Extinction Rebellion and Climate Change Activism Breaking the Law to Change the World Oscar Berglund Daniel Schmidt Extinction Rebellion and Climate Change Activism · Oscar Berglund Daniel Schmidt Extinction Rebellion and Climate Change Activism Breaking the Law to Change the World Oscar Berglund Daniel Schmidt University of Bristol University of Bristol Bristol, UK Bristol, UK ISBN 978-3-030-48358-6 ISBN 978-3-030-48359-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48359-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. 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Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland To all those fighting for a sustainable and just world Contents 1 Introduction 1 References 8 2 XR and Anarchism 9 2.1 The Anarchist Label as Othering 10 2.2 The Non-Anarchism of XR 13 2.3 Direct Action 16 2.4 Prefiguration 18 2.5 Conclusion 21 References 22 3 Civility and Disobedience 25 3.1 Civil Disobedience 27 3.2 Legitimacy 29 3.3 The Last Resort and Fidelity to Law 32 3.4 Arrests, Sacrifice & Exclusion 34 3.5 Conclusion 37 References 37 4 Between Democracy and Efficiency 41 4.1 Nested Structures and Geographical Scaling 42 4.2 Horizontalist Aspirations 44 4.3 Power Structures and Hidden Hierarchies 48 vii viii CONTENTS 4.4 People’s Assemblies 50 4.5 Conclusion 54 References 55 5 Reimagining Democracy 59 5.1 The Crisis of Representative Democracy 60 5.2 Participation and Deliberation 63 5.3 Citizens’ Assemblies and Solution Agnosticism 67 5.4 Revolutionary Reformist Politics 69 5.5 Conclusion 72 References 73 6 A Theory of Change: The Civil Resistance Model 79 6.1 What Is to Be Done? 80 6.2 The 3.5% 84 6.3 Civil Resistance and Climate Change Activism 88 6.4 Conclusion 92 References 94 7 Conclusion: XR, the Climate Change Movement and Capitalism 97 7.1 Creative Tensions 100 7.2 Climate Change Activism & Capitalism 102 References 105 Index 107 CHAPTER 1 Introduction Abstract The introduction sets out four creative tensions that activists should reflect upon. (1) Are XR campaigning to put pressure on the government to address climate change OR are they campaigning to replace the state as we know it with something different? (2) Is it tenable forXRtobesolutionagnosticandleavethesolutionstotheclimateemer- gency to a future Citizen’s Assembly. (3) Can XR continue to have a model of change that they claim is based on social science although it is based on evidence which does not relate to the struggle for equitable climate action? (4) Can climate change activists afford to wilfully ignore the political economy? Keywords Extinction Rebellion · Climate change · Climate emergency · Political economy · Social movements · Protest In 2019, climate change went from being an issue that many people were concerned about to one which many are alarmed by and demand swifter government action on. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic started to talk about a Green New Deal and a multitude of institutions at different levels declared climate emergencies. There are several reasons for that increased salience of climate change in public debate. The hot summers of 2018 and 2019 along with other extreme weather patterns may have made it feel more real and immediate. The school strikes that © The Author(s) 2020 1 O. Berglund and D. Schmidt, Extinction Rebellion and Climate Change Activism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48359-3_1 2 O. BERGLUND AND D. SCHMIDT have grown and grown from a one-girl protest by Greta Thunberg in August 2018 to 1.8 million students striking in 120 countries in June 2019 have been both a cause and an effect of this heightened interest intheclimate.Anothercause/effecthasundoubtedlybeenthegrowthof ExtinctionRebellion(XR)andnotleasttheirlarge-scalecivildisobedience protestinLondoninApril2019whereover1000peoplewerevoluntarily arrested. It was in the aftermath of this protest that the UK Parliament declaredaclimateemergency(Reuters2019);alargelysymbolicactsince it was not linked to specific policies. XR and their April protest took many commentators by surprise and was remarkable in many ways. For two weeks, XR and climate change wereheadlinenewsastheyoccupiedOxfordCircus,MarbleArch,Parlia- ment Square and Waterloo Bridge. The authorities seemed confused in how to deal with this unusual kind of protest that was disruptive, organ- ised, nonviolent and welcoming of arrests. The protest was disruptive in that it closed off important parts of central London for traffic. It was organised in that it did so with thousands of people who seemingly knew wheretheyhadtobeandwhattheyhadtodo.Mostimportantlyperhaps, itwasevidentlynonviolentandpeaceful,whichmadethepolicingofitall the more difficult. The most unusual aspect of the protests was the will- ingness of the protestors to be arrested. That is, arrests were not just an inevitable result of disruption, but an end in itself. The demands of this newsocialmovementwereintheirownwordsto‘tellthetruth’,‘actnow’ and go ‘beyond politics’ (XR 2019a). Telling the truth means that the governmentandthemediashouldbehonestabouttheseverityofclimate change and take responsibility for informing people about what it may mean for society and individual citizens. Acting now means that radical actionhastobetakensoonerandmoredrasticallythananythingthathad beenseriouslydiscussedbypolicymakers.Lastly,bygoingbeyondpolitics, XR claimed that climate change is best addressed by reinventing democ- racy and establishing a Citizen’s Assembly. This body would be selected through sortition and tasked with coming up with solutions to climate change after a process of consulting experts in all relevant fields. Along with the radical and seemingly efficient tactics and the broad demands came a discourse about strategy; a vision for how this form of disrup- tivenonviolentprotestcouldleadtorealchangewhereothersbeforehad failed (XR 2019b). 1 INTRODUCTION 3 In this book we engage with the tactics and strategy of Extinction Rebellion.WeaskwhatXRareandwhatlessonscanbedrawnfromthem. Wedosothroughexploringanumberoftensions,contradictionsorissues regarding XR as political actors. These tensions are woven through the chapters that follow and concern what XR do, how they present them- selves, what their demands are, how they are portrayed by the media and how they see themselves as political actors. We explore different sets of academic literature that address these tensions in different ways. SomeoftheseliteratureshavebeenessentialtodevelopXR’sstrategyand discourses.Othersareimplicitlydrawnuponwhilstothersstillarewilfully ignoredbyXRandtheacademicliteraturethatdirectlyinformsthem.The book is based on research carried out in 2019 and early 2020. We have participatedinXRinBristolandinterviewedbothlocalandnationallevel activists. The tensions that we have identified within and around XR are necessaryforXRactivistsandotherclimateactivistsandpotentialactivists toreflectupon.Indeed,manyalreadydosoandwehopethatthisanalysis will aid those reflections. 1.Are XR a reformist or a revolutionary movement? That is, are XR activists campaigning to put pressure on the government to address climate change OR are they campaigning to replace the state as we know it with something different. The answer to this ques- tion is not obvious and different aspects of XR’s discourse offer contradicting answers to this question. This tension runs through theirlawbreakingprotests,theirdemandsandtheirbroaderpolitical strategy. We also get different answers to this question depending on who we ask within XR. 2.Is it tenable for XR to be solution agnostic? XR do currently not offer answers to how to address climate change. Instead they leave thesesolutionstoafutureCitizen’sAssembly.Atthesametime,XR claim to be committed to climate justice. As climate change politics develop, ecofascism and neo-Malthusian thought are also gathering strength.Suchperspectivespromotesolutionstoclimatechangethat involve deeply unequal adaptation rather than mitigation and tend to focus on controlling populations rather than controlling produc- tion and consumption. This tests XR’s solution agnostic stance. It may push XR to become more explicit advocates for climate justice andmoredirectlypoliticalthantheywouldliketobeperceived.The other risk is that the movement ends up justifying neo-Malthusian