Joost de Moor

Leiden University | LEI · Department of Political Science

Climate activists are confronted with an increasing tension between the need for urgent climate action and a sense that it could already be too late to prevent 'dangerous' or 'runaway' climate change. In this context, scholars observe the spread of a postapocalyptic environmentalism that understands climate change as already being locked in beyond...

Climate change adaptation is rising on the agenda of cities. However, critics have argued that urban adaptation efforts largely focus on preserving economic growth while overlooking the root causes of unequal vulnerability to climate impacts, giving rise to climate injustices. In response, literature on transformational adaptation has politicized t...

Climate adaptation is seen by many as increasingly important and as deeply political, leading some to argue for its democratization. Social movements could play an important role in this. Meanwhile, we have recently witnessed a major swell in climate activism, as well as a growing realization among climate activists that it may be too late to preve...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

As climate movements are growing around the world, so too is a postapocalyptic form of environmentalism. While apocalyptic environmentalism warns of future catastrophe in case of inaction, its postapocalyptic sibling assumes that catastrophe is already here or unavoidable. Here I explore the overlooked strategic implications of postapocalyptic narr...

To provide a global answer to a global problem, the climate change movement (CCM) has long organized itself around international organizations and summits. However, waning trust in a multilateral answer to climate change has motivated many in the CCM to abandon their traditional focus on UN climate summits (COPs) and to rely increasingly on decentr...

Creative participation refers to citizens’ invention of, and engagement in, new action forms that aim to influence, or take responsibility for, the common good in society. By definition, these action forms are constantly evolving and cannot be listed or summarized. Yet some, like guerrilla gardening, have over time become established in political r...

Since late 2018, a global wave of mobilization under the banners of Fridays For Future (FFF) and Extinction Rebellion (XR) has injected new energy into global climate politics. FFF and XR took the world by storm, but have now been forced into (partial) latency as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. We believe this moment presents an opportunity for...

In September 2019, the third Global Climate Strike organized by the Fridays For Future (FFF) protest campaign mobilized 6000 protest events in 185 countries and brought 7.6 million participants out onto the streets. This report analyses survey data about participants from 19 cities around the world and compares it to data from an international surv...

In September 2019, the third Global Climate Strike organized by the Fridays For Future (FFF) protest campaign mobilized 6000 protest events in 185 countries and brought 7.6 million participants out onto the streets. This report analyses survey data about participants from 19 cities around the world and compares it to data from an international surv...

In September 2019, the third Global Climate Strike organized by the Fridays For Future (FFF) protest campaign mobilized 6000 protest events in 185 countries and brought 7.6 million participants out onto the streets. This report analyses survey data about participants from 19 cities around the world and compares it to data from an international surv...

Processes of politicization and depoliticization are increasingly studied in relation to urban contexts and cities have been depicted as incubators of social movements. What has been largely ignored is why in some cities forces of politicization or depoliticization are stronger than in others. To address this caveat, this paper compares two British...

Drawing on our recent study of the climate movement’s mobilization around COP21, published open access in the journal Theory and Society, we argue that today’s organizers would benefit from reflecting upon the use of shared stories about prior mobilizations when strategizing.

Many have depicted a steady rise in lifestyle politics. Individuals are increasingly using everyday life choices about consumption, transportation, or modes of living to address political, environmental, or ethical issues. While celebrated by some as an expansion of political participation, others worry this trend may be detrimental for democracy,...

The proliferation of environmental alternative action organization (EAAOs) is a defining feature of present-day environmentalism. The literature on sustainable materialism has celebrated this as an appropriate, effective, and above all, political strategy. By contrast, drawing on post-political and post-ecologist critiques, some have argued that th...

Political participation has seen substantial changes in terms of both its structure and its scope. One of the most prominent venues of citizen engagement today is participation that relies on online means. Several approaches to online participation have attempted to understand its nature as a continuation of offline acts into the online realm, or a...

Report on the results of a survey of participants of the Fridays for Future climate change protests on 15 March, 2019 in 13 European cities

This article advances theory on social movements’ strategic adaptation to political opportunity structures by incorporating a narrative perspective. Our theory explains how people acquire and use knowledge about political opportunity structures through storytelling about the movement’s past, present, and imagined future. The discussion applies the...

This Section aims to bring together panels around current issues in the study of political participation and social movements. Scholars of democratic theory, participation, social movement mobilization and political parties have pointed to the fact that understandings and expectations of the (political) engagement of citizens are constantly evolvin...

The transnational climate movement mobilized massively around the 2015 Paris Climate Summit (COP21) – despite a growing consensus within the movement that the UN was unable to solve the climate crisis. Extensive ethnographic fieldwork is the basis for exploration of the profound effect this consensus had on the movement around and beyond COP21. Fir...

Lifestyle politics are often defined as a political strategy used to avoid state-oriented politics. However, recent studies indicate that in some cases, lifestyle activists engage in actions that target the state. This study investigates why some lifestyle activists combine these forms of engagement, while others do not. We explore whether such dif...

The COP meetings create global spaces for protesters to target transnational institutions, with the potential for reaching worldwide audiences through global media attention. City spaces around COPs temporarily became global public spaces, which the respective national police forces were set to govern. The challenges for the state in this context h...

By means of illegal occupation, squatters produce (urban) space. Previous studies have predominantly focused on the external dimensions of this process (e.g. squatters' negotiations with authorities), while the few studies that have analyzed the internal processes of producing squatted space have mainly focused on formal and explicit decision-makin...

Van Deth’s comprehensive ‘conceptual map of political participation’ has reinstated a lively debate about the concept of political participation, and provides some compelling solutions to it. However, an important question that has been raised is whether van Deth’s map actually achieves its main goal of unambiguously identifying and classifying eme...

Numerous studies have stressed the role of citizens' perceptions of the state's responsiveness to explain political participation. However, in doing so, they have mainly focused on citizens' perceptions of the state's willingness to respond. In contrast, how political participation is affected by citizens' perceptions of the state's ability to resp...