Civil Disobedience:

There’s no single agreed upon definition of Civil Disobedience. Some even refer to it as civil resistance. However, a reasonable definition comes from philosopher John Rawls.

Civil disobedience or civil resistance can take many forms depending on the issue at hand. In some cases, a specific law that is considered unjust is broken for the purpose of bringing attention to it and perhaps the chance to have ruled unconstitutional. When the dispute is the government leaders themselves, disobedience can take the form of strikes, refusal to pay taxes, a slow-down of the economy (citizens literally doing everything more slowly, including working, walking, and driving), refusal to disperse, and boycotts. The disobedience may also extend to digital efforts such as distributed denial-of-service attacks.

A widespread and continuous resistance can increase the cost of repression and demoralize security forces. It can also result in the loss of support among those inside an administration. For example, Augusto Pinochet, having lost a referendum that would result in new elections, attempted to implement a plan for an auto-coup. He attempted to implement efforts to orchestrate chaos and violence in the streets to justify his power grab, however, the Carabinero police refused an order to lift the cordon against street demonstrations in the capital, according to a CIA informant. In his final move, Pinochet convened a meeting of his junta at La Moneda, in which he requested that they give him extraordinary powers to have the military seize the capital. Air Force General Fernando Matthei refused, saying that he would not agree to such a thing under any circumstances, and the rest of the junta followed this stance, on grounds that Pinochet already had his turn and lost. ( Pinochet ).