Resistance, Law, and the Limits of the Disobedience Framework

In the last decade, many scholars have sought to overcome the shortcomings of the reified conception of civil disobedience that was developed in the 1970s by offering alternative conceptions of (un)civil disobedience. The “disobedience framework” is now so predominant that it is almost unthinkable to refer to any protest involving an alleged infraction of official rules as anything other than disobedience. I argue that this overstretching of “disobedience” rests on the misleading assumption that “intentional lawbreaking” occurs in an uncontested political/legal space; it also ignores that, in certain contexts, activists insist on the legality of their protests even when they defy official orders. Examining how feminist activists in Turkey offer alternative interpretations of existing laws to challenge the legality of protest bans, I demonstrate that folding such protests into the disobedience framework silences protesters, erases their narratives of resistance, and adopts the state’s perspective on the “illegality” of their actions.