"Minor" Injustices Matter. On the Justification of Civil Disobedience and the Importance of Adequacy

Jannike Riesch

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Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject Politics - Political Theory and the History of Ideas Journal, grade: 1,3, Univers...

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Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject Politics - Political Theory and the History of Ideas Journal, grade: 1,3, University of Frankfurt (Main) (Politikwissenschaft), course: The Philosophy of Civil Disobedience, language: English, abstract: In 2011, current President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Joachim Gauck, discredited civilly disobedient acts committed by supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement as "ineffably foolish" and, on a different note, warned of a protest culture "that only flares if one's own front yard is affected." With the latter statement, Gauck undermined the protest of thousands of demonstrators in the city of Stuttgart who had been engaging in acts of civil disobedience out of frustration about a large-scale construction project on the city's main train station-a project which they perceived to be neither economically nor ecologically reasonable, nor sufficiently legitimized democratically. These attention-grabbing movements receiving harsh judgements of high state representatives such as Gauck reignited the public debate about the justification of civil disobedience in Germany-a debate that is of everlasting importance among theoretical examinations. Whereas within this debate it is largely beyond question that citizens of unjust and corrupt states with no legitimately established authority clearly have the right to (even more drastic forms of) resistance, the real challenge lies in answering the following question: How, that is to say, on which grounds and under which circumstances, can illegal means of protest be justified in a prima facie legitimate state?