The legitimation of protest and control: the Dutch farmer movement

• In Event: State and Political Crime

Abstract

In recent years, Dutch farming communities have engaged in unconventional highway protests against nitrogen policies and consequent plans to shrink the agricultural sector. These protests varied from tractor occupations of national infrastructures to the besmirching of state property with manure. In response, the Dutch state reinvigorated its protest control and increased its surveillance practices.
Across disciplines, disobedient protest regarding environmental politics and the securitization and criminalization of protest have received considerable attention. This paper aims to elaborate on this body of work by coming to a deeper understanding of the relationship between the legitimation of protest by farmer activists and their understanding of protest control. This paper is based on the findings of six months of ethnographic fieldwork on the Dutch farmer movement and in-depth semi-structured interviews with farmer activists that shed light on the form of their resistance, their protest imaginaries and their experiences of control. The paper will conclude with a reflection on the implications of these insights for climate protest policing in the Netherlands and other European countries alike.

Author

• Merel Driessen, Erasmus University Rotterdam