Reappropriating the "ecoterrorist": How green activists contend with terroristic framing


Alexander Painter, University of Windsor; Mariah Brooks, University of Windsor

Scholarship in Critical Terror Studies (CTS) contends with established essentialist views on terrorism that permeate the formal sociological forum, as well as doublespeak and statecraft agendas that underpin terrorist framing. CTS deals with how the state’s usage of rhetoric and lawmaking in defining what is terroristic and what is not underpins the colonial imaginaries that facilitate the widespread usage of the phrase ‘terrorist,’ which compartmentalizes groups and identities as unlawful spectacles, and the tendency of scholarship to treat terrorism research purely as a way to recommend counterterror policy (Jarvis 2009; Loadenthal 2013; Gandio and Nocella 2014; Ganor 2017; Loadenthal and Rekow 2020). Social Movement Scholarship (SMS) has become entangled with CTS as governments have mobilized the term ‘terrorist’ to refer to several nonviolent dissent groups; and, the marriage of these two disciplines has produced literature regarding the terrorization of activist identities, and the harsh criminalization of protest-radical typologies that have been synthesized and proliferated in the media and within policy discussion. This ‘terrorization’ of activism is perhaps best illustrated by the treatment of green movements and the increasing prevalence of ‘ecoterrorism’ as a term used to frame green dissent (Loadenthal 2013; Sumner and Weidman 2016). While CTS/SMS literature offers a critical theoretical lens to view ecoterrorist framing as a kind of structural violence that highlights state and media capacities to employ put-down rhetoric, a surprising dearth of attention is paid to green activists’ employment and framing of the terminology. Social media/informal slacktivism strategies have been studied in the past; Previous SMS literature has pointed to the value of online activism in developing communicative autonomy (Carlson and Berglund 2021), the facilitation of collective action (Castells 2018), and the mobilizing of geographically distant groups that otherwise would be incapable of organizing dissent (Sageman 2008). However, as ecoterrorist sympathetic slacktivism is rarely a point of interest in scholarship, radical activism is often cold-shouldered academically, thereby perpetuating an abstraction between scholarship and direct-action movements. This paper applies a discursive approach to critical discourse analysis (Gale 2010:8) that analyzes how activists reappropriate counter-hegemonic definitions of political phrases such as ‘eco-terrorism’ through their unique articulations within an extant discourse system. This approach serves as a means for giving voice to green movements that are often not provided nuance in scholarship and aims to build an inquiry into the complexities and barriers that green activism faces in academia. Analyzing grassroots social media helped find a pulse on activism discussion without agitating a delicate ecosystem as formal researchers. Major social media platforms – Twitter (X), Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr – each possess unique modes of ‘sharing,’ and public discussion. Some are more focused on image-sharing and others focused on conversation. Each offers different avenues for articulating opinions and sharing values. Thus, the analysis highlights the thematic nature of online interaction as a key mechanism for sharing values.

This paper will be presented at the following session: