The targeting of environmentalists with state-corporate intelligence networks

Abstract

This chapter examines how neoliberal rationality conceptualizes environmental organizations and activists as terrorists rather than as citizens participating in democracy. Neoliberalism is subject to diverse interpretations, but in this chapter, I describe it as a dominant mode of reason that economizes social life and reduces human beings to economic actors. To support this argument, I provide examples of how governments in Canada and Australia are working with intelligence services and the private sector to spy on and infiltrate environmental organizations that are targeting “critical infrastructure” such as coal mines and gas developments. These practices represent a material impediment to the realization of ecological law and a degradation of the public sphere. Against these practices, I conclude by looking at how protest in defense of “public things” might help us resist neoliberal rationality and provide a foundation for building ecological law in practice.