University of Sussex
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Policing Environmental Injustice

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journal contribution
posted on 2024-10-30, 09:34 authored by Andrea BrockAndrea Brock, N Stephens-Griffin
Environmental justice (EJ) activists have long worked with abolitionists in their communities, critiquing the ways policing, prisons, and pollution are entangled and racially constituted. Yet, much EJ scholarship reflects a liberal Western focus on a more equal distribution of harms, rather than challenging the underlying systems of exploitation these harms rest upon. This article argues that policing facilitates environmentally unjust developments that are inherently harmful to nature and society. Policing helps enforce a social order rooted in the ‘securing’ of property, hierarchy, and human-nature exploitation. Examining the colonial continuities of policing, we argue that EJ must challenge the assumed necessity of policing, overcome the mythology of the state as ‘arbiter of justice’, and work to create social conditions in which policing is unnecessary. This will help open space to question other related harmful hegemonic principles. Policing drives environmental injustice, so EJ must embrace abolition.

History

Publication status

  • Published

Journal

IDS Bulletin

ISSN

0265-5012

Publisher

Institute of Development Studies

Issue

4

Volume

53

Page range

65-84

Department affiliated with

  • International Relations Publications

Institution

University of Sussex

Staff notes

Item deposited via Symplectic Elements on: 2024-10-29 Item deposited by: Dr Andrea Brock (A.Brock@sussex.ac.uk) Elements publication ID: 284769