How the Backlash to Climate Protest Laid the Groundwork for What We’re Seeing in U.S. Cities Today

Amy: Hello and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. Obviously there is a lot to be outraged by and fearful of happening in the US right now. And as is the case whenever anything is happening outside of extreme weather events, there's a bit of a chorus right now chanting who cares about climate change?

Who cares about a far off problem when there are so many more urgent threats? It should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway: Anyone who cares about mitigating climate risk should absolutely be showing up to fight for democracy. The same administration that is shooting citizens in the street for exercising their First Amendment right is, after all, trying to get rid of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and all of the protections that go along with them. I would say that those of us who think the world should act according to the scientific evidence on not only climate change, but also air and water pollution, should be able to walk and chew gum at least as well as the goons intent on destroying the so-called "administrative state" in the U.S.

Giving a shit about the long-term viability of the human species is very much aligned with protecting your fellow humans on the streets today. There are also a whole bunch of ways that these issues directly intersect, one of which is the topic of today's show. From 2022 to 2024, we reported, wrote and produced an investigation into the increasing repression of climate protest around the world.

It was called the Real Free Speech Threat, a nod to the fact that while these supposed free speech warriors were worrying about cancel culture, governments were actually threatening political speech all over the world. The problem has unfortunately only gotten worse, and in many ways, the backlash to climate protest laid the groundwork for the way we're seeing protestors treated in the streets of Minneapolis and lots of other cities around the world today.

Last month I caught up with researcher Oscar Berglund, who recently released the first ever peer-reviewed study of the global repression of climate protest. Some of Drilled's reporting actually fed into that research, and I was curious to hear from Oscar what he and his team learned and how things have progressed in recent years.

It tells us a lot about not just the fight for a livable world, but also the fight for a just one. That conversation is coming up right after this quick break.

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Oscar: I am Doctor Oscar Berglund, and I work at the School for Policy studies at the University of Bristol.

Amy: Tell me a little bit about this paper and what prompted you to write it? I was shocked when you, put it out and noted that it's the first, academic peer reviewed paper on repression of climate protests. 'cause I had seen, you know, like a fair bit of media coverage on that topic. It was surprising to me that there hadn't been more research on it. So I'm curious, why you think that is, and then what prompted you to wanna do this paper?

Oscar: Yeah, so the main reason why there isn't more research on this is probably that research, research is slow. Academic research is slow. And, you know, Drilled have obviously been really early on on reporting about this. And what this paper was the first of was kind of taking this kind of global, international perspective. And of course you have done that in your, reporting and Michelle Forst, you know, the UN Special Rapporteur certainly also takes a kind of international global perspective in writing about these things and talking about these things. So it's not like we're the first in the world to take this global, international perspective, but this is as far as I know, the first peer-reviewed publication to, to come out to do so.

And you probably remember, you know, I obviously have been kind of looking into these things for a couple of years now. You and I have talked about it before. And you know, we obviously give a shout out to your work

I suppose what brought me to study this topic in the first place is that I studied climate change activism. I studied, civil disobedience, very much the kind of wave of 20 18, 20 19, climate protests. And then during the pandemic, particularly in 2021, it became pretty obvious that there was a clamp down on protest, and therefore I started looking at that. And I think when we started this project, because we've been kind of doing this for two years here now, and when we started this, we started with a list very helpfully provided by you, which had laws, various laws in various countries or states that were criminalizing protest in various ways. So then we looked dug deeper into that. We've extended that list.

When you look at these new laws, you can see that they obviously have geographical differences. I think you can tell when places have extractive industries that there are certain types of protest tactics that are particularly targeted through new laws. So we can see this in Australia, for example, particularly with states that have extractive industries, or go harsher on things like lock ons and things that protesters might do at sites of extraction. And, there seems to be a fair bit of copy and paste, particularly in the US context, of these anti protest laws. But there's also, , a lot of kind of, local variation of what types of, protest is being criminalized.

And then we realized well actually, if we're talking about kind of repression, criminalization of climate protest, then those laws are just, one aspect of that criminalization.

