Legal Governmentality – governing climate activism through criminal law and human rights in Europe (LeGo)
Funding: ERC Starting Grant 2026-2031
Dr. Jevgeniy Bluwstein, Zoë Ruge, Motahareh Mohebi
LeGo examines repression, securitization, criminalization and rights-based defense of climate civil disobedience in the UK and in Germany. Climate activism through civil disobedience has become a key tactic of the European climate movement to denounce climate inaction by states and corporations. Governments increasingly respond with repression, securitization and criminalization of climate civil disobedience, while NGOs, activists, social movements, and transnational institutions such as UN special rapporteurs defend it. Repression, securitization, criminalization and defense of civil disobedience highlight a growing tension between state efforts to restrict and supress political protests (often by treating protests as a matter of security), and movement, civil society and transnational efforts to legitimize protests (usually treating them as a matter of rights).
Theoretically, the project advances our understanding of how environmental activism is governed through the uses of law and rights. The main research objective is to examine how the use of security frames, criminal law and human rights discourses and legal defenses shapes the legal consciousness and conduct of individual climate activists and movement collectives. To this end, the project examines criminal trials against climate activists; state efforts to pass new laws and mobilize criminal codes and security frames to prosecute activists; efforts of transnational actors, institutions, and movement collectives to counter criminalization; and climate activists’ perceptions of and responses to repression, securitization, criminalization and rights-based defense.
LeGo adopts a mixed method research design, drawing on methods and concepts from political and legal anthropology and geography, social movements and mobilization studies, and critical legal studies. Methods include a textual and discourse analysis of criminal trial proceedings and decisions, a policy and discourse analysis of state efforts to pass new laws and mobilize existing criminal codes and security frames, discourse analysis of interventions in defense of climate civil disobedience, courtroom ethnography of criminal trials, interviews and participant observation with affected groups and individuals subject to repression, securitization, and criminalization.
The project follows ethical standards in anthropological research, prioritizes participant safety and agency, and involves equitable parnerships through a transdisciplinary research design and methodology.
Juridification of climate politics in the name of climate emergency: the case of climate activism and litigation in Switzerland
Funding: SNSF Ambizione 2023-2026
Dr. Jevgeniy Bluwstein, Lucie Benoit
Drawing on interdisciplinary research across the fields of legal anthropology, political ecology and political economy, and based on methods including courtroom ethnography, participant observation, interviews, and discourse analysis, this project examines how the Swiss climate movement mobilizes the courts to transform climate politics through juridification and judicialization.
Empirically, the project focuses on the Swiss climate movement and how it mobilizes legal conflicts through different forms of campaigning, protests, and court cases, including strategic litigation against states (e.g. KlimaSeniorinnen v. Switzerland) and corporations (e.g. Asmania et al v. Holcim), as well as reactive litigation by the state against climate activists who have engaged in climate civil disobedience (e.g. Extinction Rebellion).
The project examines what justice claims activists articulate through different forms of campaigning, protests and legal proceedings, what legal strategies climate activists and their lawyers adopt in lawsuits and in litigation trials in the courts, and how the state responds to climate activism (through police, prosecutors, judges, legislative initiatives).
PhD project description
Lucie Benoit is a PhD candidate within the SNSF Ambizione project. Her research interests lie in the anthropology of law, critical legal studies, and graphic ethnography. Lucie examines the criminal trials of climate activists prosecuted for various forms of disruptive protest—such as unauthorised demonstrations or roadblocks—in Switzerland. Drawing empirically on courtroom ethnography, she explores the affordances and limits of these trials as sites for making sense of disruptive protests through their translation into the discursive and material spaces of law. In doing so, she seeks to complicate dichotomous accounts of criminal trials as either instruments of domination or arenas of resistance.
Conservation Labor: A New frontier in Labor Theory and Conservation Science (CONLAB)
Funding: Research Council of Norway Fripro 2023-2026
Other project members: Dr. Anwesha Dutta (PI, Christian Michelsen Institute, Norway), Dr. Amber Huff (Co-I, Institute of Development Studies, UK), Dr. Francis Masse (Co-I, Durham University, UK)
CONLAB advances interdisciplinary research on labor (e.g. labor geographies) and conservation science (e.g. political ecology) by examining how biodiversity conservation policies, initiatives and projects shape labor dynamics in affected communities in the Global South and across the North-South conservation geographies. CONLAB conceptualizes conservation as a mode of production that requires and generates value from different forms of paid and unpaid work. The project situates conservation labor and theorizes it in the broader context of an international conservation labor regime. This labor regime is underpinned by a particular division of labor and labor dynamics in capitalist societies and postcolonial contexts that are characterized by entrenched social hierarchies cutting across gender, class, caste, race and ethnicity.
From this vantage point, CONLAB examines the division of labor and labor dynamics i) within and outside of the conservation sector, ii) across social identities of gender, class, caste, and race, and iii) across hierarchies of paid, underpaid and unpaid work for conservation. By analyzing these dimensions, the project seeks to understand how conservation affects livelihood strategies and people’s access to work, as well as the resulting impacts on labor markets in related fields such as tourism, transportation, and hospitality. The research is implemented using a mixed-methods approach that incorporates surveys, focus group discussions, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation. The research team includes early- and mid-career scholars with expertise in political ecology, conservation social science, human geography, development studies, and agrarian change.
More information on the Project-Website.
