage and more diligent enforcement of civil rights laws. In 1963 and 1964 there was growing unrest about the denial of civil rights to blacks, about grossly disproportionate rates of black unemployment and poverty, and about continued racist violence against nonviolent demonstrators. The U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964 instituted equal employment opportunity for blacks and outlawed racial discrimination in places of public accommodation, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 authorized the federal government to intervene in cases where local election officials practiced racial discrimination. But despite these advances, many black activists found the pace of progress in official efforts to undo deeply embedded racial inequality to be too slow, and the scope of change too limited. The messages of Malcolm X, and later the Black Panther Party, defined a more militant path to liberation, based not on the principles of nonviolence and reform, but rather of armed self-defense and revolution.

According to Howard Zinn, in 1967, black ghettos were sites of urban uprisings on an unprecedented scale. The Black Panther Party, which drew inspiration from Malcolm X and from Frantz Fanon, alarmed many whites and middle-class blacks. This explains why they were a primary target of the FBI's Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which went to great lengths to infiltrate, discredit, and break up black militant groups. Writing about fears in the 1960s of black militancy, Zinn notes that it was only when black demonstrations began to become violent, and following the 1968 release of the report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the "Kerner Commission" report), that civil rights legislation became a top priority as the national government responded with alarm to the rapidly growing popularity of the idea of "Black Power." The Kerner Commission report stated that U.S. society was moving further and further toward a separate and unequal, racially divided society. It also concluded that "The frustrations of powerlessness have led some Negroes to the conviction that there is no effective alternative to violence as a means of achieving redress of grievances, and of 'moving the system.' These frustrations are reflected in alienation and hostility toward the institutions of law and government and the white society which controls them, and in the reach toward racial consciousness and solidarity reflected in the slogan 'Black Power.'" Although the doctrine of nonviolence continued to have a wide following among civil rights activists, which undoubtedly did much to persuade many previously apathetic members of the middle class to support racial justice, after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, the message of turning the other cheek had lost significant ground to the message of self-defense advanced by Malcolm X, whom Cornel West calls "the prophet of black rage." Speaking at an earlier time about nonviolence, Malcolm said "Black people shouldn't be willing to bleed unless white people are willing to bleed. And black people shouldn't be willing to be nonviolent unless white people are going to be nonviolent." The point in recognizing this shift in thinking is not to dismiss the value of nonviolence, but rather it is to acknowledge the historical context in which nonviolent civil disobedience occurred during the most active period of the civil rights movement in the United States. It was a context in which the fear of violence by the caretakers of a structurally racist, white-dominated political and legal system seems to have had much to do with spurring efforts to reform racist institutions. Antonio Gramsci has taught us that the engineering of consent, which is technically nonviolent, has greater staying power in sustaining cultural and political hegemony than the direct application of coercion, and that counter hegemony - the efforts by subordinated groups to mount an opposing agenda - is also best won by persuasion rather than by the overt use of force. But Gramsci also taught us that, while hegemony is sustained by consent, it is premised on the general awareness that it is possible for force to be invoked to back up hegemonic interests. Certainly, this wisdom has not been lost on those who, while they support nonviolent civil disobedience, also refuse to condemn direct action that may take a violent turn. Despite the fact that strict advocates of nonviolence do not welcome the threat or use of violent force, it is reasonable to assume that their message is made more palatable in a context in which the resort to violence looms as a clear alternative. The counter-hegemonic struggle against legalized, overt racism has not been waged, nor all of its victories won, simply on a foundation of nonviolence.

As we have seen, it is generally assumed that, by definition, the use of violence falls outside the scope of what we would call civil disobedience. But at this point we need to revisit what it is we mean when we refer to violence. In reflecting above on the meaning of violence, we have seen that it sometimes difficult, if not impossible, to draw a meaningful distinction between speech and conduct. We also have seen that speech can produce effects that reasonable minds would call harmful, not simply offenses. Further complicating the picture of what we mean by violence is the question of whether we should distinguish between violence to persons, on the one hand, and aggression directed at property, on the other. The latter, as Howard Zinn notes, "might include depreciation (as in boycotts), damage, temporary occupation, and permanent appropriation." Numerous authors have argued that this distinction between persons and property is vitally important if we are to understand radical politics in a meaningful way. Not surprisingly, some find it less problematic to justify property damage and destruction than harm to persons. For example, in discussing the "trashing" of corporate property that took place during the demonstrations that interrupted the meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, Washington in 1999, Rachel Neumann defends some of these actions against a blanket rejection of all forms of violence:

When speaking about "violence," it's important to distinguish the rock thrown through a window from the rock thrown at another human being. This is not a semantic distinction. All expression of anger is on a continuum, but historically property destruction doesn't necessarily lead to violence toward other human beings.

