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In a paper to the U.K. parliament in 2015 the then Prime Minister David Cameron described Islamist extremism as a poisonous ideology, and the fight against it as ‘one of the great fights of our generation’.i In the same paper the then Home Secretary (and subsequent Prime Minister) Theresa May outlined the importance of resisting not just violent but non-violent extremism, saying that the Government will ‘systematically confront and challenge extremist ideology, exposing it for the lie it is’.ii Extremism was characterised in the paper as: ‘the vocal or active opposition to our fundamental values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.’ iii It is not uncommon for disobedient but non-violent animal rights and environmental activist groups to be described as extremists, even terrorists. More recently in the U.K. the environmental protest group Extinction Rebellion (XR) were included by some police forces in guidelines on countering extremismiv, and while the current U.K. Home Secretary clarified that XR are a protest group rather than extremists she defended the need to include them in the monitoring of ‘a range of security risks’v. In truth, there is a substantial gap between the non-violent but sometimes illegal protests of XR and what can more feasibly be described as extremist ideology. This paper, however, will argue that a deliberative conception of western democracy and of its political ontologies, epistemology and norms cannot but react to holistic environmentalism and vegan activism by categorising them as extremist. In contrast, the paper will examine the potential merits of an agonistic account of such activism, including the role of disobedience and violence to related ends. Accounts such as those of Habermas and Rawls will be contrasted with more recent work by Mouffe, Oksala and Roy, alongside lessons drawn from the radicalisation of elements of past student movements (from the civil rights movements of the U.S.A and Northern Ireland in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and from the civil war between the Tamil and Sinhalese people of Sri Lanka from 1983 to 2009). While this agonistic account of veganism and holistic environmentalism will offer a different rationale for disobedience than that primed by deliberative accounts, and will separate it more clearly from extremism (properly understood), it will also distinguish non-extremist disobedience from the sort of violent activism that might more legitimately be regarded as extremism or terrorism. Wayne Williams(Faculty of Business, Law and Politics, University of Hull) Comments are closed.
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