Civil disobedience has proven to be a very effective tool for socio-structural change under situations of institutionalized oppression, provided you can achieve the appropriate psycho-cultural transformation in a large enough group of people to carry it out. However, it is a tool that the Bahá’í Community has chosen not to use, because it requires intentionally disobeying the government, which is against Bahá’í law, and would be so damaging to the Bahá’í Cause as to make its other important work much less effectual.
This Bahá’í law includes the caveat to obey every “just government”, which has lead some to believe that civil disobedience is an option. However, as I understand it, no individuals are authorized to decide for themselves what constitutes an “unjust government." Only a supra-national authority with legislative, executive and judicial powers could do this legitimately, and this does not exist yet. Once a world federation of nations is established, if a national government disobeys the international law, then all people are called upon by Bahá’u’lláh to resist it.
In this case then, to disobey the unjust command of a national government would be to obey the just command of the world government, making it lawful. In summary, civil disobedience is only allowed by Bahá’í law when practiced against a lower legal authority who has disobeyed a higher legal authority. Until this situation exists in the world, civil disobedience is not an option for Bahá’ís.
Therefore, we need to find other means to achieve our purposes, which I believe are latently contained in the Writings, although we may not have realized their full potential yet. Our goal should be to identify them and begin to build them into a structured practices that can be tested out, learned from and then replicated in other places. For instance, how would one go about institutionalizing the idea of opposing hatred with love and a thought of war with a stronger thought of peace?
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