Contentious Interation in Ultima Generazione (Last Generation). A Preliminary Analysis on Radicalization and Spin-off Movements
From Firenze University Press Journal: SocietàMutamentoPolitica
Fabio de Nardis, University of Salento
Angelo Galiano, Università del Salento
- CLIMATE MOVEMENT AND THE “NEW ECOLOGICAL CLASS
The aim of this work is to offer a preliminary analysis, descriptive for the moment, of the specific case of the “Last Generation” movement as a specif-ic case of a spin-off movement within the broader climate movement that, in recent years, has become central to the international scene. The climate movement is experiencing a paradoxical situation in which both govern-ments and social movements are not addressing the climate crisis seriously and with the right means. Malm uses Lanchester’s paradox to define some of the trends of this historical phase (Malm 2021). John Lanchester is a British novelist and essayist, author of the book War me r, War me r in which he asks why climate activists have not yet committed “terrorist” actions in light of the catastrophic situation in which the world finds itself. Lanchester’s para-dox thus expresses a twofold inability to respond: one coming from the dis-interest of governments in addressing the causes of the climate crisis, and the other dictated by the use of protest modes that are inadequate to the serious-ness of the situation.To date, in fact, climate activists have never indulged in violence, much preferring an action repertoire inspired by the American civil rights move-ment, marked by more assertive and perturbative performances, symbolic and dilemmatic actions that fall under the strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience (Burkett 2016; Dietz and Garrelts 2014; Chenoweth and Stephan 2013). There has been a shift from a conventional or semi-con-ventional repertoire typical of environmental movements to a more perturbative one. What we are faced with is a climate movement that has made nonviolent civil disobedience its hallmark and instead sees violence as a strategy that leads social movements to failure rather than achievement (Chenoweth and Stephan 2013). The use of nonviolent methods, as the leading theorists as well as activists of the climate movement, Bill Mckibben and Roger Hallam, have argued, is not the result of a moral and ethical choice but strictly instrumental. A choice, as argued by some scholars, that sanctions the shift from moral to strategic pacifism (Engler and Engler 2017).The climate movement has so far experienced sev-eral cycles of activity, some punctuated by self-education and information campaigns, others by intense to repeat-ed protest. Each of these has spanned a larger scale than the last (see Dietz and Garrelts 2014; Cassegard et al. 2017; Cheon and Urpelainen 2018). The first of these cycles crossed Europe between 2006 and 2009, especially Great Britain, where a group of Plane Stupid activists invaded the runways of most of the country’s airports, organizing festivals, assemblies, and demonstrations in front of the sites deemed most responsible for climate pollution. The wave then reached Denmark, at Cop15 in Copenhagen.On that occasion, the climate movement brought more than 100,000 people into the streets but did not get a real response from governments. The second cycle began in 2011, in the United States, when President Barak Obama failed to pass the Cap and Trade Act dealing the death blow to the spirit of COP15. Again, thousands of activists took to the streets bringing disarray and anger. Activists later converged on New York City for the Peo-ple’s Climate March in September 2014, where some 400,000 people paraded, tripling the Copenhagen attend-ance. The third cycle opened with the large cloud over Sweden’s sky that led Greta Thunberg to demonstrate at the gates of the Swedish Parliament. Thus began the wave of school strikes known as Fridays for Future that swept across Europe and the rest of the world, including Ant-arctica. This cycle of mobilization was interrupted by the Coronavirus crisis in 2019 that froze the enthusiasm and energy patiently nurtured over the years. Since then, the climate movement has alternated between large cycles of demobilization and small cycles of re-mobilization. One of these is the one that began between December 2021 and January 2022, inaugurated by a number of protest actions born in the spirit and on the legacy of Extinction Rebellion, such as those carried out by Just Stop Oil in Britain, Dernière Rénovacion in France, Letzte Genera-tion in Germany and Ultima Generazione in Italy. These mobilization projects are part of an international net-work, the A22 Network, which since April 2022, hence the acronym, has been mobilizing, in a systematic way, more and more activists in various parts of the globe, to try to defend and save current generations and those to come from climate collapse.As Marwell and Oliver (1984) state, defining a social movement is a theoretical nightmare. The literature is vast and widely differentiated. Some scholars use the phrase “social movement” to cover much or all of the overlapping area between conflict and collective action (Frickel and Gross 2005). Others such as Tilly and Tar-row (2008) define a social movement as a prolonged campaign of claims that makes use of repeated perfor-mances to publicize protest that relies on the organiza-tions, networks, traditions and solidarity that can sus-tain it. Still others see social movements as networked entities that allow actors with different perspectives, interests and visions to mobilize in specific ways by determining their own contribution to the achievement of common goals (Gerlach and Hine 1970; Diani 1992). Marxist thought, on the other hand, places the analysis of capitalism at the center of inquiry as a determining condition to the formation of a social movement (Good-win and Hetland 2013; Nilsen and Cox 2006; Barker 2013; Berberoglu 2019; Della Porta 2015).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/smp-15508
Read full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/smp/article/view/15508