And what we see perhaps much more is what we call here, the creative and strategic legal interventions, which is basically using or misusing laws created for a different purpose and, and using it against climate and environmental activists. Or changes to court procedures and so on, which you've seen loads of here in the UK where you know, you limit what can be said in courts, what kind of defenses can be used. I mean, now they're even trying to get rid of jury trials for certain kind of trials. 'cause juries are, more likely to, to find defendants not guilty then if you just have sort of judges making that decision. So that's one aspect. And then of course you have this third very important aspect, which is that most of the repression and criminalization that activists face is in relation to the police.

I mean, most of them don't end up in court. Right. So then, you know, looking at how is arrests used? How is surveillance used and harassment and other kind of forms of police violence? So for the report that came out a year earlier, and then the paper that came out last month, kinda looking at the data and actually see quite, you know, important and interesting differences in how the police police protest and climate and environmental activism, which shows us for example, that you know, France, you are much more likely to get violently attacked by the police. The police are much more likely to use teargas or water cannons or other forms of police kind of violence against you than you are in a country like the UK or in most other European countries. Whilst, you know, in the UK and Australia you've had this huge amount of arrests, for example, which obviously is because you've had extinction rebellion and groups like that have kind of used arrest as a means of protest in a way. That is behind that data, but like still, it shows, you know, differences in policing practices, for sure. So, those three, three different categories all for us come under this kind of criminalization aspect. And two of my colleagues that have written this paper with identify as criminologists. So they see themselves as criminologists. I'm more of a political scientist, and so is Chris who's another coauthor of the paper. And so if that's criminalization, then when we move over to the even darker aspects of this, which is, you know, the killings and disappearances which arrive in certain countries, then that's beyond criminalization, right? If you murder somebody, you're not criminalizing them. That's, you know, so that's why we felt we needed, you know, criminalization isn't enough to capture this. We need repression. We need repression more broadly to capture all of this. And actually those killings and disappearances often follow the kind of harassment and surveillance that are part of police action,. And of course in many countries have state actors, whether it be military or police that carry out a lot of those killings. And then lastly, you know, something that you have covered a lot as well is that all of this is kind of justified and enabled by a constant vilification by media outlets, by politicians and on social media trolling, accounts and so on, of climate activists.

During the time that we've studied this, you know, you had the use of anti terror legislation against Les Soulèvements de la Terre in in France.

You had kind of organized crime legislation used against Letzte Generation in Germany and against Futuro Vegetal in Spain. So, you know, these are all European countries that are supposed to be the more democratic ones that use that kind of legislation, that obviously is not designed to be used against nonviolent activist groups.

Right. And in a way then, I mean, how is that different from what the Filipino state has been engaging in, in for a long time now, which is, you know, this, notion of red tagging where they label any activists that they don't like, they label them, you know, communist terrorists and then hence the red tagging, and therefore they remove a whole bunch of rights that otherwise they, they would have.

Right.

Which is, it's, it's the same process. Right. For sure. In Germany and France, you run a lot lower risk of being you know, killed by, by the military as you certainly do in the Philippines. But the process is the same in in many ways. So I think that. That surprised us a bit. I think the extent to which, and I've been, we've been following this more closely, I suppose, in the UK because we live here, but the extent to which court processes are constantly changed and how the goalposts are constantly changed. And this really strange thing, which I think would not be possible in a lot of countries, but what has happened in in the UK a lot is that you can do a protest act in 2022 before the Public Order Act becomes law. And then you go to trial two years later and you are sentenced using the Public Order Act, which didn't exist in that

form. Yes.

When, when the, when the acts took place. I mean, that's insane,

Amy: Yes. Imagine if imagine if people tried to do that to, you know, corporations with tax law. There'd be, we'd never hear the end of it.

Oscar: No, no, we wouldn't. And so that's, and obviously so, you know, the UK is sort probably the place where I have spoken more to activists because, you know, I live here and I know speaking and, and speaking to these people who, oh, you know, have live court cases and are the way in which, you know, it really matters who your judge is. And you know, if you, certain judges have real grudges against activists, whether those, whether they exist, the kind of actual financial links or not, whether it's just kind of political grudges that judges have against activists, but it's obvious that some do and have been much, much harsher in the restrictions that they have put in, in their courtrooms.

