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.

Violence can provoke repression, alienate allies, injure uninvolved people, and displace the movement's stated issue. Calling property destruction, threats, and peaceful civil disobedience the same thing destroys distinctions needed for both legal and political analysis.

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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