This paper is concerned with the articulation of climate justice in contentious politics that has been developing over the past nine years. Drawing upon the authors’ personal experiences as participants in the climate justice mobilizations during the United Nations ‘COP 15’ negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009, the paper argues that ‘climate justice’ has emerged as a key framing and mobilising discourse for expressing a new climate change politics and for mobilising climate activism. While the presence of justice in contentious politics has been a leitmotif for alter-globalisation and anti-poverty activists (e.g. Juris, 2008; Routledge and Cumbers, 2009), as well as certain environmental campaigns (e.g. Schlosberg, D. 2007), the mobilisations in Copenhagen were important because of the emergence, within the discourse of climate justice of three co-constitutive tendencies – antagonism, the common(s), and solidarity. In this paper we will argue that these are important because they pose direct challenges to the de-politicization of climate change through the ‘post-political’ turn and the primacy given to technological and scientific approaches to climate change (e.g. Swyngedouw, 2007; 2010); and are suggestive of the importance of thinking productively and critically about what is at stake in strategies to tackle climate change and how they are framed, positioned and articulated.
