Disobedience, Old and New Definitions. An Introduction

Disobedience has traditionally been played out through collective actions and protests which configure and propose alternative social scenarios to the status quo. Today, in such a changed historical-social context, disobedience represents a mode of political participation and a means through which forms of active citizenship attempt to correct authoritarian drifts. Furthermore, it highlights social problems and morally controversial issues. In the so-called “movements society”, where several kinds of civic participation seem to have some influence on institutions and democratically give shape to different emergent needs, and where the freedom to show disagreement with a political system—through various forms of demonstrations and protests—is considered an implicit prerequisite for democracy and a fundamental right to be guaranteed, the urgent need has arisen for the concept of disobedience to be connoted with new adjectives—social or prosocial rather than civic—addressing new symbolic meanings emerging from contemporary society. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.