And and so on, and the kind of, yeah, depoliticization of the courtroom. Or, you know, attempted de politicization of the courtroom here in the UK and which I think is replicated in, in, in several other countries as well, where, you know, you're not allowed to talk about climate change. You're not allowed to talk about anything about what motivated you to do it.

I mean, that's insane. Any crime that has been committed. You talk about the motivation in, like, that's part, part of it, isn't it? But no, here in these, in, in these what is political trials, you're not allowed to talk about about the politics of it.

So I

Amy: talking the other day, in fact, to one of the health workers that is on trial for for protest in the uk. I think their, their trial is February, and they were saying that in their initial hearing too, that they were Yeah. Told, like effectively told that they yeah.

Whatever they had to say wouldn't, wouldn't qualify as a legal defense anyway, so they couldn't say anything, which I'm like, I don't understand how that doesn't constitute effectively not allowing someone a defense.

Oscar: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

yeah.

Amy: yeah.

Oscar: no, absolutely. And if you look at the experiences of these activists that have gone through the trials and so on as well, what these new, what the Public Order Act did was, you know, really limiting. Their civil liberties when they are out, you know, on remand, just been released from prison that, you know, on paper they're not allowed to do anything.

They're not allowed to go anywhere near a protest. They're not allowed to go be, engage with perfectly legal groups of of, of activists. So, you know, whether, you know that is ultimately policed or not is of course another matter. But, but on paper, they're not allowed to do very much at all.

And the civil liberties are, are, are, are significantly restricted. And that kind of brings me in the, the point about, you know, is it policed or not? That brings me into, because in the kind of theoretical criminalization literature, there's this kind of distinction between, you know, one thing is what is criminalized in law? And one thing is what is actually in practice criminalized. So, you know, like the law allows for a whole bunch of types of criminalization that aren't actually then policed or acted on in in, in society. And here we can see that, you know, the new powers that were given to the police in the UK early on were used almost exclusively against climate protestors. So, you know, against against Just Stop Oil. And that was a group that was very heavily criminalized by the state and by the police. Now I think, we've seen very obviously heavy criminalization of of. Palestine protestors as well, and not least obviously, Palestine Action. That was prescribed as a terrorist organization. Again, very much, you know, misusing this label. And here also, I've done many interviews with foreign journalists who all you know think that it's ridiculous that this happened because, you know, it's easy to criticize what goes on in other countries harder to do it in in their own country,

Amy: yeah. I'm curious. Because we're thinking about building on the series that we did on criminalization of activists to look at criminalization of civil society organizations now as sort of like the, the next phase. So I'm curious what you think about that and if you looked at that as part of the repression tactics as well, or what you found as you were looking.

Oscar: Yeah, absolutely. So in some countries that's really obvious, right? And to be honest, the way that criminalization has happened in like Russia has been a lot about foreign NGOs. And now one of our countries that we look at is Peru and. In Peru, you have a new law that particularly targets NGOs that might, in some way support activists in the country. So that is definitely a really important part of repression. And has been more common in some countries than in others for sure. But. It's scary. So you see that more? Where have you seen, is that the case in the U.S., or…?

Amy: Yes, and now the foreign influence law thing is becoming a deal in the US both at the national level, which is interesting. 'cause actually Fara was something that we've used in the past as a reporting tool to, understand like, which U.S. PR firms and whatever else are doing work for like Saudi Arabia for example.

That's been like a key use of Fara in recent years. This is the, the foreign agent. Act and now the Trump administration is using it to go after climate organizations.

Oscar: Yeah.

Yeah.

Amy: and also they're talking, there's now a few local level foreign influence laws being floated, which I have not seen in other countries.

So they're talking about state level foreign influence laws, which would be really, really weird.

Oscar: So I suppose one thing that we wanted to do is to. Address this kind of separation between a kind of global north, a global south, or a kind of more democratic and, you know, less democratic countries and actually say, obviously you do run much more risks being an activist in the Philippines or Mexico or Brazil, than you do. In the US or in the uk or in Sweden. But a lot of the similar strategies are used to repress protest and activism, across this. So it's not a kind of categorical difference in most instances it's a difference in degree and so on. Take the thing about NGOs, right?

