Abstracts Political Science

The Right to Resist: A Theological Investigation of the Moral Legitimacy of Maximalist Campaigns

by Walter Patrick McCormick

This thesis presents a theological investigation into the moral legitimacy of maximalist resistance campaigns. It was prompted by the results of landmark research in political science finding that, over the course of the twentieth century, nonviolent campaigns were statistically more effective than their violent counterparts in achieving maximalist objectives. The implications of these findings are profound. If it is not only possible, but more effective, to depose tyrannical governments by nonviolent means, there are ramifications for normative international frameworks, external actors, international law, and moral theology. And yet, to establish efficacy is not to determine legitimacy. This thesis therefore explores the moral legitimacy of maximalist campaigns from a theological perspective. It does so in the context of the social doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church concerning the right to resist political authority. The doctrinal criteria for exercising the right to resist are essentially isomorphic with the doctrinal criteria for just war. Accordingly, it examines legitimate reasons for resistance to a government, as well as legitimate means of resistance – corresponding to the jus ad bellum and jus in bello categories of the just war tradition. It then discusses a doctrinal tension in which the modern Magisterium consistently has rejected recourse to war, and yet endorsed the potential use of force to protect vulnerable populations in fulfillment of the Responsibility to Protect. The study suggests that a route toward resolving this tension may lie in clarifying conceptual relationships that remain underexamined in the doctrine itself: (1) the relationship between the right to resist and the rule of law; and (2) the relationship between the rule of law and sovereignty.