Desobediência civil? Um estudo sobre a ocupação na reitoria da UFSM em 2011

Abstract

In 2007, a wave of occupations of rectors of several Brazilian public universities began. These occupations were concentrated in that year, but there were occupations also in later years. In general, what led the students to promote such occupations was the attempt to guarantee rights which they consider to be holders. The belief that seemed to guide the practice of said acts is that the failure of the public power to fulfill certain duties to the student community would give it the right to promote occupations. However, in carrying out these occupations, students eventually violated the legal system in force in our country, practicing illegal acts. It may be thought, at least at first, that the acts of the students could be classified as what is commonly called in Political Science of "acts of civil disobedience", which are considered justified by most authors when certain conditions are met. The general objective of this research is to make a case study of the rectory of the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM) in 2011, in order to answer two questions: (1) such occupation can be considered as a genuine act of civil disobedience and, (2) if so, it may be considered a justified civil disobedience. The work is structured in three chapters. In the first of these, a characterization of our central category of analysis, civil disobedience, will be carried out. In the second chapter, we will present an overview of the main occupations that took place in different Brazilian universities in 2011, with a specific focus on the federal educational institutions, in order to understand the scenario of student demonstrations that included the occupation of the UFSM rectory 2011. In the third chapter, a case study of the UFSM Rector's occupation of 2011 will be carried out, with a detailed description of the occupation of the rectory of UFSM 2011 and analysis of the data collected during the research, attempting to from this, provide answers to the questions that the research proposes. After analyzing each of the relevant aspects of the occupation of the rectory of UFSM 2011, we came to the conclusion that such occupation, although fulfilling almost all the necessary requirements for its framing as an act of civil disobedience and even satisfies the conditions required to be a justified civil disobedience, can not, strictly speaking, be considered a practice of civil disobedience according to the manner in which civil disobedience is characterized by the majority of authors dedicated to the subject. However, this does not mean that occupation can not be considered a legitimate and justified practice. What it means is only that, to demonstrate this, we would have to take, as said before, other avenues of analysis and research than those adopted in this work.