I mean, this is justified in terms that would be justified in Russia and that we would be, our governments would feel really free to criticize Russia about being authoritarian about, but then they do very similar things at home.

Amy: Yeah.

Oscar: yeah, and that's the kind of. I suppose thing that we really want to, you know, call out and observe, and I think, it's scary that those lines are, are being increasingly blurred.

Amy: Yeah.

Oscar: So I'm Swedish Peruvian, right? And Sweden and Peru are two countries with vastly different histories and, civil liberties, equality, all sorts. So when people ask, you know, is this gonna basically kill protests?

You know, obviously. It doesn't. Right. I mean, people protest under the most horrendous repressive circumstances. You know, as, as we all… well, it's would be wrong to say that we are seeing it, but I mean, something, something is going on here in Iran as we speak.

And it's certainly not the case that Iranians don't protest because of how repressive the Iranian regime is. Protest has continue to happen in Iran. Obviously it becomes a lot more dangerous, but repression is never a hundred percent successful in repressing protest. So this is a really interesting question that, you know, people, you know, how does this change protest?

And I think that's something that we want to explore further and understand more about, because, it doesn't kill off protest, it changes the conditions under which we protest.

Amy: Yeah. That is something that I think we saw a lot in the reporting too, that it's like more violent and maybe more obvious in some global south countries. But not dissimilar in the Global North…

I would say, and you know, now, at least in the, in the US we're starting to see a huge uptick in state violence as well.

So two things. One, I. Completely accidentally. 'cause I, I was looking, I was pulling all the video from various press conferences that Marco Rubio, who's the secretary of State for the US, has been doing since March, because there's quite a bit in what he was saying that has to do with what's happening in Venezuela right now.

So I was just sort of like, okay, what's he been saying over these months or whatever. And I didn't know this was happening before I watched all of those videos, but it seems like the Press Corps that was traveling with him, like. Decided amongst themselves that one of them at each press conference he did, would ask him about the repression of campus protest in the U.S.

It's, it's very, it's pretty amusing 'cause he gets very irritated by it every time they have, they have, you know, unfortunately many varieties of of questions to ask, but, one of the things that has come up in that is a, that he the way that he talks about protesters in general, and definitely it seems like, you know, the way that a lot of these countries have been talking about and treating climate protesters was then just like copy pasted to, Gaza protestors as well. So one of the reporters in, I think it was in Surinam, asked him you know, you had condemned China in 2019 for repression of student protests. Would you say that today you agree with the Chinese government and its view of protests?

and now it's time for Ed Wong, from the New York Times. I thank you, Mr. President, Mr. Secretary, for taking questions from us. Um,

Ed Wong, NYT: Mr. Secretary, first to you. Related to China, in 2019, you supported legislation to have the US government support the protestors in Hong Kong, the pro-democracy protestors and mostly the protests were peaceful, but also occasionally they disrupted public life.

And so based on your rationale for deporting campus protestors in the U.S., would you now support the Chinese Communist Party or Hong Kong authorities deporting foreigners who took part in those protests in 2019?

Marco Rubio: Your question is silly because, so the people that we're getting rid of in our country are vandalizing co.

They're not protesters. They're taking over college campuses. They're harassing fellow students. We let 'em in our country to study. We gave 'em a visa because they said, I want to go to your university. I want to get a degree.

They didn't say, I want to go to university and I wanna vandalize your library and I wanna wear a mask over my face, like if it's Halloween and terrorize people, we didn't give 'em a visa to do any of that.

So we don't want those people in our country. They're not, uh, they're not demonstrating for, they're, they're, they're, they're going beyond demonstration. They're going and they're creating a ruckus. They are creating riots basically on campus and it's making, it's unfair for students. Some of these schools are some of the most expensive schools we have in America.

People pay a lot of money to go to these schools. They borrow money to go to these schools, and you can't even go to class because some lunatic who's covering their face is running through campus spray, painting things, harassing people, and they're in my country as a guest. We want 'em out. Every one of them I find we're going to kick them out.

