Not Just War: Violence in Climate Protest

In response to the failure to agree upon and enact ambitious emissions reductions, climate protest has become prominent in contemporary politics. It is a striking feature of such action that it has so far remained almost exclusively nonviolent. But recent work has begun to think about whether limited forms of violence, particularly against property, might be permitted in climate protest. In this paper, we assess these arguments. More specifically, we consider whether revisionist just war theory (RJWT) might, as has been suggested, provide a useful frame for understanding permissions to use violence in climate protest. To the contrary, we claim that the individualism of RJWT renders it unable to provide plausible conclusions about political resistance in this context. First, RJWT misses how climate harm manifests at the collective level: when considered as individual risk, climate harm will not generally ground permissions to use violence in self-defence. Second, and relatedly, climate change results not from individually harmful emissions but rather from the way those emissions are aggregated by complex and overlapping social and political practices. But on the reductivism of RJWT, individuals can only be liable to violence on the basis of harm they have caused themselves or as part of structured collectives. Finally, we argue that when applied to clear wrongs like climate change, RJWT appears to construe attempts to enforce unjust laws as instances as wrongful aggression. This has the implausible implication that the police who arrest climate protesters are liable to serious and potentially lethal defensive force.