The person-property distinction is particularly well-developed among radical environmentalists. In the March-April 1998 issue of Earth First! journal, several contributors took part in a debate forum on "the cult of nonviolence." This forum was organized in response to an essay that was published in the journal in November-December 1997, in which the authors reject the view that nonviolence is the only acceptable code of activism: "What we [those who adhere to a strict code of nonviolence] have complicitly created is a romantic backdrop for herd mentality. We build heroes, inflate martyrs and devalue the roles of other activists. People feel compelled to win approval by getting arrested, perhaps rejecting what they feel is right or effective." By contrast, there are a number of examples of arguably violent practices, including tree-spiking (which endangers the lives of loggers), which is practiced by a few and condemned by most. Likewise, "monkeywrenching," or rendering inoperable the equipment of corporations and individuals in order to prevent them from doing work that may harm the environment, is also controversial for a variety of reasons. For example, in some cases monkeywrenching can deprive an independent logging contractor of a livelihood in a rural area where there are no other jobs, an act one writer terms "a flagrant abuse of class privilege." Monkeywrenching can also put the lives of workers at risk, although there are practices that pose no immediate threat of harm, but which clearly are aimed at the destruction of property. And it is on this fulcrum - the question of the protection of corporate property - on which a liberal-versus-radical debate over nonviolence rests. As one contributor to the Earth First! forum concludes in criticizing the code against the destruction of property: "How can a creed fashioned with the ostensible aim of preserving the Earth even acknowledge the idea of 'property'?" Not surprisingly, such challenges to the sanctity of corporate property have been applied not only to environmental issues, but also to issues of civil rights, workers' rights, and human rights in general. Indeed, the question of what is the greater harm is one basis upon which damage done to corporate property at demonstration sites has been defended.

It is unlikely that property destruction can be shown to fit a universal definition of civil disobedience, even if we might make a compelling case that it is rational, and even if we demonstrate that it amounts to a lesser form of violence than what is perpetrated by those who own the property. However, damaging or destroying corporate property in order to make a strategic statement is not "senseless" simply because it violates the sensibilities and class interests of property owners. The destruction of corporate property, including capital equipment, may be based on very rational grounds, reflecting opposition to the destruction of a way of life in all of its social, cultural, political and economic complexity. Whether or not it is unwelcome, such destruction should not be viewed as random or wanton, but instead it may be symbolic and clearly motivated, as in the case of the early nineteenth century Luddite movement.

What concerns many critics of nonviolence, and what sometimes leads them to embrace violent alternatives, is the sense that nonviolence has become a normalized, domesticated, and sometimes disempowering form of civic action that may be viewed as posing little pressure on corporate leaders and government officials to rectify injustices for which they may be responsible. Indeed, nonviolence may offer officials a chance to be self-congratulatory by enabling them to show how open they are to respectful and domesticated dissent toward policy agendas to which they are wedded. In symbolic terms, the difference for some is what separates the legacies of Martin and Malcolm although, as I have suggested, it would be misleading to paint these viewpoints as fundamentally incompatible.

Conclusion
On April 19, 1995, Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh left a truck bomb in front of a federal government office building in Oklahoma City, and caused an explosion that killed 168 people. His stated reasons had to do with taking revenge against a government that he believed to be intolerably unjust. An earlier massacre of eighty-five men, women, and children at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas in 1993, resulting from an assault by U.S. federal law enforcement agents, had become a modern-day equivalent of the Alamo in the minds of a number of overlapping groups, including libertarians, white supremacists, Christian extremists, and militia members. McVeigh fit such a profile, and he explicitly used Waco as a rallying call to freedom. When captured after fleeing from the site where he left the bomb, McVeigh was wearing a T-shirt that had a picture of a tree on the back, along with the text of that memorable quote from Jefferson: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Should we conclude that McVeigh, an ostensive lover of liberty who committed an act of extreme violence against his fellow citizens - innocent victims who included infants and toddlers - was a man who acted in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson? Connor Cruise O'Brien believes so, but not because he wishes us to admire or defend McVeigh. It comes as no surprise to O'Brien that a Tim McVeigh should emerge and bless his terrible actions with the widely consecrated words of Jefferson, but O'Brien wishes not that we condemn McVeigh for distorting Jefferson. Rather, he condemns Jefferson for providing vague moral authority that condones violence, reinforced later in Jefferson's hearty endorsement of "the Terror," the bloodletting that took place in revolutionary France. O'Brien argues that, although liberalism and terrorism seem to be opposing concepts, what they have in common is a devotion to freedom, both freedom "combined with order and limited by law" and freedom that is asserted as the "rightful heritage of a particular group of people defined by nationality, religion, language, ancestry, or territorial affiliation," and who feel they are being denied it by some other group or groups. According to the latter conception, "Freedom so understood is one of the most powerful of human motivating forces and the most destructive, impelling large numbers of people to risk their lives for it and to take the lives of others, the enemies of freedom." Moreover, O'Brien believes that American liberalism is not strong enough to combat home-grown terrorism, "the version of the Jeffersonian tradition offered by McVeigh and Nichols." Citing the inability of American liberalism to produce meaningful gun controls, O'Brien concludes, "If American terrorism ever acquires sustained momentum, it could be more dangerous than is today's terrorism in the Middle East and the British Isles."