Amy: It's an amazing question, but yeah. I do wonder, like how, how close are some of these supposedly Democratic countries getting to countries that, you know, the Global North has always pointed to as examples of like the most intense state repression of speech.

Oscar: Yeah, I mean it's equally, you know, galling to see UK government ministers coming out and, and call out repression in other countries

when there are currently, you know, three Palestine Action hunger strikers on the brink of, of, of dying be and that the government won't even acknowledge that they are on hunger strike. And not even, you know, open negotiations with them. I mean, the longest one has been now for over 70 days which is insane that she's still alive. And that the government won't even, you know, acknowledge it happening. So yeah absolutely It's that kind of, you know, double standard, which obviously is a classic thing in, in politics, right. But I think particularly in this sphere of. Oh, we know civil liberties, political liberties, I think it is it is scary how quickly they have deteriorated in in many Global North countries. And I think that, one of the sources that we use– so we use various databases sort of evidence based in the paper– and one of them is the Civicus database which is really, really good. And, you know, CIVICUS do this grading of countries and the extent to which they are free basically. And, you know, it's a grim picture. It's a grim picture around the world. Very few countries are going up on the freedom index whatever it's called.

And you know, most countries are becoming a lot worse. And you know i'm not surprised that the UK are, are doing, you know, increasingly bad on it and the US, but so are a lot of other countries. And interestingly even, I mean, Sweden is like green on the Civicus thing, but I mean, Sweden's had, you know, they were threatening one, academic at the University of Lund with deportation because, you know, he participated in non-violent climate protest.

So you really are seeing seeing this everywhere and yes, the way that it's so easy to support protests in other countries and criticize, re oppression.

I mean, that's what's so going right. Like they actually, you know, they, they, they kind of. They, they express awe of, of protesters in in other countries whilst throwing nothing but scorn on them in their own countries. And I think that vilification, which we're really talking about then, the vilification of activists that politicians and, and the media do.

It's really important to understand here and sort of in other research, you know, I've looked at public opinion on protesters and so on, and, a lot of these protest groups have been really unpopular in the countries. But I mean, that's not strange. If you look at the, the media reporting

about them.

Amy: right. Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that too. The what is, what's the latest kind of. Research showing on that front in terms of. I guess you can't point to any one thing as being the driver of public opinion on protesters, but I guess even just sort of, qualitatively, how much influence do you think that has?

I can't remember the last time I saw coverage of a protest that was, either just like very neutral, Hey, this happened or was remotely positive and I wonder, what you've seen on that front, how much the way that people are seeing protest in the media impacts how they think of it.

Oscar: Yeah, so we've actually in with a different team of mine, we're about to come out with an article in the next couple of weeks about just stop oil and the public opinion and media reporting about Just Stop oil.

And there actually the media reporting in The Guardian, which is, you know, left leaning according to some not very left leaning but nonetheless one of the big British newspapers that is fairly neutral. The reporting about Just Stop Oil in the Guardian was pretty neutral. But the outlets that reported the most on Just Stop Oil were what you would call right wing, click bait media. And there obviously it's, you know, incredibly negative and used always use these kind of derogatory terms to write about them. But that wasn't the case in the Guardian. And then relating to what you were saying, I think, how, how big is the impact of these kind of media discourses and I would say significant. So we studied, the government discourses around just stop oil in 2023. And then we also carried on I carried out interviews with, you know, members of the public that's just responded to a survey that we did and you find a lot of the sort of discourses in the media and by politicians being repeated by by members of the public. So, you know, issues about energy security and things about we need new oil and gas to be an energy independent from Russia and so on.

So things that are like. Just political discourses that are not grounded in the truth , of energy security in the uk are very much repeated by people and they swayed like, opinion about it. So like, obviously just stop oil, were campaigning to stop oil and gas licenses in the North Sea. And when that kind of heated up more than anything else in the summer of 2023, then public opinion did sway. Like basically most people instinctively actually think that let's not dig out more oil and gas. It's probably good if we, if we let it be. But because of those discourses, they managed to sway, a proportion of the public to be, for new, new oil and gas licenses.

