Authors: Diana Jiménez Thomas R., Grettel Navas, Arnim Scheidel


Abstract
Environmental defenders commonly face violence in response to their activism against socially and ecologically destructive development projects. While various protection mechanisms have been developed in the last decades, the level of repression they face is on the rise – especially in Latin America. This chapter discusses different ways through which the public and international community have responded to the violence experienced by environmental defenders, as well as the limitations of such responses in preventing future violence against them. We examine, as indicative case studies, the responses to the murders of two high-profile defenders: Chico Mendes (Brazil, 1988) and Berta Cáceres (Honduras, 2016), and propose a schema which maps responses according to: 1) their institutional character, and 2) their transformative capacity. We argue that while conventional institutional and non-institutional responses are crucial to address violence against defenders, more transformational responses that aim to recast the logic of extractivism are needed for the protection of environmental defenders. Furthermore, we argue these responses need to incorporate a wider understanding of violence and go beyond demands for retributive justice and incorporate demands for the protection of the territories and ways of life of environmental defenders.

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Individual Presentation Submission

After generations of struggle to stop logging and dam construction in their lands, in 2010 the Orang Ulu Indigenous Peoples of the Baram River watershed in Malaysian Sarawak began a movement to create the Baram Peace Park within their territories. Movement members envisioned the Peace Park as a new forest territory within their ancestral lands that would allow them to reduce large-scale logging of the forests and strengthen their control of the area. In 2020 the Sarawak government and the International Tropical Timber Association announced their plans to create a new legal entity, the Upper Baram Forest Area, with the same boundaries as the proposed Peace Park.

Building on a decades-long solidarity with Baram environmental justice movements as activists and researchers from the USA, this paper uses our experience with the Baram Peace Project to explore the potential of decolonizing transnational environmental justice struggles. Based on our work with the Baram movements for indigenous control and environmental well-being, we analyze the ways that transnational solidarity activism and research can move beyond typical Western ideas of consent and participation and into more emancipatory roles of allyship. We describe the formation of an Indigenous movement across the upper Baram that advocated for the Peace Park and our position within it, our experimentation with a series of ecological and cultural community-led research initiatives across the region to support Indigenous claims to the land, and the way that these efforts of advocacy and research unfolded alongside the state and intergovernmental organizations efforts to define and control the Baram in their own vision.

Individual Presentation Submission

In the presentation, I would critically discuss the moral question of whether South Africa deserves climate reparations. I examine the deeply unequal and polluting nature of the South African economy, to demonstrate how claims from South Africa for climate finance and reparations are morally complex and fraught. For South Africa’s claims for climate reparations and finance to be justified, I propose two conditions: 1) that South Africa acts in line with it’s fair share of global climate action; and 2) climate finance must help to transform South Africa’s deeply unjust country and bring benefits not to the rich elite, but to the majority, especially the poor, black and working class. Based on this analysis, my presentation provides a critical analysis of whether the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) Investment Plan announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa meets those conditions. I argue that it potentially fails to meet both. Based on that example, I argue that global south countries must be critically wary of JETP funding models, as rather than being a fulfilment of climate debt owed to the global south, they may entrench the interests of Western donors who seek to dominate the clean energy future.

Writing on – and participating in – climate and environmental justice activism and mass movements across multiple transnational sites can prove challenging in a time of surging social movements and expanding state repression, infiltration, and violence. Moving through these spaces in a queer Brown femme body can pose further challenges. This paper argues for a praxis of “threading diaspora” through “transnational [climate, environmental, better world] justice dreams” by actively engaging in activism within social movements across Black and Brown diasporas in the South Africa, the US, and UK. Drawing from my own experience as a queer Indian-American activist based between London, the US, and South Africa, I explore how multi-sited scholar-activist methodologies guided by building transnational activist comradeships can allow for new solidarities and climate and environmental spaces to emerge between Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other frontline communities. I also seek to explore how this can push back on “respectable” ways of doing scholarship and activism in the midst of the rise of the right, while also bringing in those outside of traditional “big green” and EJ/CJ spaces into the fights for our homelands, waters, ecosystems, and lives. Centering queer diasporic Black and Brown comradeships across South and North rejects the myth of impartial research, holds space for “oh, you too?” moments of QTPOC recognition (quoting interlocutor and EJ/CJ/RJ activist Sasha), and grows transnational webs of feminist and queer Black and Brown solidarity that develop in the liminal space between being member and researcher, insider and outsider, South and North.

This paper argues for a praxis of “threading diaspora” through “transnational justice dreams” by actively engaging in activism within social movements across Black and Brown diasporas in the South Africa, the US, and UK. Drawing from my experience as a queer Indian-American activist based between London and Joburg, I explore how multi-sited methodologies guided by building transnational comradeships can allow for new solidarities and climate and environmental spaces to emerge between BIPOC / frontline / directly impacted communities. I also explore how this can push back on “respectable” ways of doing scholarship and activism in the midst of the rise of the right, while also bringing in those outside of traditional “big green” and EJ/CJ spaces into the fights for our homelands, waters, ecosystems, and lives. Centering queer diasporic Black and Brown comradeships across South and North rejects the myth of impartial research, holds space for “oh, you too?” moments of QTPOC recognition (quoting interlocutor and EJ/CJ/RJ activist Sasha), and grows transnational webs of feminist and queer Black and Brown solidarity that develop in the liminal space between being member and researcher, insider and outsider, South and North. I aim to explore how leaning into personal narrative and emotive sharing (Ganz and Skocpol 2010, 2004, 2000) within social movement research can create threads that build deeper, more reflective, and more leaderful movement ecosystems. Building from Ahmed (2017), Minai and Shroff (2019), and Brown (2017)’s arguments for queer intimacies and co-production of knowledge, I argue that these methods of “threading diaspora” and “transnational EJ dreams” meld multi-sited ethnographic research in Black and Brown diaspora with activist praxis to move research and activism towards liberatory alternate worlds.