The Duty to Protest

Communicative Resistance,, Enabler’s Responsibility, and Echoing

Abstract

This article argues that the duty to protest is a central democratic obligation required for active citizenship. Failing to protest injustice entails a democratic failure: apathy and complicity with injustice. In order to shed light on the complex issue of how to discharge our communicative obligations to protest injustice, we need constraints and maxims that can help us determine which protests to join or give proper uptake to and in what way. I argue for a contextualist and victim-centered approach that claims: (a) that the victims of injustice have the prerogative to initiate protest and epistemic authority over the communicative life of protest; and (2) that, when participating in protest is not adequate because of our positionality or lack of knowledge with respect to the injustice in question, we still have the obligation to echo protesting voices. My notion of echoing accommodates different ways of properly responding to protest.