The Criminalisation and Repression of Environmental Protest

• In Event: POLWG Panel 6: Environmental Policing: Climate change, criminalising protests and ecological governance

Abstract

The criminalisation and repression of environmental activists has received increasing attention and is taking place across the world in both more and less democratic countries. It focuses state policy on punishing dissent against inaction on climate and environmental change instead of taking adequate action on these issues. These are authoritarian moves that are not consistent with the ideals of vibrant civil societies in liberal democracies.
This paper explores patterns of criminalisation and repression of climate and environmental protest around the world using data from Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), Global Witness, and Climate Protest Tracker. We argue that the attempt to contain contemporary climate and environmental protest is taking a plethora of forms. From our analysis we find that the repertoires of repression include a) enactments of new anti-protest laws that expand police powers, increase minimum and maximum sentence lengths, and create new offences; b) intensification of policing with increased use of arrests, stop and search, surveillance, under-cover policing, infiltration, and extended use of private security; c) criminalisation through prosecution and courts by re-purposing existing laws to charge protestors; d) use of physical violence against activists by both state (police, armed forces) and non-state (private security, corporations) actors; e) disappearances and killings, generally carried out by the same state and non-state actors; f) vilification through discourses that seek to other and criminalise activists carried out by politicians, media, think tanks and other state and non-state actors. The aim of these repertoires of repression is to deter and prevent, to punish, and to delegitimise systemic concerns about states’ response to environmental degradation, re-casting those as into criminal concerns. The paper ends by presenting a number of policy recommendations

Authors

• Christina Pantazis, Universit of Bristol,

• Oscar Berglund, Univer

• Chris Rossdale, University of Bristol

• Roxana Pessoa Cavalcanti, University of Brighton

• Tie Franco Brotto, University of Bristol