BY MARKUS SPECHT
Markus Specht is a first-year International Development student and Junior Editor of SAIS Perspectives. He used to work as a research assistant at the Berlin Social Science Center, focusing on international norm contestation and transnational advocacy.
Last month, as millions of young people all over the world took to the streets in their quest for climate justice, sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg, the face of the growing youth climate movement, offered a powerful indictment of world leaders at the UN Climate Action Summit. An array of heads of government had gathered in New York City for the 2019 high-level General Debate of the UN General Assembly and they all, from Germany’s Angela Merkel to Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, had to sit through a forceful attack on their policies by the Swedish activist. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words”, Thunberg emotionally charged, filling news feeds around the world for days with her powerful message (see transcript).
Thunberg began the “Skolstrejk för klimatet,” Swedish for “school strike for the climate,” in 2018, standing outside the Swedish parliament with a banner displaying her slogan each Friday. Acknowledging this choice to miss school in order to protest in her opening statement at the UN Climate Action Summit, Thunberg asserted that “this is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean.”
Whether consciously or inadvertently, she picked up what is likely to be the only point of agreement between herself and her critics on the political right who have repeatedly berated her for skipping class in the name of her advocacy efforts. Less innocuously, they have also called her “mentally ill” and likened her to Nazi propaganda images. While most attacks on her can easily be dismissed and are increasingly feeble, as Charlie Warzel of The New York Times points out, there seems to be a growing public sentiment among commentators that agrees with the right’s critique of Thunberg’s school attendance choices. The belief that children should prioritize their education before wading into the deep waters of international activism still has considerable clout. However, as the prevalence and history of youth advocacy show, youth activists can affect international policymaking, including on crucial environmental issues.
Although Thunberg surely receives the majority of the media coverage on youth climate activists – both positive and negative – this year’s opening of the UN General Assembly featured a variety of youth activists from around the globe who had made the same choice of opting for advocacy instead of school attendance, acting on their frustration with the political inaction on the climate crisis. Thunberg is not an anomaly, but just one of many young people engaging in global advocacy efforts. The kids aren’t alright and they’re starting to speak up.
Autumn Peltier, a 14-year-old Canadian national and member of the Wikwemikong First Nation, ignited a youth-led movement for the universal right to clean drinking water in 2018. What sets her advocacy apart is a clear focus on Indigenous knowledge and the collective rights of Indigenous peoples, who are disproportionately affected by water and sanitation issues. “There are people living in third-world conditions in our first-world country,” a Canadian newspaper reports her saying. “It’s insane. Canada is wealthy. There shouldn’t be places that can’t drink their water.” Peltier is an integral part of the “subtle revolution”[1] of asserting collective rights of Indigenous peoples and protecting “transnational Indigenous ways of being” on the global stage, a process which has recently been discussed at length by Sheryl Lightfoot (2016). Lightfoot is Canada Research Chair of Global Indigenous Rights and Politics and Associate Professor in both First Nations and Indigenous Studies and Political Science at the University of British Columbia.
Ruth Miller, an Alaskan-born youth advocate for Indigenous-led climate justice, echoed in a recent interview that “climate justice should include first and foremost the voices of the people who will be affected by climate change the most, and I do not see that happening in the majority of international rhetoric at the moment.” A member of the Dena’ina Athabascan tribe, Miller represented the United Nations Association of the United States (UNA-USA) at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York this year. “The world is at this breaking point because of the few people who are in power and the few corporations that have built their profits through the exploitation of the many”, she asserted, adding “if we’re talking about reform, if we’re talking about change, it’s not the responsibility of the individuals who have been victimized by these global processes.” With her actions and rhetoric, Miller represents the confluence of the global Indigenous rights movement and the youth-led protest movement for climate justice.
These three young women illustrate the diversity of young people engaged in transnational climate advocacy. To name another prominent example of youth advocacy, we only need to look back to 2012 when Malala Yousafzai, Nobel laureate and champion of girls’ and women’s right to education in Pakistan, was shot by Taliban gunmen in retaliation for her education advocacy efforts. In the years since, her fight has risen from the national to the global stage, culminating in the launch of several UN programs on education.
Young people’s advocacy efforts have a long history, although they often did not receive the same attention we now witness around Thunberg. Children and youth have long advanced claims for substantive and procedural participation rights, as critical constructivist norms scholars like Anna Holzscheiter (2018) point out.[2] Taking the example of child labor, Holzscheiter explores the empowerment of “affected people” and shines a light on “how the increasing visibility and agency of working children (as the affected) has resulted in changing discourses on child labour and contestation of the meaning of the norms enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child.” This agency-focused approach is highly relevant to the emerging youth-centered movement for climate justice. After all, it is young people, with most of their lives before them, who will be much more affected by climate change than most of the septuagenarians formulating policies on the issue. Similarly, Indigenous peoples’ livelihoods, due to their reliance on natural resources, will be threatened by the climate crisis long before many other groups will feel the brunt of the changes to come.
Other scholars of international norm dynamics are also picking up on the importance of the climate justice movement. The discursive elements of Thunbergs advocacy and her unique rhetoric have been widely recognized. In a recent blog post, Lea Wisken and Anette Stimmer of the Berlin Social Science Center focus on the importance of behavioral norm contestation in the movement: Thunberg decided not to fly and traversed the Atlantic in a sailboat in order to participate in the UN summit, for instance. It could be added that the mere act of engaging in advocacy, instead of conforming to the image of the child as a silent subject of international politics (as opposed to an actor with a voice), is also a form of behavioral contestation, challenging the prevalent norms surrounding childhood and youth.
It looks like the global leaders who witnessed Thunberg’s speech at the UN will need to get used to this form of political pressure unless their behavior changes. As Wisken and Stimmer note in their blog post, Thunberg and the Fridays for Future school strike attendants combine their discursive and behavioral norm contestation “with the offer of a bargain: ‘I assure you we will go back to school the moment you start listening to science and give us a future.’” There is a way out. The ‘affected’ of the climate crisis – Indigenous peoples and the next generation – are leveling forceful calls for global action on the protection of the environment. It is high time to take into account their voices. Thunberg, Peltier, and Miller are a good starting point. Let’s listen to them.
[1] Sheryl Lightfoot. 2016. Global Indigenous Politics: A subtle revolution. New York: Routledge.
[2] Anna Holzscheiter. 2018. “Affectedness, empowerment and norm contestation – children and young people as social agents in international politics.” Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, 3:5-6, 645-663. DOI:10.1080/23802014.2018.1600382
PHOTO CREDIT: Lorie Shaull, licensed under the terms of the cc-by-sa-2.0.