This chapter assesses the richest source of positive law on the right to resist, in its historical and contemporary iterations. It first considers several examples of antecedent provisions for lawful tyrannicide in ‘ancient constitutions’ or equivalent law including customary law. It then reviews examples of provisions for a right to resist unlawful exercise of power in Middle Ages ‘constitutions’ or public law equivalents including customary law, and other quasi-constitutional sources such as coronation oaths, as well as intervention appeals rooted in custom. It concludes consideration of the historical right to resist provisions with a review of key modern revolutionary republican and anti-colonial foundational declarations and constitutions. The remainder of the chapter concerns approximately forty contemporary constitutional provisions for the right to resist in African, Asian, European, and Latin American constitutions. Using the template developed in Chapter 4, it provides comparative analysis of their legal features and content. Finally, the chapter evaluates the provisions’ legal meaning by way of a two-fold typology, and their legal value against the question of ‘sham law’.

The declarations of rights issued during the American and French revolutions are the most important outcomes of the eighteenth-century’s debates about natural rights. Concise and clear in their language, these declarations distilled decades of theorizing into easily understood axioms meant to make citizens aware of their rights and of their entitlement to participate in the making of the laws under which they lived. The eighteenth-century declarations on both sides of the Atlantic were drawn up by legislators determined to protect the institution of slavery that so flagrantly contradicted their sweeping statements about natural rights, and they were not intended to grant women equal rights with men. Their expansive language, however, provided a basis for excluded groups to formulate demands that rights be extended to them, even if the authors of the declarations had not intended to do so. The most influential of these documents, the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, used sweeping, universal language. Intended as temporary, it was swiftly canonized as the embodiment of the principles of the French Revolution. The more radical French Declaration of 1793 incorporated social rights to welfare, work, and education. Napoleon rejected the idea of including a declaration of rights in the constitution he imposed in France 1799, but the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights showed the lasting power of the tradition inaugurated with the Virginia Declaration of 1776.