Strategy, Adaptation and Power: The Climate Disobedience Protest Cycle, 2018-2024

Extinction Rebellion’s emergence in 2018/19 launched a new wave of arrestable climate action in the UK and elsewhere. This action was expressly presented as strategic, the outcome of experimentation, reflection and feedback; a theory of change; claims to rationality and efficacy; and an exceptionalist critique of extant climate activism. In this paper, I discuss the evolution of the arrestable action of XR and its spin-off organisations, Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil. Whilst established understandings of strategy and tactics in social movement literatures primarily differentiate between strategy and tactics through a temporal lens, I argue here that this misrepresents strategy, placing it outside the pressures that produce adaptive responses and minimising the relations of power and culture within which it is itself determined. Drawing on what de Certeau (1984) calls ‘the control of the proper’, or the spatial (as opposed to temporal) components of action, I argue that in the UK the climate arrestable strategy launched in 2018 has been destabilised and profoundly transformed through its interactions with the ‘control spaces’ of internal movement culture and external political and policing response. Here, the strategic continuity of arrestability frames a hollowed-out, if spectacular, set of tactical applications. I conclude by reflecting on the ideational value attached to strategic claims.