Paper short abstract:

The paper explores climate contestation at the twenty-second conference of the parties (COP22) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as indicative of sustained engagement with further generative sites and modalities of global politics.

Paper long abstract:

The twenty-second conference of the parties (COP22) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was held over a two week period in Marrakech, Morocco, in November 2016. This paper considers climate contestation at COP22 through observations from three main sites; the Green and Blue Zones held at the main conference space in Bab Ighli and the 'Espace Autogéré' (autonomous space) held at the University of Cadi Ayyad's Faculty of Science and Technology. While previous research has found the massive expansion in civil society participation at some COPs to be accompanied by its disenfranchisement (Fisher 2010; Wahlstrom et al 2013), others have suggested the deepening of social and climate justice movements through translocal actions (Chatterton et al 2013; Featherstone 2013). The former turns on its head what many perceive as a degenerative feature of climate contestation—that forms of solidarity and antagonism are primarily oppositional—rather than co-emergent and co-productive (Featherstone 2008, 2012; Featherstone and Korf 2012). The paper explores climate contestation in Marrakech at the time of COP22 as part of broad involved processes—or 'roads through COPs'—that stretch beyond individual sites of contestation and are indicative of sustained engagement with further formal and informal generative sites and modalities of global politics.