Peace, Protest and Precarity: Making Conceptual Sense of Young People\u2019s Non-violent Dissent in a Period of Intersecting Crises

Sarah Pickard,Benjamin Bowman

doi:10.1007/s43151-021-00067-z

Abstract

The current young generation are living through socio-historically situated intersecting crises, including precarity and climate change. In these times of crisis, young people are also bearing witness to a distinctive global wave of youth-led activism involving protest actions. Much of this activism can be deemed dissent because many young activists are calling for systemic change, including the radical disruption, reimagining and rebuilding of the social, economic and political status quo. In this interdisciplinary article, between politics and peace studies, we investigate how the concept of peace plays an important role in some young dissent, and specifically the dissent of young people taking action on climate change. We observed that these young environmental activists often describe their actions in careful terms of positive peace, non-violence, kindness and care, in order to express their dissent as what we interpret as positive civic behaviour. They also use concepts grounded in peace and justice to navigate their economic, political and social precarity. Based on a youth-centred study, drawing on insightful face to face semi-structured interviews in Britain and France with school climate strikers, Friday For Future (FFF) and Extinction Rebellion (XR) activists, we explore how young environmental activists themselves related their dissent, and especially how they attached importance to it being non-violent and/or peaceful. Stemming from our findings, we discuss how young environmental activists’ vision of violence and non-violence adapted to the structural and personal violence they face at the complex intersections of young marginalization, global inequalities and injustices in the lived impact of climate change and the policing of protest.

Highlights

Journal of Applied Youth Studies (2021) 4:493–510“To make peace among people we need to make peace with the Earth” (Shiva 2019: 6)The history of young environmental activism is long and global
We focus on recent history, since 2018, of a world-wide wave of youth-led and youth-centred environmental activism, which has moved public and political debates towards taking greater action on climate change (Hayward 2021; Nissen et al 2021; 2020; Collin and Matthews 2021)
We offer the concept of climate peace as a way to understand and explore young environmentalist activism from the positions of young people themselves

Summary

Introduction

“To make peace among people we need to make peace with the Earth” (Shiva 2019: 6). The history of young environmental activism is long and global. To clarify, is a term that refers to the ways in which young people are not calling for change within existing political system, but they dissent from that system, and call for systemic change on a global scale This theoretical article stems from and draws on our qualitative study that included interviews with young environmental activists in 2019 and early 2020. The concept of peace is, we think, not yet adequately examined in this growing field of literature on young people’s experiences, and action, with respect to climate change For this reason, our article is led by young people but provides what we hope is a strong academic conceptual basis for concepts like peace, violence and young people’s political repertoires in this context. We hope our conceptual work, and our exploration of the voices and experiences of the young people who shared their environmentalist action with us, will be of use to young people themselves and to adults who support them, as well as educators and researchers with an interest in climate change and young people’s environmentalist politics

Background and Methodology

Conclusion