ABSTRACT
The September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States have been widely christened as so profound that social and political life around the world would never be the same again. Social movement theorists were quick to jump into the postSeptember 11 fray assessing and criticizing how the US government’s response and a resurgent brand of unbridled American patriotism might negatively affect domestic and international activists, specifically those a part of global anti-war or social justice movements. Much of these early works tended to focus on political opportunities, sometimes in the context of static political opportunity structures, other times as changing political environments. Utilizing global radical/revolutionary environmental activism as a case study, this chapter aims to contribute to assessments of the latter by injecting analyses of cultural and strategic elements within the changing post-September 11 political environment. Furthermore, in conjunction with the overarching focus of this volume on power relations, its purpose is not to simply recognize that political opportunities did close for activists in the United States and abroad following the terrorist attacks. Rather, it aims to deconstruct the mechanisms by which the United States (and subsequently European states) were able to utilize fear and uncertainty to (1) construct and impose social boundaries between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ environmental activists, (2) broaden and impose existing definitions of ‘terrorism’ after the attacks, (3) transpose the ‘terrorist’ identity and its legal consequences on sectors of the environmental movement that engaged in anti-establishment rhetoric and protest and (4) provide incentives to reformist environmental organizations for maintaining the dichotomy between themselves and radical sectors.