Now that then swung back later when the issue kind of was removed from the headlines and so on. Another way of seeing this is when you look at polls or surveys that have been done about criminalizing protests, we found that in the abstract, people don't want to criminalize nonviolent protest, but when you ask questions specifically about Just Stop Oil, then they do.

Amy: Wow.

Oscar: of,

yeah.

Amy: And you think that that is, 'cause I, I see a lot of, even kind of like quote unquote climate people will look at that stuff and say, oh see, Just Stop Oil's tactics are bad. People don't like them. But do you figure out what impact potentially, you know, whatever choices they're making on campaigning have versus how the media and politicians are positioning those tactics.

How much of people's opinion of Just Stop Oil do you think is shaped by how the media and politicians frame their tactics? 'Cause I've seen some people will point to that and go, oh, see, like their tactics are bad. People don't like them as opposed to having a more nuanced understanding of like, well they've been sort of uniquely vilified in the press and, and by

Oscar: Hmm.

Amy: and that plays into it.

Oscar: I think there are a lot of critiques of Just Stop Oil and such groups from many angles, and some of them I think have more merit than than others. But this paper that we have coming out soon looks specifically at claims of counter productivity about Just Stop Oil and see if there's any credibility to say that, oh, those protests are counterproductive. So the Just Stop Oil were not counterproductive in terms of people's opinions about oil and gas licenses. It was not counterproductive in terms of actually banning oil and gas licenses. I mean, that is still the policy of the current UK government, the labor government, and it was before. So, you know, Just Stop Oil's, unpopularity or whatever did not change that.

So in that sense, they have not been counterproductive. Now, I think another claim is that, Just Stop Oil would've been counterproductive in that they weakened the overall climate movement. But even that, there's a very vague evidence for that. People often point to this German survey, which was done, you know, to ask what do you think of climate activists. Basically, and when they think about Just Stop Oil they, or about Letzte Generation in that case, you know, that's, they think very negatively about climate activists. And maybe a few years earlier when they thought about the school strikers, they had more positive views of of climate activists.

But. Have they fundamentally changed the way that climate activists or, or the climate movement is viewed? Well, all, there's a fair amount of scholarship on what's called, you know, the Radical flank effect, and a lot of that points towards the fact that actually it doesn't really damage organizations that are more kind of moderate in that sense. The, the fact that Just Stop Oil are unpopular, it's, you know, it turns people against that group, but it doesn't really change people's opinions on a matter at hand or, or support for for other groups. And then of course, you know, this question of does the fact that Just Stop Oil had a kind of tactic of wanting to get arrested, of kind of pushing the boundaries of the law and so on. Has that kind of increased the repression against activists in general? And it's like, sure, you can see that there, but I mean, you don't blame the person, the people being repressed for for that. And actually through the work that you have done and that I have done, we've shown that this is a global phenomenon.

The, the criminalization or oppression of climate and environmental activism is global. It would likely happen whatever, Just Stop Oil were do. Even though of course, the way that it has happened in the UK has been very much targeted against them and and what they are doing. So I think that, you know, claims that Just Stop Oil and such groups have been counterproductive.

They might, or, you know, unfounded, they may not have been the most productive, they may not have achieved very much, and they have certainly been very risky for the people involved, the people that, that have done the protests that have paid a very high price for it. So in that sense you could, you know question. It in terms of being, being worth it, but what we have found is very much that claims of it being counterproductive are wrong.

Amy: Thank you. You mentioned this paper that's coming out in a couple of weeks. What else are you looking at to kind of follow on from here?

Oscar: So we want to continue the research into criminalization and repression, globally. So the research that I want to carry out next. Is look, taking this global angle, but also zoning in on four countries, and that's the uk, Australia, Philippines, and Peru that are all in different parts of the world. Obviously two of them in the global north, two of them in the global south, two of them with significant risk to life of doing climate and environmental activism in the Philippines and Peru, and two countries that have had very high levels of arrest and a lot of new kind of anti protest laws in Australia and the UK. And looking at these and using this kind of framework that we've developed in the article to look deeper in these countries and carry out interviews with people involved. So activists for sure, but also a lot of the legal professionals involved with this and other kind of civil society groups to see what are the effects of of criminalization and repression. And how does it change what people do and how do you resist it as well? So, what are the efforts to resist criminalization and repression and so on. So we have these partner organizations in these countries and we want to be really yes, studying this in depth to really see the effects. At the same time, we also want to keep this kind of global aspect, so we want to interview more kind of international stakeholders who have this kind of global overview and, look at policies, you know, I think it's one question that drives us in which we don't have the answer to yet is, you know, what international global processes are kind of driving this? How does policy move? How are these policies adapted in different countries, you know, are they kind of transferred, copied, and pasted?

