“We Are Radical In Our Kindness”: The Political Socialisation, Motivations, Demands and Protest Actions of Young Environmental Activists in Britain

Abstract

The year 2018 was a watershed in environmental activism, especially regarding young activists. Greta Thunberg started her School Strikes for Climate and the environmental movement Extinction Rebellion was founded. This article deals with young people’s involvement in these two global movements. It draws on 60 semi-structured interviews carried out with young environmental activists before, during and after protest actions under the auspices of the climate strikes and/or Extinction Rebellion in five British locations. The period of the political socialisation of this young generation is outlined and how it contributes to young people becoming environmental activists. The article then identifies the “radical” demands made by young environmental activists and their “radical” repertoire of contention in relation to their perceptions of the “radical” compared to hegemonic definitions. The interviews show that these young environmentalists are part of a generation of activists this is committed to obtaining significant change from powerholders through the use of deliberately non-violent direct action that challenges academic perceptions of radical repertoires of contention.

Youth Attitudes and Participation in Climate Protest: An International Cities Comparison Frontiers in Political Science Special Issue: Youth Activism in Environmental Politics

“…Generational analysis of participation in recent global movements includes feminist, civil rights, peace movements, and social and economic justice struggles like Occupy, or Black Lives Matter (Honwana, 2019;Lam-Knott and Cheng, 2020). There is renewed interest in understanding whether the experience of being socialized politically during a time of "successive and overlapping crises" (pandemics, rising economic in equality, and environmental crises for example) is impacting the values of new generations of youth and how they participate in, and view, politics (Pickard and Bessant, 2017;Pickard et al, 2020).…”

Peace, Protest and Precarity: Making Conceptual Sense of Young People’s Non-violent Dissent in a Period of Intersecting Crises

“…Young people's approach to climate peace, which we consider could be called a radical kindness approach (Pickard et al 2020)-with our gratitude for this term due to Skylab, 17, a young environmentalist activist who spoke to us in London-is characterized by three features: first, a focus on climate justice as opposed to sustainability (Foran 2019); second, the search for community, cooperation, conversation and sharing in response to intersecting oppressions and injustices including at a global scale; and third, repertoires of dissent that call for "systems change, not climate change". Young people are attempting to build climate peace through repertoires of political contention within a political context where both climate peace and young dissent remain difficult concepts for traditional analyses to grasp; young people work for peace at a time when their contention is obscured by assumptions about the place of young people in democracy, and peacebuilding itself remains hard to imagine.…”

“…We focus on young people's peace work and not on the process of classifying this work as engaged, political or otherwise. Binary approaches to classifying young people's action continue to limit much academic work across youth studies and including in the study of young people's environmentalism, as we have elsewhere argued (Pickard et al 2020).…”

“…In Kishinani and Smith's student-authored Student Guide to the Climate Crisis, they argue that climate change requires "difficult conversations. Not everyone will agree, Photograph 3 Global Climate Strike, 20 September 2019, Nottingham, UK (Pickard et al 2020) but that's the whole point-we need everyone to participate in these conversations. We need to work together, despite our differences" (2020: 23).…”

“…This wave of environmental activism marks a "watershed" moment in climate action (Pickard et al 2020: 251) that needs to be more contextualized and conceptualized (beyond the numbers and policy outcomes), so as to provide a greater understanding of this young generation. We contribute our conceptual approach to radical kindness in young activism (Pickard et al 2020) as well as our theoretical exploration of young people's environmentalist activism during intersecting crises to a growing literature on young people's action during climate change.…”