 Many democratic theorists incorporate political realism in their approach as they strive to think about and “learn from the streets” (Celikates 2014), in a “bottom-up” approach designed to understand particular contemporary protest movements. This approach constitutes a stark departure from “top-down” liberal approaches like Rawls’s and Dworkin’s that require agents justify their disobedient protest before engaging in it. As Alexander Livingston puts it, many democratic and critical theorists today seek to draw “theoretical insights from protest movements themselves around the globe rather than legislating moral guidelines for activist praxis from the sidelines” (Çıdam et al 2020, 540). Guy Aitchison sees this as a central feature of the ‘new civil disobedience debate’, in which scholars seek to respond to ‘a new era of political protest and unrest’ characterized by “the proliferation and intensification of oppositional political action by groups challenging economic inequality, racist policing, immigration enforcement, austerity, war, climate change, financial oligarchy, privatization, and corporate domination of cyberspace” (Aitchison 2018b, 5, 7–8) – which theorists tend to be in broad sympathy with. Such bottom-up approach also diverges from David Lefkowitz’s and Kimberley Brownlee’s defenses of a moral right to civil disobedience that applies impartially to all acts of civil disobedience, justified or not (see 4.2).