Civil Disobedience, refusal to obey civil laws or decrees. This refusal usually takes the form of passive resistance. People practicing civil disobedience break a law because they consider the law unjust, want to call attention to its injustice, and hope to bring about its repeal or amendment. They are also willing to accept any penalty, such as imprisonment, for breaking the law.

In perhaps his most famous essay, "Civil Disobedience" (1849), the American author Henry David Thoreau set forth the basic tenets of civil disobedience for the first time. The individual, Thoreau claimed, is "a higher and independent power," from which the state obtains its power. Civil disobedience was later practiced by pacifists and by individuals devoted to such causes as woman suffrage and prohibition. Two notable examples of progress were achieved through the practice of civil disobedience in the mid-20th century. The first, the independence of India, was largely a result of the Satyagraha (Sanskrit, "truth and firmness"), programs of nonviolent resistance by Mohandas Gandhi to the British colonial laws. The second involved civil rights legislation in the United States, in which the nonmilitant efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr., played a primary role.