Thread by @berglund_oscar

🧵Thread of stuff I’ve learnt from studying civil disobedience/direct action/disruptive protest for the last decade. Not least climate activism. (Academic references & examples can be provided on request). 1/11

Disruptive protest is by far the easiest way to get media attention. March through a town with a thousand people and nobody will care. Block a road, occupy an important building or important infrastructure and the media is much more likely to engage. 2/11

Disruptive protest provokes and creates tension. It polarises. It pushes some people away whilst pulling others towards the cause, to care more, to engage or just to become more aware. 3/11

But disruptive protest is very very rarely counterproductive. It does not turn people against its cause. Nobody who cares about climate change stops caring because of some annoying protestors. People don’t work like that even if they pretend to. 4/11

Protests are rarely popular with the majority but still often further the cause. That doesn’t mean that being unpopular is unproblematic. We also need a broad and diverse climate movement and people don’t want to join one if all their friends will think they are dicks. 5/11

Direct action can get direct results. Achievable demands are good. If not immediately achievable, it’s good if demands are clear & make sense to people. Insulating homes & stopping new fossil fuel projects are better demands than ‘telling the truth’ or ‘acting now’. 6/11

It matters what your target is. Blocking the M25 gets you in the papers but its relationship to insulating homes is otherwise non-existent. That means that there are no partial wins beyond getting to talk about insulation on TV. 7/11

If your target is the thing you are trying to stop, then you’ve already won something by causing disruption. The fossil fuel industry is the enemy of humanity so disrupting it is inherently worthwhile even without policy change. It makes fossil fuels a little less profitable.8/11

Don’t get arrested for the sake of it. Don’t call the cops on yourself. It looks terrible and privileged and like it’s all a theatre. It’s harder to get people’s sympathy if you’ve done something otherwise pointless just in order to get arrested. 9/11

If you’re going to get arrested, make it count. Block an oil refinery, occupy a museum receiving oil money, occupy a bank funding oil. When the cops come it will be clear who they’re there to protect. Not people, but the profit of the forces that are destroying the world. 10/11

At its best, direct action brings to light the unholy trinity of the fossil fuel industry, the financial sector and the state with all its repressive forces that are all driving us towards climate disasters. 11/11

The best data for this is in @djbailey231’s dataset that shows what he calls militant protest to sometimes achieve its goals whereas non-militant protest pretty much never achieve its goals

This is part of XR original strategy and draws on US civil resistance literature, not least Engler & Engler’s ‘This is an uprising’

Also from Engler & Engler ‘This is an uprising’ but I draw this conclusion from looking at opinion polls about the protests themselves (unpopular) & the policies they support (popular). Case by case basically.

My own book ‘Extinction Rebellion and Climate Change Activism’ has plenty on this point.

Anarchist direct action literature is useful here. Graeber etc. also referenced in my book on XR

Again, anarchist direct action literature referenced in my book on XR

I bring up this critique of XR’s arrest strategy in my book. There’s just very no historical evidence to say that seeking arrest in itself is a useful tactic.

The reading I set for students here is @Andrea__CJN’s article about anti-fracking protests in the UK

As this thread took off I have now suggested some readings underneath most of the points raised

Much of it is covered in my book on XR: link.springer.com/book/10.1007/9…