rebel

rebel n Rebel, insurgent, iconoclast are comparable when they denote one who rises up against constituted authority or the established order.

Rebel carries the strongest implication of a refusal to obey or to accept dictation and of actual, often armed, resistance to what one opposes; the term does not necessarily imply antagonism to a government but is comprehensive enough to cover one who defies a generally accepted authority (as of a law, a tradition, or a custom)

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all their friends were protesters and rebels and seceders— H. G. Wells

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one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society— Mailer

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Insurgent applies chiefly to a rebel who rises in revolt but who is not regarded by the authorities as having the status of an enemy or belligerent; thus, rebels in a colony or dependency of an empire may, from the imperial point of view, be designated as insurgents, even though they call themselves rebels

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at the beginning of the war Lincoln held the idea that the Southerners were insurgents and that those captured in arms should be punished as traitors— Muzzey

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In a more extended use insurgent applies to a rebel (as in a political party, a church, or a group of artists or writers) who rises in revolt not so much in an attempt to destroy the organization or institution or its laws or conventions as in the hope of effecting changes or reforms believed to be necessary

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the progressives, who favored giving the voters more control over the nation's political and economic life, were called insurgents— Canfield & Wilder

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the free verse movement was led by a group of insurgents

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Iconoclast, historically applicable to one of a party of insurgents in the Eastern Church in the 8th and 9th centuries who opposed the use of images, is applied in an extended sense to a person who, especially in the capacity of a reformer, violently attacks an established belief, custom, tradition, or institution

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I have become a reformer, and, like all reformers, an iconoclast. ... I shatter creeds and demolish idols— Shaw

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the blundering crudity of the tough-minded iconoclast— Garvin

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Analogous words: *opponent, antagonist, adversary: assailant, attacker (see corresponding verbs at ATTACK)