The Causal Effects of Violence Against Environmental Justice Activists

• In Event: Environmental Politics in Developing Countries and Marginalized Societies

Abstract

Over the past decade, thousands of community environmental leaders and indigenous land rights activists have been assassinated, with many thousands more facing violent threats. This large-scale violence occurs across the world, spanning dozens of countries. Particularly severe violence against environmental activists occurs in Honduras, Brazil, Indonesia and the Philippines; however, many more Latin American and Asian countries have witnessed at least moderate levels of violence. We still know very little about the logic of this violence, its political and environmental effects, its role in shaping environmental activism across the globe and patterns of media coverage of this violence. While a few human rights organizations and environmental NGOs have attempted to highlight the importance of this issue, political scientists have not studied this issue in detail.

This paper offers the first meso-scale analysis of the logic of violence against environmental justice activists across the global South. The paper exploits two new datasets. First, we collect individual-level data on 2,139 environmental justice conflicts identified in the Environmental Justice Atlas, an online crowdsourced resource. These conflicts span countries in the Global South, but include a substantial number of cases in Latin America. For each conflict, we identify every known individual activist who has experienced some form of violence as a result of his or her indigenous or environmental activism. We collect incident-level records of this violence, collecting data on near assassinations and violent threats, as well as assassinations and violent attacks. This unique dataset allows us to causally identify the effect of violence against environmental justice activists. We do so by exploiting conditionally-as-of random variation, at the individual level, in violent attack outcomes (e.g. comparing conflicts where indigenous leaders were assassinated against conflicts where these leaders were the targets of unsuccessful assassination attempts). This global dataset is based on data that is publicly accessible in local media and human rights reports. We also partner with a local Colombian NGO to analyze incident-level data that includes complete incident data for that country. We replicate our analysis using this more granular data.

Author

• Matto Mildenberger, University of California Santa Barbara