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Paper short abstract

Drawing upon fieldwork between radical environmental and ‘freedom’ activists in Australia, this paper explores how a pressure for de-polarisation has become entangled with anticipations of collapse, while presenting a challenge to established activist group tactics.

Paper long abstract

Over the last few years, an imperative for certain social movements to ‘bridge’ polarisation within society has come to the fore. Drawing upon my doctoral fieldwork between radical environmental and ‘freedom’ activists in Australia, this paper explores how a pressure for de-polarisation has become entangled with anticipations of collapse, while presenting a challenge to established activist group tactics.

The call to bridge polarisation in environmental activist groups has become a rhetorically generative position to build a mass movement of ‘unlikely alliances’ which reach out over the divide between left and right. Under this guise, polarisation becomes threaded into anticipations of collapse, where social collapse is both observable within covid-19 lockdowns and recent bushfires and floods, and anticipated for the future as the faultlines of the climate and ecological crisis deepen. However, unlike ecological dimensions of collapse which are tied to ‘tipping points’ and ‘thresholds’ of no return, social collapse is theorised by activists as reversable through acts of ‘love’ against fascism and localised deliberation across ‘the divide’. The application of this rhetoric within existing activist groups is fraught with complexity, creating internal pressures to move away from established protest aesthetics of non-violent direct action, such as disruption to infrastructure, that have become a key part of the activist's identity.