William Smith

Policing by consent is an influential frame of reference for police forces, policy makers, and members of the public in appraising the means and ends of law enforcement in Anglo-American societies. The doctrine is nonetheless vulnerable to powerful philosophical and political objections, which suggests that an alternative paradigm is necessary. This article draws on recent republican political theory in elaborating a doctrine of policing by contestation. This republican conception does not rest the legitimacy of policing on the supposed consent of the policed, but on the availability and adequacy of the means through which the policed can contest arbitrary interference at the hands of the police.

Deliberative democracy is underpinned by ideological preferences that lend unity to an otherwise diverse theoretical paradigm. It is, in particular, shaped by concepts and values associated with liberalism and social democracy, which inform its political goal of embedding deliberative reforms in existing systems of representative democracy. At the same time, practices associated with deliberative democracy are emerging in very different contexts to those envisaged by deliberative democrats. An upshot of this is that deliberative democracy is increasingly undergoing a process of contestation, whereby alternative ideologies revise and rearticulate its core ideas. This article focuses on anarchist deliberation, analysed here as a form of collective organization forged by successive generations of radical activists and underpinned by core values of anarchist ideology. This practice is also presented as a central component of a deliberative anarchism, a normative perspective that constitutes an insurgent challenge to standard theories of deliberative democracy.

There is currently a global wave of protest movements whose militant tactics cannot be subsumed under the category of nonviolent civil disobedience. There has, concurrently, been a surge of interest among political philosophers in the idea of ‘uncivil disobedience’, with a range of theorists converging on the view that there is often no compelling rationale for limiting dissent to the nonviolent repertoire associated with civil disobedience. This discussion piece reconsiders deliberative democratic approaches to activism and protest in light of these political and philosophical developments. It argues that the tendency to frame protest through the catch-all category of ‘non-deliberative’ behaviour elides the distinction between civil and uncivil disobedience, treating as analogous forms of conduct that are quite different in terms of their potential consequences and their ethical complexion. The paper focuses in particular on the difficult case of violence, exploring the normative scope for deliberative theorists to treat it as a potentially legitimate mode of uncivil resistance.

The study of citizenship as a political or moral ideal involves identifying core commitments and capabilities, the cultivation and exercise of which is often presented as a condition of being a ‘good’ citizen. Deliberative democracy was, at least until recently, associated with a conception of citizenship that endorses those qualities that equip us for a certain kind of respectful and reflective dialogue. This article reappraises this conception in light of the so-called ‘systemic turn’ within deliberative theory. It shows how systems thinking has displaced the traditional conception of deliberative citizenship, but that theorists have so far not elaborated a satisfactory replacement. A pluralist model is thus proposed, which casts light on the diverse qualities that a range of actors in a deliberative system might require. The resulting argument is not merely of interest to deliberative theorists, but to all who are concerned with the ethics of citizenship. The main reason is that it displaces the entrenched notion of a ‘good citizen’, in favour of the more heterogenous ideal of a ‘good citizenry’.

Direct action is an attempt to disrupt a contentious practice, rather than an effort to communicate opposition to that practice to others. It has received much less philosophical attention than the related but distinct notion of civil disobedience, which means that we lack comparable insight into its nature, justification and role in more-or-less democratic societies. This article contends that direct action can be legitimate in democracies if it is carried out in line with what is described here as an ethic of responsibility. This ethic imposes duties upon citizens to moderate the coercive and violent dimensions of their activism, while also restricting the use of direct action to the most serious and urgent cases of harm.

Civil disobedience has been theorised as an informal guardian of the constitution in democratic societies, but such accounts struggle to accommodate protest that has an international or global dimension. This article addresses this issue through offering a theory of civil disobedience as transnational disruption. Civil disobedience is ‘transnational’ insofar as it is an appeal to a national, international or global public that highlights failures to observe moral, political or legal values that are an appropriate source of normative authority in global contexts. Civil disobedience is ‘disruptive’ insofar as it obstructs the routine activities of relevant parties in order to draw attention to the demands of protesters. The core argument is that civil disobedience can uphold normative standards that have been incorporated into a dense network of treaties, conventions and global regulatory frameworks. It can thus make a modest but valuable contribution to the processes through which publics deliberate about the meaning and interpretation of these contested norms.

The idea of a deliberative system has been employed to demonstrate that deliberative democracy should not be limited to the give-and-take of reasons, but can also incorporate a range of apparently non-deliberative actions. Despite the appeal of this move, the inclusive spirit of the systemic turn is indicative of a general problem with its theoretical framework. The problem is that the boundaries of a deliberative system have not been drawn with sufficient precision, such that it is not possible to reach a clear determination about what is internal and what is external to the system. The article resolves this problem through suggesting that a deliberative system should only include modes of action that embody substantive norms of deliberative action. This suggests a more nuanced approach to the relationship between deliberative systems and non-deliberative action than is typically found in the existing literature, which is illustrated here through considering the case of disruptive protest.