It has been two years since the inauguration of President Donald Trump and the massive, worldwide Women’s March protests that came the next day. In the time since, a capital-R Resistance to Trump, his administration, and his agenda has helped people focus energy on efforts to counteract his political machinations.

“The resistance” has been an important development: It has engaged the public in politics and in protest, raised awareness about the deleterious effects of the administration, and become a go-to phrase to capture a moment. But it has also prompted criticisms of whether it’s enough to simply oppose Trump or if there is a responsibility to address the systemic forces he’s exploited, begging questions of whether or not something beyond resistance is necessary or even possible.

There have been moments that go beyond resistance in recent history. The Black Lives Matter movement and moments like Occupy Wall Street and Disrupt J20 embody a spirit of rebellion. A context of resistance only gives that rebellious spirit room to grow and has given some people the impetus to question the nature of our society and wonder whether revolution — a true change to the systems of oppression, discrimination, and disenfranchisement — is possible, realistic, or too dangerous.

Teen Vogue spoke with two writers and scholars who shared their thoughts not only on resistance but on two other key concepts that create an alliterative spectrum of political opposition: rebellion and revolution. Though some may consider their ideas controversial, George Ciccariello-Maher and Keeanga-Yamhatta Taylor have studied these concepts and share with us scholarly and historical perspectives on where they could fit into the spectrum of long-term, sustained social change.

What is resistance and what are its shortcomings?

The Resistance that has formed to address Trump’s tenure as president has been a high-water mark of outrage and action for many who were previously unengaged in opposition. The term gave people politically left of center a name for the passionate and well-founded objections to Trump’s presidency.

“Resistance is something that we do or can do every day, that we can do in a multiplicity of ways,” says Ciccariello-Maher, a writer, political organizer, and visiting scholar at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. But he’s critical of the ways the term is used in the current moment, telling Teen Vogue, “Resistance is not babbling about Russian interference on MSNBC every single day of the f*cking week.”

“Resistance is building actual movements,” Ciccariello-Maher explains. “Resistance is the Abolish ICE campaign that was unleashed over the summer. Resistance is embracing and helping border struggles and migrants, encouraging amnesty, supporting movements. Resistance is resisting police brutality and murder, and arguing for prison and police abolition. This is what resistance looks like.”

Taylor, who is an African-American Studies professor at Princeton University and the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and How We Get Free, agrees that resistance is misunderstood in the current moment: “The meaning of resistance has become almost vague in the wide way that it's used, meaning that essentially anyone who opposes any aspect of Trump's agenda can be lumped into something referred to as a resistance. That doesn't really tell us very much about what that constitutes,” she says.

Both Ciccariello-Maher and Taylor believe that the capital-R Resistance isn’t necessarily something to be totally written off, though.

“I do think what we see across this country is a deepening political understanding of the challenges that we face and an understanding that these are things that we cannot just vote our way out of,” Taylor says.