Environmental Movements and Avant-Garde Political Agency

Environmental movements are playing an ever more important role in raising issues of environmental justice in the domestic and transnational context. This paper will assess how the concept of political avant-garde agency may help to conceptualize this role as well as its related tensions. Adapting Lea Ypi’s (2012) concept of an avant-garde political agency, I will demonstrate how environmental movements challenge existing boundaries in formal politics and democratic discourse. Additionally, I will elaborate how the concept of an avant-garde may also show limits to the democratic self-understanding of environmental movements. Building on avant-garde theory in the arts, as well as political thinkers such as Gramsci, Sorel and Lenin, I will discuss inherent tensions to the concept and how these prove relevant in the context of movements, their tactics and their relationship to democracy. Based on this analysis, I will discuss how the concept of avant-garde political agency may prompt us to rethink to what extent movements can overcome implicit or open forms of oppression and to what extent they can speak for an intended constituency without losing their legitimate claim to representation. Overall, I will argue that without reifying them, environmental movements help to transcend existing forms of imagination and further normative environmental debates.