What, what, who are the actors that drive them? Obviously your research has a lot to say on that. Beyond your investigative journalism. I don't think we have much to go by there. So I think those are the questions that would really drive this kind of research going forward .

Amy: Yeah. We're looking into that too, so if we find anything interesting, I'll let you know. But I actually do wonder how much some of the extractive companies themselves are spreading these ideas around. We found some indication, for example, that like, a coal mining company was trying to encourage folks in Australia to adopt a foreign influence law that applied to organizations that was similar to FCRA in India, which was pretty interesting. And I was like, Hmm, I wonder how much that's happening with other companies. 'cause they are very global entities. Anyway, so I'm curious about that too, how it's traveling around and who's funding what.

I'm curious if either in the research that fed into this current study or just your work in general, if you are seeing any kind of a similar pattern or global kind of approach in people figuring out creative ways around the repression.

So like, I, I mentioned the health workers in the UK, the ones I was talking about are these, six medics that broke windows at JP Morgan, to protest their funding of fossil fuel projects. And they are putting on a play that is basically just the transcript of their hearing to, to kind of show how ridiculous this legal process has become.

Oscar: So I suppose we can come back to this question of what's criminalized in law? And what's criminalized in practice

Amy: Yeah. Yeah.

Oscar: and as activists, we can increase the cost of criminalizing us in practice. And that's ultimately what, you know, the, so efforts to legitimize protestors and activism, which you do from a journalistic perspective, which I do from an academic perspective, which this theater then does from a kind of artistic perspective, are all, you know, we're a kind of ecosystem of, of, of trying to say that actually. Protest and part, you know, climate and environmental protest is not just justified, but it's good. These actors are fundamentally good actors. They need to be legitimized. They need to not be criminalized.

The more spotlight is on that when these actors are criminalized, the costlier, the repression is Right.

So the people who repress you, the actors that repress you, they also, make cost benefit analysis of, should we repress, should we let it go? And for me more than, you know, drawing on my actual research. Like now, for me, this is, you know, deeply personal.

My dad was a Peruvian revolutionary slash activist for all his life and he, if the Peruvian states and landowners would've had their way, they would've just shot him and, or, and, you know, after that given him death penalty or after, that locked him up for, for all his life. But they weren't able to do that right? Because there was too much spotlight on him. So when he was caught in 1963, he was lucky in that it was the security services and not the police who found him first and the security services had orders to capture him and not to kill him on the spot. So that was, you know, luck number one. And then when he was, you know, put on trial, there was a whole, a whole kind of international campaign for his, for for his liberty, so he wasn't sentenced to death. He was sentenced to 25 years in jail and then in came a kind of progressive Peruvian government that didn't like him, but it was too uncomfortable to keep him in jail. So they released him, but, but deported him from, from the country.

So like, this is obviously under, you know, deeply repressive realities of Peru in the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties. So. And it matters like the, the spotlight, the international spotlight matters.

And that's why I'm really, you know, motivated to be doing work with like Philippines and Peru and by, you know, organizations that work with highlighting these things is like, you know, if the international spotlight is on you, that's a level of protection,

right? That's like, it, it makes the repression more costly. So that kind of makes it a, a, any, anything that we do in order to highlight and call out that repression and call it for what it is offers some level of protection against repression and criminalization or, you know, in worse instance, death for for people. So I think that's really important to remember and for those on the front lines, and for those of you and me who, who in different ways write about this and research this, is that that's worth it.

Amy: That's great. Thank you. That's such an interesting, I didn't know about your, your personal background. That's really interesting. Well, it must be that much more interesting and scary to see this sort of like turn in Peru for you too. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

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