From Territorial Struggles to Insurgent Peripheries: Analysing the Spatial Politics of 'Les Soulèvements De La Terre' in France

The paper examines how French activist movement 'Les Soulèvements de la Terre' engages with territories to support its confrontation with capitalist structures. My empirical analysis illustrates how activists reclaim the local to reconfigure environmental conflicts, thereby offering a renewed spatial analysis of grassroots resistance. I begin by exposing the rationale behind this territorialisation of protest on the French scene. I then discuss how territorialisation shapes activists’ struggle against capitalism. Finally, I present the group’s translocal strategy as a springboard to connect insurgent territories and achieve its objectives more effectively. Within 'Les Soulèvements de la Terre', territorialisation proceeds through local struggles which anchor ecologism in the realities of specific territories. Their repertoire, based on sabotage and physical occupations, pursues the restoration of habitability in sites affected by development projects. The group’s consistent emphasis on land tenure, water rights, and peasantry seeks to re-embed food and energy systems within local cultural contexts and ecological landscapes. This rooted approach echoes with a broader trend where activists increasingly invoke place-based interests to confront capitalist structures. Whereas the geography of capitalist flows erases the specificities of places, grassroots resistance foregrounds these specificities to nurture territorial attachments and local knowledges. Deepening place-based relationships crystallises key strategic issues. Territorialisation contrasts with previous waves of climate activism, whose globalist perspective viewed climate change as a shared state of vulnerability. The group criticises this activism for its abstract claims and distance from the materiality of capitalist infrastructures. Instead, defending concrete territories displaces conflict from climate marches to sacrifice zones. Terrestrial anchoring helps activists gaining control over environmental commons and reconnecting with life-sustaining resources. It also reconfigures their relation to the state: activists cease to expect governmental action to instead prefigure new forms of territorial organisation. By taking back the land, activists unleash alternative spatial practices from which enduring alternatives can thrive. Territorialisation thus provides concrete modalities to subvert capitalism’s organisation of space. Activists’ creativeness results in experiments which foster material autonomy and ecological restoration. For example, the 'Uprisings’ Granaries', a set of autonomous food provision schemes designed to supply protests and strikes, helps ensuring subsistence while developing sustainable farming. In doing so, niches freed from capitalist alienation emerge. Finally, I argue that the group’s logic of spatial expansion provides lessons for the study of territorialisation. Territorialised movements are often accused of being localist, and therefore unable to secure impactful change. Yet, territorialisation is not spatially bound to the local. Whilst founded on territorial autonomy, 'Les Soulèvements de la Terre' also establishes translocal solidarities. This comes in response to the earlier autonomous zones, deemed too parochial. To create an insurgent network, the group’s spatial strategy unites multiple territories under the banner of ‘peripheries’, whether rural, suburban or colonial. Connecting insurgent peripheries serves to confront the capitalist core with a more diffuse and networked spatiality. This experience reorganises resistance sites into locally rooted but closely interconnected nodes, highlighting a path beyond the fetishisation of the local. Yet, its success hinges on sophisticated coordination skills that reconcile local autonomy with spatial expansion.