The People versus the Pipelines
My main research project over the past few years has examined the political subjects of contemporary pipeline opposition in North America. Some of the research from this project is published in the following papers. My book Pipeline Populism was published in 2022 from the University of Minnesota Press.
A description of the book is below. Some accessible introductions include a conversation with Matthew Haugen, an interview with Sara Van Horn and Cal Turner published in Bookforum, and a podcast with Stentor Danielson on the New Books Network.
Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the 21st Century.
Contestation of the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines gathered in resistance a coalition of progressives, farmers and ranchers, environmentalists, and Native Nations. Although existing accounts of pipeline resistance properly foreground Indigenous resistance, no book has thoroughly examined the environmentalist and democratic emotional-political orientations at stake in the populist wing of the pipeline opposition movement. While long-standing rifts exist among mainstream liberal and radical approaches to environmental justice, populist environmentalism attempts to subvert aspects of this division through constructing the identity of “the people versus the pipelines.”
Pipeline Populism makes an original contribution to the disciplines of geography, environmental studies, and political theory by examining the affective conditions of an emergent environmental populism as one portion of the movement against pipelines. Only infrequently have scholars placed populist movements in historical, institutional, and political-economic contexts, which provide insight into the rhythm by which they wax and wane, transitioning into or away from other political tendencies. To describe and analyze this situation, Pipeline Populism understands populism as a genre and a transition, one that must be related to the affective infrastructures produced by its political-economic context. In doing so, it places populist social movements in the critical context of racial inequality, nationalist sentiments, and ongoing settler colonialism and global empire. Such an analysis is crucial, for if environmental populists are correct in thinking that only through mass people’s movements could we adequately and democratically address global climate change, scholars and activists alike must grapple with the tensions and dangers in the desires and ideologies embedded in this genre of politics.
The book’s "Introduction: Affective Infrastructures of Populist Environmentalism" describes the emergence of populist environmentalism, investigating its historical role in challenging environmentalist elitism over the last fifty years. This section develops the concepts of affective infrastructure to understand populist political ambivalences, while theorizing the latter as indicating populism’s political genre conventions and transition into other forms of politics.
Chapter 1 “‘This Land is Our Land’: Private Property and Territorialized Resentment” examines how the material and performative perforations of private property by land agents conditioned a feeling of territorialized resentment among settler pipeline opponents. Different understandings of land, influenced by private property, conditioned the lowest-common-denominator form of populism that emerged to fight the pipelines.
Chapter 2 “‘Keystone XL hearing nearly irrelevant’: Participation and Resigned Pragmatism” examines resentment at seemingly superficial public participation processes associated with environmental permitting for pipelines. I argue that such spaces are important staging grounds for populism’s meta-concern with a supposed deficit in democratic decision-making, examining why pipeline opponents kept returning to these spaces and demanding more participation despite their skepticism.
Chapter 3 “Canadian Invasion for Chinese Consumption: Foreign Oil and Heartland Melodrama” examines how populist rhetoric structured an interior part of the US in opposition to a foreign power through melodramatic affect. I argue that attachment to the heartland reinforced US nationalism and, concurrently, anti-Chinese and anti-Canadian sentiment.
Chapter 4 “The People Know Best: Counter-Expertise and Jaded Confidence” demonstrates how populist political identity was predicated on a particular experience of the affect of expertise. This chapter demonstrates the utility and limits of contesting evidence via counter-expertise in a landscape where knowledge is seemingly available for purchase and facts seem to be contingently constructed.
The "Conclusion: The Desire to Be Popular" reflects on the limits of pipeline populism as a political project through the lens of “the desire to be popular,” and asks what anti-colonial socialists can learn from this movement for addressing future climate crises.
Further writing from this project can be found here:
Kai Bosworth and Charmaine Chua. 2021. The Countersovereignty of Critical Infrastructure Security: Settler-State Anxiety versus the Pipeline Blockade. Antipode https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12794
Scholars argue that blockades of infrastructure pose an economic threat to capital circulation. This explains how activists can gain power through strategic spatial occupations and why states seek to protect “critical infrastructure” from disruption. However, Indigenous-led blockades of pipelines gain power not (only) by disrupting economic flows alone, but by eliciting state anxieties about the racialised political, psychic and economic project of settler colonialism. Analysing public discourse surrounding the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, including legislative measures introduced to criminalise protest since the blockade at Standing Rock, we reframe critical infrastructure security as a component operation of settler countersovereignty. The criminalisation of Indigenous dissent through the state’s escalation of protest legislation is an investment in maintaining settler political authority, leading us to conclude that blockades must be understood not only as a form of anti-capitalist resistance, but also as a locus of anti-colonial struggle.
