The Anti-Democratic Argument Against Disruptive Climate Protests

Against disruptive protests, it is often argued that they are undemocratic. (This holds widely, but I focus here on climate-related protests.) Moreover, in the public debate the (presumably) anti-democratic character of disruptive climate protests seems to be perceived as exceptionally strong argument against such protests. I believe that neither of these arguments holds as self-evidently as it might seem. In this paper, I shall focus on the former. First, the question whether disruptive climate protests are undemocratic in many cases depends on one’s conception of democracy – which is of course a contested concept. Specifically, I shall argue against perspectives (widely adopted in public discourse) that conceive of democracy as essentially a negotiation of preferences that are themselves morally neutral. While such a standpoint might on the face of it seem plausible, it no longer is if we accept that not all decisions that can come about by means of democratic procedures are legitimate within a democracy. If the majority were to decide to derive some minority of their basic rights, this is not compatible with democracy. But of course some political proposals do indeed threaten basic rights of some people. Many nation’s climate policies threaten the basic rights of many people living now and in the future and of course there are many other domains in which basic rights are under threat because of ‘democratically’ justified state behaviour. For this reason, the self-evidence with which the boundaries of a democracy were once equated with the boundaries of the corresponding nation state has crumbled. There are different conceptions of democracy, such as Goodin’s ‘all-affected principle’, according to which the demos ought to be radically expanded – in the case of the ‘all-affected principle’, predictably, to all affected by a decision. Decisions that in narrower forms of democracy would be unproblematic, are actually undemocratic on those conceptions. From that perspective, the protests that are being described by many as undemocratic might be seen as taking a step towards restoring, rather than threatening democracy. In addition to the argument centring on conceptions of democracy, I will argue that disruptive climate protests have many different forms, functions and targets. All of these can be relevant to the question whether they are undemocratic, but they are not actually always transparent. So we will in many cases need a careful analysis of what exactly is going on in such protests in order to settle the question of them being anti-democratic – even if we can come to a shared conception of democracy. I shall in particular expand on the notion of coercion, which for many is a major factor in calling certain protests (problematically) undemocratic. I shall argue that discussions around disruptive protests often lack a sufficiently sophisticated notion of coercion, and that we need one in order to be able to make proper judgements. In any case, my conclusion will be, it is by no means self-evident that disruptive climate protests – even those that seem coercive – are undemocratic.