Murphy, Shannonbrooke --- "The Right to Resist Reconsidered" [2012] ELECD 789; in Keane, David; McDermott, Yvonne (eds), "The Challenge of Human Rights" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: The Challenge of Human Rights

Editor(s): Keane, David; McDermott, Yvonne

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9780857939005

Section: Chapter 5

Section Title: The Right to Resist Reconsidered

Author(s): Murphy, Shannonbrooke

Number of pages: 23

Extract:

5. The right to resist reconsidered
Shannonbrooke Murphy

The right to resist has ancient, cross-cultural and pan-ideological origins.
Its antecedent legal and normative concepts include the doctrine of tyran-
nicide codified in Solon's Law and the Athenian Decrees of Demophantus
and Eucrates, transmitted into Roman law and advocated by jurists and
philosophers including Cicero, Seneca and Plutarch,1 and manifested
in the Confucian twin concepts of tianming (mandate of heaven) and
geming (removal of the mandate).2 Of course it is also one aspect of the
broader concept of jihad (struggle against oppression) in Islamic law.3 It
has roots in the earliest conceptions of international law and in a wide
spectrum of philosophical traditions. The right of `the people' to resist
`the sovereign' under conditions of misrule is acknowledged in the just
war theories of Grotius4 and de Vattel,5 as well as in the liberal democratic



1 James F. McGlew, Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece (New

York: Cornell University Press 1993) 88, 185­7. See also Oscar Jászi and John D.
Lewis, Against the Tyrant: The Tradition and Theory of Tyrannicide (Glencoe, IL:
The Free Press, 1957).
2 Mencius (D.C. Lau trans, rev. edn, Beijing: Chinese University Press, 2003)

for example book 1 part B:8, book II part B:14, book VII part A:31. See also
Chung-Shu Lo, `Human Rights in the Chinese Tradition', in UNESCO, `Human
Rights: Comments and Interpretations' (July 1948) UNESCO Doc PHS/3(rev.)
...