The Cambridge Companion to Civil Disobedience is a timely, comprehensive, and thought-provoking edited volume that brings together an impressive array of scholars to “reconsider main competing theoretical accounts of civil disobedience” and “reexamine their core components” (p. 3). Revisiting the theory and practice of civil disobedience in this manner, the editor William Scheuerman argues, has become a necessity given the changing political circumstances characterized by the proliferation of, and concomitant backlash against, protest movements and new forms of activism that pursue controversial and, at times, outright “illegal” political action. The insightful and diverse contributions to the volume confirm the prescience of this observation.

One of the most stimulating aspects of this collection of essays on civil disobedience is its systematic approach to, and careful organization of, the rich and conflicting material at hand. Scheuerman, who draws on W. B. Gallie’s notion of an “essentially contested concept” (p. 5), emphasizes that disagreements on the meaning of an evaluative and internally complex concept like civil disobedience are not shortcomings but rather potential starting points for a fruitful intellectual and political exchange. As an essentially contested concept, civil disobedience is defined with reference to certain core components, including “civility, conscientiousness, non-violence, and a willingness to accept legal sanctions” (p. 6, emphasis in the original). Competing theoretical positions interpret these components differently and offer alternative accounts as to how much weight should be given to each. Rival theoretical positions thus formed are not closed to revisions. Quite the opposite, the interpretive debates surrounding civil disobedience constantly respond to “changing circumstances” (p. 6).

Using these insights as an organizational rubric, Scheuerman divides the book into three parts. The essays in the first part explore the competing theoretical and political approaches to civil disobedience. Part II showcases the current interpretive debates on each core component listed in the paragraph above, and the contributions in the final section engage with the challenges posed for existing conceptions of civil disobedience by globalization and digitalization. For Scheuerman, what guides this project of multisided intellectual exchange is the conviction that, when taken seriously, disagreements surrounding civil disobedience can pave the way to “some modest conceptual (and normative) gains and perhaps even something such as theoretical progress” (p. 9), bringing to light previously neglected elements of the concept.

Whether such a “fuller” (p. 8) understanding of civil disobedience is possible, or even desirable, is, of course, a matter of debate. One can, for instance, argue that due to its—in James Ingram’s words—“enormous prestige, even hegemony, in contemporary political discourse” (p. 194) the ongoing preoccupation with civil disobedience may lead to a lack of appreciation for other modes of oppositional practices. Even worse, when people engage in such forms of resistance, their actions may be deemed “illegitimate” by politicians, pundits, and theorists, who “hold them to standards derived from theories of civil disobedience … that may not be appropriate to their situations or aims” (p. 195). With these concerns in mind, the three essays that bookend the first part offer fascinating readings of the works of civil disobedience’s canonical practitioner-theorists that demonstrate how their radical ideas have been “domesticated” through a series of political appropriations and reinterpretations by various theories of civil disobedience. Russell Hanson highlights Henry David Thoreau’s “willingness to consider violent forms of resistance to unjust laws” (p. 40). Erin Pineda powerfully argues that Martin Luther King provides “less a theory of civil disobedience than an expansive politics of disobedient civility” (p. 70, emphasis in the original) that rests on the transformative and risky proposition that “individuals could remake themselves—and the world around them—anew, through non-violent collective action” (p. 73). And by “pulling on the anarchist threads of Thoreau’s and Mohandas K. Gandhi’s thought and practice” (p. 194), Ingram shows how their works can offer alternative visions of politics that are not limited by “the statism and legalism” (p. 195) of the liberal and democratic accounts of civil disobedience.

Other contributors suggest that rather than an indication of a problem with civil disobedience per se, the limits of contemporary discussions are an effect of how the term is theorized by rival approaches. Writing from a radical democratic perspective, Robin Celikates convincingly argues that once we transcend the liberal/deliberative models that “underestimate the transformative effects of civil disobedience” (p. 142), it becomes clear that civil disobedience can take “much more radical forms” (p. 143). Andrew Sabl’s realist vision of civil disobedience opens up space for disobeying the law for strategic reasons that are readily dismissed by nonrealist accounts. Alexander Kaufman and William Smith deftly defend the liberal and deliberative democratic approaches to civil disobedience, respectively, arguing that such accounts offer more expansive conceptualizations of civil disobedience than they are given credit for by their critics.