O'Brien's ungenerous assessment of Jefferson's legacy contrasts with those that emphasize the Jeffersonian spirit of resistance against tyranny, although that is not what is most important about O'Brien's law-and-order focus. Rather, it is his view, derived from John Stuart Mill, that the only end for which we are justified in interfering with people's liberty is "self-protection." Invoking the doctrine of self-protection, O'Brien's eerily prescient prescription is that, "If the ordinary courts, and the ordinary criminal laws, are inadequate to protect the citizens from terrorism, then a liberal of the school of Mill could legislate, without a qualm of principle, for the introduction of internment without trial of persons whom the security authorities believe to be terrorists." O'Brien's statement, made in 1996, seems a blueprint for the Bush administration's response to the September 11 attacks. In O'Brien's view, the threat to an effective response to terrorism in the United States is not liberalism that is balanced by a doctrine of self-protection. Rather, he argues, it is liberalism that is absolutist, and that foments armed militias and home-grown terrorists. Are the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects the right to keep and bear arms, and the First Amendment, which the federal judiciary has interpreted as providing protection of the right to publish instructions on how to make a bomb, matters that should worry Americans? O'Brien believes so, and such worries about the causes and risks of terrorism clearly fit within the framing of contemporary anxieties in the United States and other countries over trade-offs between civil liberties and public safety and security. From a civil libertarian viewpoint, the frightening thought about O'Brien's view is that it has become all too easily accepted in American civic discourse after the September 11 attacks, a consequence of which has been to place into the unaccountable hands of a small number of individuals the discretion to act with impunity against those they "believe to be terrorists." This is bad news as far as the freedom to dissent is concerned. To paraphrase Vincent Blasi, we live in a pathological period. As in an earlier pathological period, one in which the term "communist" could be used to slay one's political opponents and create political capital for oneself and one's political allies and supporters, the term "terrorist" now stands in its place. As in the past, and in many other contexts, the concept of terrorism is poorly defined, and conveniently so for many who aim to silence dissent.

As far as the viability of the emerging formations of global civil society is concerned, the distinction between what is and is not terrorism was already vitally important prior to September 11. And the discourse on terrorism has become even more vital to civil society groups since that day, particularly as it relates to the freedom to dissent and the right not to be enjoined from engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience. The politics of shame, which are central to the practice of civil disobedience, constitute in such a context an appeal to public reason about what is morally just. But efforts to oppose injustice, and attempts to articulate a vision of global justice, risk a great deal when they consider the lure to become violent. From a strategic perspective, to be reduced to violence is to play into the hands of those with the power and the keen motivation to derail such a movement. It should come as no surprise that one of the tactics of covert law enforcers in trying to undermine oppositional movements is to provoke them to violence, thereby making the subsequent crackdown a welcome response in terms of media coverage and public opinion. When non-state actors abandon the moral high ground of nonviolence, they become more easily classified as criminals and terrorists in the eyes of the state, and the mass media, and from the viewpoint of mainstream public opinion. Based on that scenario, it would not be difficult to imagine that the cause of global justice could suffer tremendous, perhaps irrevocable damage. It is a credit to this movement that it has been mostly nonviolent. History will no doubt show that Italy's Berlusconi government put the brutal face of state terrorism on neoliberal globalization, a face that many have argued was there already, but that was simply masked from the vantage point of mainstream public opinion in the global North. What could lead to a tragic future is the failure of those who cannot see that the moral superiority of this movement is derived largely from its capacity to appeal to reason by communicating its views publicly and nonviolently. Violent action by activists is a threat to the well-being of nonviolent political activists, and to the causes they represent, in the sense that it offers greater legitimacy to political repression than might otherwise be available to governments operating alone or in cooperation. Violence, whether it is on the streets or in cyberspace, can bring down repression against legitimate dissent, which is the most important instrumental reason why nonviolence must be advanced. Not only is nonviolence intrinsically virtuous, it also lends moral authority to the health and longevity of progressive action.