[Book Review] Sophie Bond, Amanda Thomas and Gradon Diprose, "Stopping Oil: Climate Justice and Hope", London: Pluto Press, 2023.

Between 2008 and 2017, offshore oil and gas exploration was expanded in Aotearoa New Zealand with the government positioning ‘energy security’ as a priority for the country’s economic development. In this context, climate justice movements emerged comprising of a range of autonomous ‘Oil Free’ groups, NGOs like Greenpeace and iwi (Māori tribal groups). When protests threatened to hinder and/or halt resource extraction, the state employed different tactics to silence resistance, including changes to legislation to criminalise dissent, limiting citizen engagement in decision-making and state-sanctioned securitisation, surveillance, violence and de-legitimisation.

In Stopping Oil: Climate Justice and Hope, Sophie Bond, Amanda Thomas and Gradon Diprose provide a unique and situated analysis of climate activism from a range of ‘Oil Free’ groups attempting to stop deep sea oil exploration and drilling in the ‘blue frontier’ of Aotearoa New Zealand. The book details the many and varied tactics by both the state and the oil and gas industry to shutdown anti-oil campaigns. More optimistically, and the crux of the book’s contribution, the authors also demonstrate how activists navigated the neoliberal state’s silencing tactics through solidarity and an ethic of care and responsibility. Throughout, a feminist political framing is applied to examine the geographies of hope in collective efforts for a more climate-just and democratic vision for the future.