Toward an ethics of decolonizing allyship in climate organizing: reflections on Extinction Rebellion Vancouver

Abstract

Since launching in the UK in 2018, Extinction Rebellion (XR) has become a global social movement that uses mass civil disobedience to pressure governments to take immediate action on the climate crisis. While XR has shifted the conversation on climate change, it has also been critiqued for its lack of attention to privilege and oppression, and for its ‘apolitical’ approach to climate organizing. In this article, we argue that XR must develop an intersectional approach in order to address the climate crisis. In particular, we reflect on our experiences as participants in XR-Vancouver, located on unceded Indigenous territory in the settler colonial state of Canada. Settler colonialism in Canada is intertwined with the climate and ecological crises, as Canada's status as a petrostate is built on the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples through a strategy of racial extractivism. To attend to these dynamics, we build on Kyle Powys Whyte's concept of ‘decolonizing allyship’ and suggest three ethics – of relational accountability, care, and incommensurability – that settler-led movements like XR can cultivate. We conclude by inviting XR to (re)engage with a ‘politics of refusal’ that subverts the state and allows XR to collectively enact what different systems (rooted in intersectional, decolonizing allyship) could look like.