Children of the Crisis: Political Subjectivity, Responsibility and Justice in the Swedish Climate Movement

Abstract

The overall aim of this dissertation is to understand how climate activists construct and negotiate ideas of political subjectivity, justice, and responsibility, and what this means for climate action. Using ethnographic methods, the four studies in the dissertation follow developments in the Swedish climate movement from 2020 to 2024, a period in which the new wave of climate activism that started around 2018 was past its initial peak. The dissertation advances a Marxist-feminist theoretical approach to the tradition of social movement studies. Study I examines how climate activists interpreted the Covid-19 pandemic’s meaning for the climate crisis and climate action. Initially, movement intellectuals and activists alike expressed (cautious) optimism that the pandemic demonstrated the state’s ability to instigate drastic measures in the face of crisis, as well as demonstrating lifestyles less centered on consumption. Activists became less optimistic as the pandemic dragged on, as the halt of movement activities also obstructed activists’ imaginaries. The study thus argues that ideas and visions of the future do not exist on a superstructural level but are produced in everyday movement praxis. Study II explores the increased focus on generational justice within the new wave of climate activism, arguing that “the child” is emerging as the political subject of climate politics. As this position draws on notions of innocence and protection, it often denies children’s political agency. Activists negotiate this ambivalence by fostering an alternative child figure—the willful child. This emergent subject expands political demands, but sacrifices some privileges of the child position. The analysis introduces the concept of political subjectivity to social movement studies, while highlighting tensions between structure and agency in shaping such subjectivities. Study III analyzes the concept of climate justice within the movement’s discussions, in particular disagreements over how to interpret the connection between the climate crisis and other justice issues implied by the concept. Drawing on the metaphor of a tree, some activists understand the climate crisis as forming the roots of other injustices, while others see it as a branch among others stemming from the same roots. I show how these understandings and discussions are intertwined with the organizational dimension of collective action. In this way, the study shows how climate justice ideals are not disembodied and static constructs but are shaped and transformed in the social activity of movement praxis. Study IV investigates how climate justice is transformed into practice when activists translate climate justice ideals into legal claims. The study shows how in public discussions on climate change, responsibility becomes obfuscated as the causes and effects are diffused both temporally and spatially. I argue that the use of climate litigation is a way to counter the obfuscation of responsibility by establishing concrete relationships of blame. However, climate justice is at odds with the normative justice discourse, which becomes clear in legal negotiations between activists and the state. The study thus demonstrates how the climate crisis necessitates new ways of thinking about justice and how activists to a certain extent aim to push this forward. Taken together, the studies show how constructions of justice, responsibility, and political subjectivity are inextricably intertwined. Questions of responsibility for the climate crisis shape how activists conceive of climate injustices and who should be considered victims and perpetrators, which again form ideas of the proper political subject of the climate crisis, in turn fostering particular political subjectivities among activists. The dissertation argues that these ideas are not formed on a superstructural level but are produced in movement praxis: the everyday practices and social relations in the movement. Although the construction of these ideas is shaped by dominant structures, the latter do not wholly determine the former. Rather, through movement praxis, activists contest the dominant views of the climate crisis, showing how they are not set in stone but are dynamic and subject to contestation and change. The conclusions point to the need for social movement theory to analyze how movements and their ideas are shaped by social forces, and to consider ideas as produced in praxis.