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Policing Environmental Injustice

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journal contribution
posted on 2024-09-05, 20:56 authored by Andrea Brock, Nathan 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.

Funding

IDS Strategic Research Initiative on Climate and Environmental Justice

History

Publisher

Institute of Development Studies

Citation

Brock, A. and Stephens-Griffin, N. (2022) 'Policing Environmental Injustice', IDS Bulletin 53.4: 65–99, DOI: 10.19088/1968-2022.139

Series

IDS Bulletin 53.4

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

IDS Item Types

Article

Copyright holder

Institute of Development Studies

Country

United Kingdom

Language

en

IDS team

Resource Politics

Identifier ISSN

1759-5436

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    Volume 53. Issue 4: Reframing Climate and Environmental Justice

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