2 - Advancing a Legal Definition of the Right

Summary

Responding to the lack of an agreed contemporary legal definition of the ‘human right to resist’, this chapter compares definitional treatments in ordinary construction with those in legal construction, identifying two related problems of conflation in contemporary term usage. It explains the term’s distinction from antecedent concepts such as the exceptio tyrannoctonos or exception of lawful tyrannicide, and from corroborative concepts including the lex generalis or ordinary ‘right of (peaceful) assembly’ and ‘right to protest’ in human rights law, ‘resistance movements’ in international humanitarian law, and ‘insurgent’ or ‘belligerent’ status in customary international law. It also clarifies the conceptual relationship between the ‘right to resist’ and its cognate terms – the ‘right to oppose’, ‘right to disobey’, ‘right to rebel’, and ‘right of revolution’ – identifying both points of differentiation and a ‘common core’. It finally proposes a consolidated contemporary working definition of the superordinate term ‘right to resist’.