On June 3, 2019, the Sudanese Transitional Military Council’s armed forces used gunfire and tear gas to disperse peaceful sit-in demonstrators camped in the center of Sudan’s capital, Khartoum. During the action, paramilitary troops killed more than 100 civilians and injured several others. As the nation mourned the massacre the following day, the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA), one of the main civil society forces behind the fall of former President Omar al-Bashir, issued a statement entitled “Complete civil disobedience, and open political strike, to avoid chaos.” 

In the face of the massacre, the statement called upon the Sudanese people to “continue their revolution, and escalate the resistance” through four directives: (1) “complete civil disobedience” (“closing of all main streets, bridges and openings; and bringing public life to a general halt”), (2) “open political strike” in both the public and private sectors, (3) political organization in every domain of life, and (4) “nonviolent resistance” directed “towards change.” Although the Western press has covered this and other civil disobedience campaigns in Sudan, the specificity of SPA’s call has been largely neglected by scholars and political commentators. The SPA called for complete civil disobedience; the statement pointed toward the disobedience of all Sudanese laws.

Originally conceptualized by Mohandas Gandhi, complete civil disobedience differs from the predominant understanding of civil disobedience today, in which activists break by definition certain laws, not all laws of the land. Applying the concept of civil disobedience as the Sudanese activists have done since 2019 would stretch it beyond recognition. It would neglect the basic principle according to which a civil disobedient “breaks the law,” in Michael Walzer’s famous definition, “but does so in ways which do not challenge the legitimacy of the legal or political systems.” Although nonviolent, complete civil disobedience would not be civil disobedience according to this limited definition but instead would be, as the SPA’s statement underlines, a revolution. Accepting this definition means, however, ignoring the anticolonial history of civil disobedience as a political practice—and its continued relevance in the face of the political crises we face today.

Gandhi developed the idea of complete civil disobedience—although not extensively—in his early efforts to conceptualize nonviolent resistance. In a letter to Srinivasa Sastri discussing resistance against the Rowlatt Act, Gandhi suggested for the first time that civil disobedience could be comprehensive to the point that “all the laws of the land” are and must be disobeyed. Two years later, he termed this possibility “complete civil disobedience” in a short article for the journal Young India. In his words, “Complete civil disobedience is a state of peaceful rebellion—a refusal to obey every single State-made law. It is certainly more dangerous than an armed rebellion.”

Gandhi’s theory of complete civil disobedience was part of his broader critique of the state. By following moral imperatives only after extensive reflection and refusing to obey state-made laws only because they are enacted by the state, civil disobedients prefigure life in a “state of enlightened anarchy,” wherein “there is no political power because there is no State.” As Gandhi said in a 1934 interview with Nirmal Kumar Bose, “the State represents violence in concentrated and organized form” and could “never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.” Gandhi’s project for post-imperial India had instead as ideal a federal polity whose fundamental principle of governance would be the “self-organizing capacity of the Indian village” and whose main social unit would be the individual. 

By mobilizing complete civil disobedience a full century after its initial coining by Gandhi, SPA went against the liberal conception of civil disobedience predominant in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. Its statement asserted before the Sudanese and global public that the association’s acts and intentions were civil, civic, and democratic. In the same gesture, the statement disentangled civil disobedience from ideas commonly associated with it today, such as reformist (or nonrevolutionary) intent and political disorder. As the statement insists, complete civil disobedience is oriented toward revolution and fundamental change. By disobeying all laws of the land, activists do not create chaos; counterintuitively, they avoid chaos by contributing to the creation of a new order. 

At a time when belief in the efficacy of nonviolent methods is in decline, and the idea of civility has been used to criminalize social movements around the globe, what could we recover from the concept of complete civil disobedience for our repertoire of activism today? And what to make of Gandhism, given the problematic aspects of Gandhi’s political thought, such as his anti-Black racism during his time in South Africa?

From Sudan to Palestine, Myanmar, and beyond, SPA’s invitation to “bring public life to a general halt,” including through general strikes, is more urgent than ever. Only a radical political project oriented toward completely interrupting life and business as usual can raise the cost of the perpetuation of genocides and humanitarian crises on a global scale. In these times, interruption—complete interruption—must be at the core of progressive politics.