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Abstract

Recent studies have highlighted the ways in which activism can be suppressed in democratizing nations, yet much of this work tends to be state centered. Our research examines the role that private actors play in the repression of environmental activism in post-socialist Czech Republic. Following the 1989 collapse of the communist regime, the environmental movement experienced a brief period of widespread public support, which quickly gave way to anti-environmental trends and the general vilification of environmental activists. Drawing from indepth interview data, newspaper coverage, and direct observation, we analyze a contentious highway bypass controversy around the city of Plzeň. Results indicate that environmentalists have been forced to contend not only with political hostility, but also with organized forms of public opposition from an anti-environmentalist countermovement organization.

The Double Force of Vulnerability

“…EJ ethnographers focused on processes generate fresh inquiries into what justice itself looks like for particular communities. Ethnographic EJ studies have long worked to explore the ways in which community groups are excluded from environmental decision-making, data collection, planning, and enforcement (Allen et al 2007;Harvey 2015;Little 2009), and works in critical EJ studies have taken these documentations further to explore ways that research methods can help make voices from the toxic landscapes defy erasure (Bell 2015;Saxton 2015). Th ese authors are frequently focused on the possibilities for, and constraints on, democratic and participatory decision-making (Urkidi and Walker 2011).…”