Kevin A. Young & Laura Thomas-Walters “What the climate movement’s debate about disruption gets wrong”

Young, Kevin A.; Thomas-Walters, Laura 2024. What the climate movement’s debate about disruption gets wrong. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11, 25. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02507-y

We argue that majority support is the wrong metric. More important than whether or not a tactic wins over the majority of the public is whether it imposes disruption on elite decision-makers. Our argument consists of three theses: (1) disruption must impose direct costs on elite decision makers; (2) disruption must be sustained; and (3) disruption can encompass a range of tactics. In particular, we advocate a strategy that can impose sustained and escalating costs on those elite sectors that can force both polluters and politicians to confront the climate emergency.

Priority targets include financial institutions that fund and underwrite fossil fuel operations as well as corporations, universities, pension funds, and other institutions that consume and invest in fossil fuels, as well as state actors such as regulators, judges, and politicians. Some sectors of the climate movement are thinking in these terms (Merleaux et al., 2023; Seidman, 2023; Young, 2024).

The victory at Birmingham [1963] thus offers a larger lesson about how political power operates in capitalist societies. Because control over the economy tends to confer control over government, forcing capitalists to change is often a prerequisite for changing government policies. Workers and consumers are uniquely positioned to impose disruption on capital. Black organizers in Birmingham recognized this relationship, as history’s most successful labor organizers (Schwartz, 1976; Womack, 2023; Young, 2024).

A previous campaign for integration in Albany, Georgia, had failed to get the desired results. Usually, that failure is attributed to the lack of high-profile violence employed by city authorities in contrast with Birmingham. But Martin Luther King, Jr., of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) blamed it on the movement’s mistaken approach to disruption:

„All our marches in Albany were marches to the city hall trying to make them negotiate, where if we had centered our protests at the stores, the businesses in the city, [we could have] made the merchants negotiate … If you can pull them around, you pull the political power structure because really the political power structure listens to the economic power structure.“ (quoted in Garrow, 1986, p. 226).

Thus the movement’s power stemmed not from majority support, which it never possessed, but from the ability of a minority to impose direct costs on the elite sectors that had influence over government. Organizers recognized that public opinion was peripheral to government policymaking. Rather than trying to win over the majority, they focused on consolidating support among the Black minority whose withdrawal of patronage “could make the difference between profit and loss for many businesses” (King, 1963, p. 48).

If elites believe disruption will dissipate, they are unlikely to advocate concessions to the movement. In general, elites will only favor concessions if they become convinced that recalcitrance and repression will be counterproductive. That realization is more likely to occur if a movement is well organized, committed to continuous recruitment of new members (and to empowering and retaining those members once they’re recruited), and prepared for the long haul of struggle and escalation.

The climate movement does have the capacity to organize sustained actions—see Just Stop Oil’s slow marches, which disrupted “business-as-usual” in London for several months in 2023 (Just Stop Oil, 2023).^{Footnote 2} However, to reiterate Thesis 1, actions need to be targeted at the right people. The general public is being inconvenienced, but it has no direct power to effect change. Meanwhile, there are campaigns such as “Cut the Ties”, which target companies with links to the fossil fuel industry, but they need to exert continued pressure on specific targets rather than just conducting one-off actions (XR Southeast, 2023). Outside the UK, several major organizations and coalitions such as Stop the Money Pipeline, Insure Our Future, and Rainforest Action Network have been building sustained pressure campaigns targeting banks, insurers, asset managers, and other financial actors.

The real measure of a tactic’s disruptiveness is its contribution to eroding elite support for the industry or policy that the movement opposes.

By that measure, the level of disruptiveness is not always obvious. For instance, a team of dedicated activists leafleting outside a bank or insurance office every day may ultimately be more disruptive to the company’s profits—and indirectly, to the fossil fuel industry’s ability to obtain financing and underwriting—than an occasional act of vandalism.

Karina Eileraas Karakus “Aliaa Elmahdy, nude protest & transnational feminist body politic”

Karakus, Karina Eileraas 2020. Aliaa Elmahdy, nude protest & transnational feminist body politics. In: Stephan, Rita; Charrad, Mounira M. (eds.). Women Rising: In and Beyond the Arab Spring. New York: New York University Press, 161–172.

Bodily protest raises the question of how diverse lives are valued, and whose experiences are officially named, celebrated, or repressed within collective memory. When protesters lie down before tanks in Tiananmen Square, light themselves afire like Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor credited with igniting the “Arab Spring”, go on hunger strikes, fashion themselves into human missives or missiles, occupy Wall Street or Tahrir Square, disrobe in the name of animal rights, or inhabit a tree to challenge multinational corporations, they pose a fundamental metaphysical, socioeconomic, ontological, and geopolitical question: “What is my body – my life – worth to you?” (163)

Because they violate sacrosanct dichotomies of public/private and visible/hidden, naked bodies constitute a uniquely explosive site of protest. Nude protest has a special capacity to reconfigure the body politic by framing vulnerability as a basis for exchange and staging intimate zones of disruption and dis-identification. (163)

[…] Elmahdy stands upright with one leg resting casually on a stool. She faces the camera head-on, directly confronting it with her potent gaze. Defying expectations of female modesty, Elmahdy boldly opens her legs to expose her genitals. Elmahdy’s choice to adorn her naked body with stockings, a red flower, and red flats instantly sexualizes the image. Her portrait is iconic: arresting in its simplicity and insistent in its determination to put sexuality in conversation with revolution. Elmahdy wrests the female nude from the realm of passive aesthetics, investing it instead with sexual and political agency. (165)

Restaging an encounter between camera and naked woman that has historically functioned as voyeuristic (especially in Orientalist odalisque paintings, often framed as if seen through a keyhole), Elmahdy orchestrates a virtual confrontation that affirms her body’s right to occupy an erotically charged spaces; fuses the private zone of the boudoir with the revolutionary public square; and transforms the photographic field into a space of possibility wherein she writes herself into history as artistic, political, and sexual subject. (166)

Elmahdy’s refusal to postpone issues of gender and sexuality sent an explosive message within revolutionary Egypt’s milieu of sexual harassment, gang rape, forced virginity testing, and public shaming of women occupying Tahrir Square alongside men. Her nude photos challenged longstanding cultural taboos by forcing the public to acknowledge sex and gender as critical components of revolution. […] Elmahdy’s audacious cyber campaign echoes one woman’s assertion: “I am with the Arab women’s uprising because I am a revolution, not a shameful private part” (Weirich 2013). (167)

Elmahdy’s alliance with the Islamophobic rhetoric of Femen also erases the re-visioning of religious identity associated with contemporary Islamic feminist movements that question the binary “Islamist-secularist” divide by which Western media often view Elmahdy’s protest. This stance ignores an entire spectrum of Islamic feminist praxis that seeks to integrate religious and feminist identities. By allying with Femen, an organization that uniformly equates nudity with empowerment and hijab with oppression, Elmahdy short-circuits the complexities of her political message. Her liaison with Femen invites us to reflect on the dangers of neocolonial feminism and the limits of transnational feminist solidarity if premised on Western feminist paradigms of “liberation”. (169)