2021. "“They're treating us like Indians!”: Political Ecologies of Property and Race in North American Pipeline Populism" Antipode 53(3): 665-685. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/anti.12426
While political ecologists have analysed the role of private property in creating and sustaining ecological inequalities, this approach does not often take property as a foundational element of racial capitalism. I argue that the defence of private property in contestation of North American oil pipelines demonstrates the centrality of property not only to the structural reproduction of capital, but also to its Euro‐American subject. Emphasising their affective attachments to land and resentment at dispossession, landowners and populist environmental organisations in the Great Plains frequently compared individual, white experiences of eminent domain to the historic and ongoing dispossession of Native Nations by suggesting “they're treating us like Indians”. In order to account for the reproduction of white supremacy in environmentalism, I argue that we must understand how its oppositional politics are linked to economic interests‐in‐land and affective desires‐for‐land that maintain landed private property.
2019. "The People Know Best: Situating the Counterexpertise of Populist Pipeline Opposition Movements." Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109(2):581-592. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24694452.2018.1494538
Critical scholarship suggests that environmental populism is either an expression of radical democracy beyond the paternalistic liberalism of mainstream environmentalism or that it is paranoid, irrational, and merely reactive to elite technocratic governance. Because both frameworks take populism to instrumentalize knowledge production, they miss how practices of counterexpertise might condition the emergence of left-populist oppositional identities. I argue that counterexpertise emerges as a political activity not by producing an alternative epistemology but as a minor science that contests science from within and in the process shapes left-populist political coalitions. This is illustrated through research on populist responses to the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines in the Great Plains region of North America, where environmentalists, landowners, and grassroots organizers sought to position themselves as experts. Through public participation in environmental review, pipeline mapping projects, and construction monitoring, environmental populists created an educational campaign concerning topics as diverse as hydrology, economics, and archaeology. Developing counterexpertise not only contested the evidence produced by oil infrastructure firms and the state but also consolidated the oppositional identity of “the people.” By examining populist knowledge production within the broader field of contentious politics, I argue that we can better understand it as neither an irrational reaction nor transparently democratic but as part of a processual production of identities of resentment and resistance. One implication is that climate change denial and disinformation spread by the oil industry might be challenged by resituating science for political ends rather than renewing neutral objectivity.
2018. The People versus the Pipelines: Energy Infrastructure and Liberal Ideology in American Environmentalism. PhD dissertation.
https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/200225
Contestation of the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines gathered in resistance a coalition of progressives, farmers and ranchers, environmentalists, and Native Nations. While these groups appear united in opposition to the pipeline, the principles and strategies of the grassroots at stake in this emergent environmental movement have been more heavily contested than recognized by existing literatures. While long-standing rifts certainly still exist between mainstream liberal environmental organizations and radical movements for environmental justice, I argue that the ideological field of contemporary environmentalism cannot be fully understood without taking into account the emergence of environmental populism. Populism is the ideology and political formation that takes “the people” as the principle and proper political actor. A mass movement of the people is positioned in opposition to corporations, corrupt institutions, and elites, all of whom trample upon their rights to participate and decide environmental futures. How does pipeline populism, as a collective social phenomenon, emerge from and transform contemporary ideologies of environmental politics? What consequences does it have for the political nexus of global climate chaos, racial capitalism, and ongoing settler colonialism? If we are right to think that only through people’s movements can we adequately and democratically address global climate change, scholars and activists alike must understand the underlying tensions in the desires and ideologies of what is meant to be “the people’s climate movement.”
The People versus the Pipelines: Energy Infrastructure and Grassroots Ideology in North American Environmentalism addresses these questions by examining the internal tensions within populist ideologies in the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Iowa. Intervening in interdisciplinary environmental scholarship and political theories concerning the relationships among ideology and desire in populist politics, this project develops a conceptual and methodological framework that understands environmental populism as emerging from resentment towards dispossession, democratic public participation, and expert knowledges. Through interviews, participant observation, and cultural and media analysis, I demonstrate how environmentalist practices are shifting from appeals to state institutions toward a movement of the people. I argue that while environmental populism attempts to take leave of elitism, its aspirations to ground property, democracy, and expertise emerge from liberal affective infrastructures and congeal into a political activism that can reproduce Euro-American, settler colonial, and nationalist tropes.
This research intervenes in interdisciplinary debates in environmental studies, political ecology, and political theory by questioning the role of environmentalism in sustaining a politics of exclusion through a left-populist ideology. I take up the complex problem of race and legacies of colonialism in movements against fossil fuels to demonstrate the sustained manner in which confronting structures of oppression elides liberal social justice movements. In making this argument, I show that the persistence of race and settler colonialism is not merely an effect of culture, history, or the state, but is also embedded in the liberal structures of contestation frequently upheld by political ecologists, including public participation, landed private property, and local and regional grassroots political formations. This research has implications for scholars and activists interested in contemporary environmental and climate justice, for political theories and public discourse on populism, and for those concerned with the intersection of race and settler colonialism in environmental politics.
See also:
"The Dakota Access Pipeline" on the Miami Rail website (with photographer Annabelle Marcovici):
http://miamirail.org/winter-2016/the-dakota-access-pipeline/
"Five Lessons from Pipeline Struggles" on the Bakken Resistance Coalition website:
http://nobakken.com/2016/09/05/voices-against-the-pipeline-five-lessons-from-pipeline-struggles-by-kai-bosworth/