ABSTRACT
The literature on environmental mobilisation provides many case studies, but one aspect remains little considered: the question of place. Most studies treat space as mere background and not as a constituent element of collective action, when by definition environmental mobilisations activate a local configuration of actors on territorial issues, such as the defence of a particular area of land or protection of a natural area. We want here to give voice to the spatial dimension of environmental mobilisation in order to answer the problem of space in contentious movements. The scientific literature dealing with environmental mobilisation provides many studies based on individual properties of actors linked to the notion of activist trajectory (Sawicki, 2003), on institutional opportunities (Kitschelt, 1986; Sainteny, 2000), and on organisational structures (Fréour, 2004; Martin, 2005). Inspired by Goffman (1991), framing theory also invested the field of environmental movements (Ollitrault, 2004), and more recently attempts have been made to reconcile the individualist and the collective approaches of collective action through the concept of the ‘activist career’ (Ollitrault, 2001). Others have highlighted interactions involving the media in environmental mobilisations (Derville, 1997). But the literature remains quite silent on the analysis and the conceptualisation of space as a constituent element of these mobilisations. This ‘silence’ (Aminzade et al., 2001) is all the more ‘deafening’ in France where a specific place (the Larzac) has a long history of contention and is perceived as the centre of the altermondialist 1 protest. Our goal here is to remedy this surprising lack.
