On violence and collective action : a pressing tension within radical environmental activism
(2026) 2nd Innsbruck Conference on Critical Applied Psychology — Location: Innsbruck, Austria (13.July.2026)
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- Abstract
- (en) Considered “one of the greatest ecological and social challenges of the twenty-first century” (Dietz et al., 2020, p. 135), the environmental crisis is deeply entrenched in capitalism and its exploitative dynamics. Since the late 1960s, environmental activism has increasingly sought to address this issue by raising public awareness and exerting political pressure (Rootes, 2022), grounding its legitimacy in a firm rejection of violence within its action repertoire (Malm, 2020). However, as the crisis continues to escalate, and after nearly sixty years of relentless mobilisation yet limited hard-won victories and no systemic change (Thiri et al., 2022), some scholars and activists have begun to question the pacifist stance prevailing within the movement, instead advocating for the adoption of more radical forms of protest (Simpson et al., 2022). Through this case, we aim to discuss the normative understandings of violence, as well as the related violence-nonviolence dichotomy that prevails within environmental activism and social movement studies (Uysal et al., 2024).
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Grevesse, N. (2026). On violence and collective action : a pressing tension within radical environmental activism. 2nd Innsbruck Conference on Critical Applied Psychology, Innsbruck, Austria. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/281281