The Right to Resist: A Theological Investigation of the Moral Legitimacy of Maximalist Campaigns
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.090 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".