The Securitisation of Environmental and Climate Protest

This chapter examines the increasingly pivotal role of environmental activism and protest in the context of the global climate emergency. It also addresses the increasing criminalisation of environmental protestors across the world, including the use of ‘eco-terrorist’ narratives, resulting in protestors being charged with national security offences and labelled ‘extremists’. It provides a critical analysis of the ongoing complexities and challenges faced by climate change protesters by examining the use of property damage as a form of protest and the securitisation framework which is increasingly being used by states to regulate climate protest. A particular focus of the analysis in this chapter is the concept of ecological sabotage, commonly referred to as ‘ecotage’—the targeting by activists of acts of property damage against objects/industries which are producing or contributing to anthropogenic climate change. In examining the lawfulness of state restrictions on climate protest, it focuses on two issues which have not yet been adequately addressed in existing literature: whether ‘significant property damage’ should be conceptualised as ‘violence’ for the purpose of the right to ‘peaceful assembly’ and the utilisation of national security as a permissible limitation on the right to peaceful assembly in Article 21 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights .