Legislation vs. Liberation: The UK Parliament’s Speciesist Criminalisation of the Radical Animal Rights (RAR) Movement and its Implications for the Climate Movement

• In Event: Theoretical approaches: Labelling, Situational Action and Institutional Anomie

Abstract

Pressured by the Pharmaceutical Industry, the U.K. Government criminalized the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) and other alike organizations around the early-2000s. In NVivo, to capture the process through which these Radical Animal Rights organizations have been criminalized, the present research conducts a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of 44 parliamentary debates that occurred between 1970 and 2022. Using NVivo, utterances were coded according to their 1) Ideology and 2) Grammar of Legitimation. Moving forward, the present research considers how such criminalization may have consequences for the “New Climate Movement”.

Author

• João Raphael da Silva, Ulster University