“Civil disobedience” will here refer to any act or process of public defiance of a law or policy enforced by established governmental authorities, insofar as the action is premeditated, understood by the actor(s) to be illegal or of contested legality, carried out and persisted in for limited public ends and by way of carefully chosen and limited means.
This is a descriptive rather than a formal definition; and it is a recommended definition rather than one that claims to represent current usage with maximal accuracy. One difficulty with this term is that it is rarely defined and never with great precision. Equally regrettable is the absence of systematic literature on the concept and the phenomenon, assuming that the term has a consensual core of meaning.
In this article neither a stringent definition nor a comprehensive survey of doctrines and practices can be attempted. What follows is, first, an attempt to clarify the concept; second, a brief and inevitably sketchy survey of political doctrines of civil disobedience from Socrates to the present time; third, a sketch of some campaigns of civil disobedience, mainly in modern times; and finally, a brief discussion of the prospects for civil disobedience and its justification in the modern world.