Injustice anywhere threatens Justice everywhere

This presentation to a meeting of Campaign Against Criminalisation of Communities (CAMPACC) asks: what “flashes of mutual recognition” might arise from deepening processes of mutual learning between communities criminalised by the “War on Terror” and those criminalised by “the Securitisation of Everything”. 

This would include those opposed to the practical consequences of “Energy Security” or “Environmental Security” such as communities:

• opposing the expropriation of their land to create carbon sinks;
• questioning windfarms that undermine their access to land upon which they rely for their survival;
• opposing fracking, oil pipelines and other forms of resources extractivism;
• fighting laws that forbid the gathering of forest products from lands designated national parks or carbon trading schemes; and those
• opposing the enclosure of land, rivers, estuaries and forests so as to acquire, produce and trade energy.

Challenges to energy security that seek to use terms such as energy democracy instead, or that locate the War on Terror solely and simply in racism or Islamophobia, are less likely to succeed than challenges that locate the problem in the evolving dynamics of capital and its assault on the commons.