Civil disobedience is a deliberate, public, generally nonviolent violation of law undertaken to protest an asserted injustice. Participants may accept legal consequences to expose a conflict between legal duty and moral claim. The violated rule can be the object of protest or a means of dramatizing another wrong. Civil disobedience differs from lawful protest because it intentionally crosses a legal line, and from ordinary lawbreaking because it makes a political and moral appeal.

Protest communicates visibly; boycott withdraws economic or social cooperation; civil disobedience deliberately violates law without making violence its method; political violence relies on physical coercion or threat. An event may combine tactics, but one participant's violence does not logically redefine every peaceful participant's action.

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