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Civil in sentence

3102 examples of Civil in a sentence

And, like many other Nobel laureates, including Jelinek, she has played an active role in civil society, most recently taking a stand against Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
The future remains uncertain, but the assumption that Arabs’ demands for fair governments and civil dignity can still be repressed, like a genie squeezed back into the bottle, is a self-serving fantasy of irremediable autocrats – and of some in the West.
It might also mean engaging Russia in the hope that its emerging civil society will give rise to a more truly democratic regime, one that might be ready to supersede the traumas of the Cold War and be drawn to closer cooperation with the West.
Thus, an effective leader is one who promotes free speech, engages in civil discourse, and remains open to compromise.
As it happens, there is a more precise alternative to “resistance” that is rarely mentioned nowadays: civil disobedience.
In theory, civil disobedience should be an effective weapon against populists.
First, there is a widespread misunderstanding of what civil disobedience actually entails.
And, second, changes in the media landscape have made it harder to convey the message of civil disobedience to a broad and diverse audience.
The American philosopher John Rawls offered the classic definition of civil disobedience in the early 1970s.
In Rawls’s formulation, those who commit acts of civil disobedience should be prepared to accept the penalties for doing so.
In each case, the “civil” in civil disobedience has been conflated with civility, as in politeness or general respectability.
He was echoing Martin Luther King, Jr., who argued that one who breaks the law in the name of civil disobedience “is in reality expressing the very highest respect for the law,” by highlighting its fundamental injustice in such a way as not to foreclose on future cooperation with one’s fellow citizens.
That invocation of love should not be taken to mean that civil disobedience must be non-confrontational.
Rawls, King, and other defenders of civil disobedience took it for granted that the message – an appeal to principles of justice – would reach a majority of citizens undistorted.
Accordingly, potential practitioners of civil disobedience should not allow themselves to be caught in a trap of politeness and respectability.
In other situations, it will mean live-streaming acts of civil disobedience and hoping that authoritarians’ brutal methods will be exposed to a large enough audience through social media.
Civil disobedience would certainly be more effective in a less distorted media landscape.
The scientists, writers, and anti-censorship activists who led the campaign were assisted in Parliament by Lord Lester, a well-known British civil liberties lawyer, who introduced a Private Members’ Bill in 2010, and eventually by endorsement of reform by all three major political parties.
Second, its position regarding Syria’s civil war is unsustainable.
That same urgency must be applied to peacemaking in Syria; after all, the refugees are a product of the country’s long, brutal, multi-sided civil war.
The civil war has enabled the extremist Islamic State to build up its capacity to the point that, if the Syrian regime were to collapse entirely, the group would likely be able to take advantage of the power vacuum to seize control of the entire country.
Swollen cohorts of young, underemployed people may cause an increase in crime and civil unrest.
From 1996 to 2006, Nepal was wracked by a brutal civil war that pitted a Maoist insurgency against the long-ruling monarchy, whose powerful army initially enjoyed the support of the country's democratic political parties.
But it is India – which maintains open borders with Nepal, and received millions of Nepali refugees during the civil war – that probably has the most at stake, as renewed conflict would destabilize India's hill districts, while leaving its Himalayan borders vulnerable to Chinese encroachment.
And, to do that, an energetic civil society must demand an end to crony capitalism.
Of course, governments cite all sorts of reasons, security concerns such as those relating to terrorism now being at the top of the list, to justify the repression of NGOs and other civil society groups.
The issue of shrinking and closing spaces for civil society must be added to the agenda of national parliaments, multilateral organizations, and international negotiation processes.
Dissolving this lucrative conglomeration at a time when the economy has little else to offer multitudes of civil servants and workers – unemployment currently stands at almost 28% – will be difficult and unpopular.
Such is the case with Syria’s civil war.
That may sound like a description of a failed state, a desperately poor country beset by civil war, or a fictional dystopia.
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