The Global Environmental Politics of Resistance, Revisited

Abstract In the inaugural issue of Global Environmental Politics, three scholars debated how social movements could or should address the role of resistance in environmental politics. In this essay, we revisit and renew dialogue around the scholarship of resistance for environmental politics. This intervention serves to reignite discussion and scholarship about resistance in our current conjuncture. We suggest that environmental research should address the tumultuous, turbulent, and ruinous times for environmental concerns and environmental institutions through leveraging the concept of resistance and should engage studies of resistance using an increased focus on multiscalar geographies, intersectional critiques, and collaborative potentials of coalitions and scholar-activist praxis. Doing so will not only make resistance studies in the present moment a more relevant and serious focus of inquiry and practice but will also give relevance to studies of environmental politics in the face of backsliding and backlash more generally.