Workshop "Non-compliance to the rules and disobedience towards the law"

Acts of disobedience are increasing today. Dissident behaviors express new types of political commitment and mobilization. Madrid indignant protesters, Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street are some manifestations of this phenomenon. Beside collective movements, other conducts of disobedience are less visible, but equally important; for instance, when a citizen refuses to pay taxes or do not comply with traffic rules or refuses to participate in the election when vote is compulsory. These ordinary conducts are also part of the contestation of social norms and order.
In non-democratic or in transition to democracy countries, scholarly works have highlighted how complex the phenomenon of non-compliance with rules is. They have showed the existence of a culture of non-compliance, linked not only to the problem of national State legitimacy but similarly to the influence of other normative orders, such as tradition or religion. Disobedient citizens experience a tension between, on the one side, what they consider as the moral norms or customary rules, and, on the other side, the current legal norms. How these plural normative orders are connected one to each other and how they affect the rule of law and the democratic regimes?
Through this workshop, we want to examine how citizens experience the law and the rules in different social and political settings. Crossing different approaches – Sociology, Political science, Law, and Anthropology – allows us to analyze both organized and collective behaviors of disobedience, such as destroying GMO crops or commercial billboards, as well as ordinary and individual conducts of non-compliance to the rules, such as cheating during an exam or breaking the traffic laws. These different forms of disobedience and non-compliance invite us to think about the articulation between individual and collective behaviors (to the extent that each conduct of non-compliance is embedded in a larger social context and contributes, in return, to shape it) and between political and self-interested acts of resistance.
The phenomenon of non-compliance to the rules can be analyzed from two perspectives: one, from the point of view of the actor (individual or collective) who are involved; the other from the purposes of action (interest-oriented or value-oriented). By crossing these two focuses, four practices of disobedience can be distinguished: (1) the non-compliance by an individual, as a selfish and interested practice, for example when a driver jumps the lights or when a citizen does not pay taxes; (2) the non-compliance by an individual who thinks the norm is unjust or immoral, for example when a physician does not follow the law in the case of abortion; (3) the non-compliance by a group in order to fulfill its interests, for example the gas smuggling practices on the border between two countries and; (4) the non-compliance by a group on behalf of shared values, for example indignant protesters. These different forms of disobedience and non-compliance to the norms allow us to analyze dissident legal mobilizations and highlight activities which differ from conventional political protestation.
Through these questions, we suggest more broadly to examine how ordinary citizens experience the law and the legality and which cultures of legality are constructed in different social and political contexts. In short, the comparative analysis of disobedience practices allows us to think about the relationship between legality and legitimacy and between the law and other normative orders.