Veritatis Gaudium: Multidisciplinary Journal of Postgraduate Studies

This paper develops an epistemic account of political obligation and democratic resistance. It argues that democratic obedience is not a categorical duty owed to authority merely because authority bears a constitutional name. Rather, obedience remains reasonable only where public institutions continue to justify themselves through transparent decision-making, responsiveness to grievance, protection of basic rights, and fidelity to popular sovereignty. Where elections are manipulated, citizens excluded, law applied selectively, or ordinary channels of redress closed, the obligation to obey may be overridden by a higher democratic duty to preserve the conditions of legitimate authority. Drawing on Dewey’s account of warranted inquiry, Rorty’s critique of final political foundations, and contractarian accounts of political obligation, the paper distinguishes everyday compliance from democratic guardianship. Its central contribution is to formulate two cumulative conditions under which resistance becomes warranted: systemic justificatory failure and closure of institutional pathways for correction. It concludes that proportionate, public, and reconstructive resistance is not hostility to democracy, but a civic practice aimed at restoring the justificatory conditions under which obedience can again be reasonable.

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