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      Climate injustice, criminalisation of land protection and anti-colonial solidarity: Courtroom ethnography in an age of fossil fuel violence

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          Abstract

          As plans for expanding fossil fuel infrastructure continue to ramp up despite threats to the planet, how are geographers to address the criminalisation and prosecution of peaceful acts of defending earth, water and land? Reflecting on a courtroom ethnography and debates spanning legal geography, political ecology and social movements studies, this article explores embodied struggles around oil, ‘justice’ and geographies of caring – discussing how Indigenous youth, grandmothers in their eighties and others were convicted of ‘criminal contempt’ for being on a road near an oil pipeline expansion project. The project (“Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion”) was created to transport unprecedented levels of heavy oil (bitumen) across hundreds of kilometres of Indigenous peoples' territory that was never ceded to settler-colonial authorities in Canada. Focusing on a controversial injunction designed to protect oil industry expansion, the discussion explores the performativity of a judge's exercise of power, including in denying the necessity to act defence, side-lining Indigenous jurisdiction, and escalating prison sentences. Courtroom ethnography offers a unique vantage point for witnessing power at work and vast resources used by state actors to suppress issues fundamental to the United Nations Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Paris Climate Accord. It also provides a lens into the intersectional solidarity and ethics of care among those who dare to challenge colonialism and hyper-extractivism, inviting engagement with multiple meanings of ‘ irreparable harm’ at various scales. The article calls for more attention to power relations, values and affects shaping courtroom dynamics in an age in which fossil fuel interests, climate crisis and settler-colonial control over courts are entwined in evermore-complex violent entanglements.

          Highlights

          • Land defense, civil disobedience and direct actions to protect the planet can oppose neocolonial violence.

          • Court injunctions protecting fossil fuel interests are used to deny Indigenous law, values and necessity defenses.

          • Courthouse ethnography can reposition thinking on climate justice, space, power and ontologies of care.

          • Affective spaces of resistance – and ethics of care – in and around courthouses are understudied.

          • Situates courtroom solidarity-building within growing intergenerational and intersectional movements.

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          Most cited references53

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          Too late for indigenous climate justice: Ecological and relational tipping points

          Kyle Whyte (2019)
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            Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice

            Kyle Whyte (2018)
            Settler colonialism is a form of domination that violently disrupts human relationships with the environment. Settler colonialism is ecological domination, committing environmental injustice against Indigenous peoples and other groups. Focusing on the context of Indigenous peoples’ facing US domination, this article investigates philosophically one dimension of how settler colonialism commits environmental injustice. When examined ecologically, settler colonialism works strategically to undermine Indigenous peoples’ social resilience as self determining collectives. To understand the relationships connecting settler colonialism, environmental injustice, and violence, the article first engages Anishinaabe intellectual traditions to describe an Indigenous conception of social resilience called collective continuance. One way in which settler colonial violence commits environmental injustice is through strategically undermining Indigenous collective continuance. At least two kinds of environmental injustices demonstrate such violence: vicious sedimentation and insidious loops. The article seeks to contribute to knowledge of how anti-Indigenous settler colonialism and environmental injustice are connected.
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              Articulating Climate Justice in Copenhagen: Antagonism, the Commons, and Solidarity

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Polit Geogr
                Polit Geogr
                Political Geography
                The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
                0962-6298
                0962-6298
                8 October 2020
                January 2021
                8 October 2020
                : 84
                : 102298
                Affiliations
                [1]School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, 19 George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LD, Scotland, UK
                Article
                S0962-6298(20)30361-9 102298
                10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102298
                7544477
                f4ede1b8-e795-4f67-80db-0508ad2b259f
                © 2020 The Author

                Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

                History
                : 27 February 2020
                : 21 September 2020
                : 25 September 2020
                Categories
                Article

                climate justice,oil,courtroom ethnography,indigenous rights,trans mountain pipeline

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