Stop Cop City and the Future of Direct Action Environmental Justice Special Guest Speaker - Joseph Brown

The Stop Cop City movement represents a convergence of racial justice, anarchism and environmentalism. Activists employ diverse tactics to halt the construction of an unwanted police training facility, with canvassers, litigators and civil resistors sharing space with rioters and arsonists. Based on participant observation and dozens of interviews collected in the movement's forest camps, Joseph Brown's paper draws insights about the future of environmental direct action.

Ecology is increasingly bound up in currents of racial justice, anticolonialism and class struggle. Activists turn to direct action for a variety of instrumental and philosophical reasons, with the life-or-death nature of social and environmental issues encouraging moderates to accept the radicals in their midst. A study of Stop Cop City exposes the current dynamics of environmental justice and its likely future in a world of stark inequality and climate collapse. Activists may try virtually anything when the struggle is for everything.

Joseph Brown is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His research concerns the politics of environmental protest and state repression, terrorism and ethnic violence. Dr Brown's books include Force of Words: The Logic of Terrorist Threats (Columbia University Press, 2020) and For the People and the Land: Direct Action Environmental Justice (Columbia University Press, forthcoming). He received his PhD from Columbia University in 2015.