The contributions in the second part rethink the core components of civil disobedience to develop a conceptual account that can accommodate contemporary political realities. Candice Delmas argues against Celikates’s and Kimberley Brownlee’s attempts to broaden the notion of civility and instead makes a persuasive case for the importance of identifying justifiable forms of uncivil disobedience. As an antidote to the fruitless violent/nonviolent dichotomy, Alexander Livingston offers a sophisticated understanding of nonviolence as “a different way of wielding coercion to bind communication with confrontation” (p. 255) to account for the disruptive aspects of civil disobedience. Maeve Cooke expands the ethical dimensions of civil disobedience beyond “considerations of conscience and duty” (p. 248) to include “radical transformation of individual and collective identities” (p. 232) through political action. Finally, Christopher Bennett and Brownlee address the question of whether civil disobedients should face punishment and argue that justifiable acts of civil disobedience can involve illegal action whose punishment may be unjustifiable.

The final part of the book brings together different attempts to think civil disobedience anew in the face of changing circumstances and concludes with Kurt Schock’s broad survey on how to assess the “consequences” of civil disobedience. Addressing the political changes introduced by globalization, Luis Cabrera broadens the scope of civil disobedience to account for morally permissible legal violations of nonstate actors such as nongovernmental organizations, migrants, and asylum seekers. More controversially, imputing political intentionality to migrants’ actions, Cabrera argues that unauthorized border crossings can be “characterized as a form of principled resistance” (p. 330). David Lefkowitz asks if states can engage in civil disobedience and answers with a qualified “yes.” Finally, Theresa Züger’s and Scheuerman’s insightful essays turn to politically motivated digital activism and whistleblowing, respectively, to explore if such practices can be understood as reinventions of civil obedience. Both scholars agree that while expanding the conceptual boundaries of civil disobedience to include emerging digital tactics/whistleblowing runs the risk of undermining the specificity of civil disobedience, it is important to pay attention to activists’ claims to have modeled their actions on the principled law breaking of iconic figures such as Gandhi and King to sustain a fruitful dialogical relation between theory and practice.

This emphasis on the importance of a dialogical relation between theory and practice takes me to my only criticism of the volume. If there is one thing that is missing in this encyclopedic project, it is an account of how civil disobedience is currently being practiced by political actors in different localities in the Global South. Surely, some of the contributors mention cases such as the most recent uprisings in Turkey and Hong Kong (Celikates), the Pussy Riot’s protests in Russia (Delmas), India’s National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (Cabrera), and the Burmese democratic movement (Sabl) for illustrative purposes. Yet, when people in Hong Kong, Myanmar, South Korea, India, Russia, Turkey, Chile, and Argentina, to name a few, engage in protest movements, they borrow resistance practices from one another, adapt those practices to their own political realities, and innovatively use the language of civil disobedience, thereby offering insights into the limits and untapped potentials of civil disobedience. The absence of such a global perspective is especially conspicuous in a volume that opens with a compelling conceptual history of civil disobedience documenting how the concept traveled from one country to another, taking a different form each step of the way. According to Hanson’s riveting account, civil disobedience was first introduced in the United States in sermons against the Fugitive Slave Law and appropriated by the editors who posthumously used it to title Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience”; the term was then taken up in the United Kingdom as Thoreau’s work was reissued by those with Tolstoy-inspired Christian Pacifist leanings. Finding its way to South Africa through those UK-based publications, it was appropriated by Gandhi whose unique conceptualization of civil disobedience was then reinterpreted by King. Can we find the traces of a similar iterative interpretive process today, whereby civil disobedience is being reinvented by activists in different parts of the world? While The Cambridge Companion to Civil Disobedience does not address this question, it offers a brilliant and illuminating overview of the contemporary debates on civil disobedience and for that it will no doubt become an invaluable resource for anyone who is interested in politics of protest.