Contesting Green Militarisation: Social movements for an anti-militarist climate justice

This PhD study seeks to explore the competing discourses and practices linking (or denying the links between) climate change and militarism in the UK. Overall, it seeks to understand the different discourses and strategies adopted by social movements to counter the dominant narrative and generate transformative, genuinely ecologically sustainable practices.

How are anti-militarism and climate justice movements challenging a militaristic response to climate change? What are the key components of the dominant narrative and who are the key actors employing them?

How are anti-militarism movements and climate justice movements adapting their narratives to challenge this and how do these counter-narratives vary and/or align?

What strategies and tactics are employed to challenge a militarised response to climate change and how do these relate to their narratives?

The study adopts a neo-Gramscian analytical framework. Gramsci's theory of hegemony has been influential in social movement analysis, particularly in understanding how change can be transformative. It led to a rethinking of the way power operates through the state and civil society, drawing attention to the need to engage in a counter-hegemonic struggle that challenges dominant beliefs and behaviours and creates a new common-sense (Bates, 1975).

Stuart Hall expanded Gramsci's theory of hegemony to understand the emergence of neoliberalism and new social movements organised around issues other than class struggle (Colpani, 2022: 223). His conjunctural approach theorised the relationship between language, consciousness, and material reality without being reductive (ibid: 234), and used Gramsci's assertion that hegemonic power operates on many different sites to explain the "diversification of social struggles" (Hall, 1988: 170).

Such an approach sits well with an understanding of militarism as a sociological process operating across many spheres with historical and economic roots. The proliferation of intersectional and transnational, yet autonomous, social movements we witness today in the face of multiple crises renders it particularly significant for this study.

The study will use a combination of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and frame analysis. By helping us to understand how power operates through the narratives of different groups and how dominant narratives are constructed and contested (Fairclough, 2013: 10), CDA complements a neo-Gramscian analytical framework. Meanwhile, frame analysis is particularly focused on how actors connect events, experiences and ideology to generate consensus and action (Snow at el., 1986: 472).

While CDA enables in-depth analysis of discourses, frame analysis allows us to compare the articulation of events on a larger scale (Lindekilde, 2014: 223). Applying a theory of hegemony to frame analysis creates a hegemonic/counter-hegemonic framing approach that enables empirical observation of the ways different actors are articulating events to reassert or challenge hegemony (Hardnack, 2015: 39).

Analysis will be conducted through a critical race feminist lens, recognising the way that gendered and racialised power relations produce, and are produced by, militarism.

The first part of the study examines militarised narratives of climate change as a prelude to understanding what social movements are engaging with and responding to. CDA will be conducted of key government policy documents on the military and climate change to identify the discursive strategies and devices that form the dominant narratives. Frame analysis will be conducted of government policy documents and a representative sample of open-source texts from military institutions and affiliated industries to explore the different military framings of climate change response.

The second, and main, part of the study explores how dominant narratives on climate change and militarism are challenged by counter-frames employed by different social movement actors.