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Paper Short Abstract

Drawing on courtroom ethnography, this paper examines climate activists' claims for climate justice in their criminal trials through a performative lens, highlighting the ways in which they appropriate the legal form as a site of resistance.

Paper Abstract

The recent rise of climate civil disobedience has been met with a global wave of repression, not least in Europe. In Switzerland, this repression takes the form of criminal sentences delivered by penal order, which activists regularly oppose to have their case heard in court despite the low likelihood of a full acquittal and the resource-intensive nature of the proceedings. This paper therefore proposes to examine the criminal trials of climate activists as spaces of contest beyond state repression. Drawing on courtroom ethnography and mobilizing performative theories of trials, I illustrate how climate activists use, subvert and circumvent criminal legal concepts and procedural steps in their criminal proceedings to voice their moral and political claims. I argue that, through these claims, climate activists enact rights and obligations that expand the spatial and temporal boundaries of modern Western law in the era of global warming. In doing so, I extend the argument of Julia Eckert and colleagues (2012) and Matthew Canfield (2023) by showing that the judicialization of climate politics, and in particular the recourse to the legal form, does not necessarily lead to the depoliticization of social conflicts, and that law can instead operate as a site of resistance.