Nonviolence can work from any direction, including from governments. In a town in PA, civil disobedience has been made legal, protecting protestors from crackdown while defending their community from large corporations. (Read more about it here)
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It seems like an oxymoron to make civil disobedience “legal.” That’s like “jumbo shrimp” or “military intelligence.” Civil disobedience is generally understood to be breaking an law openly (either an unjust law or an otherwise just law to highlight an unjust situation) and accepting the consequences. Rather than making civil disobedience legal, I would suggest that the City Council changed the law so that whatever action the protestors were taking was no longer illegal, making it no longer possible for the protestors to commit civil disobedience in the same way.