Gorman, Jamie
(2021)
Disobedient youth:
Lessons from the youth climate strike movement.
Other.
EU-Council of Europe Youth Partnership, Strasbourg.
Abstract
In the middle of the long, hot European summer of 2019, 450 young people travelled from across
Europe to the shores of Lake Geneva. They gathered together in the town of Lausanne as
representatives of a new youth-led movement for climate justice which had erupted across
Europe in the previous months. By the time these activists arrived in Switzerland, they had
already co-ordinated a first major wave of strikes which mobilised 1.6 million people in March
2019 (Wahlström et al., 2019: 5) and three quarters of a million in May 2019 (Fridays for Future,
2021). This second school strike action coincided with the European Parliament elections. At
their August meeting the strikers made the Lausanne Climate Declaration which articulated three
major demands for this nascent movement (Fridays for Future, 2019):
1. Keep the global temperature rise below 1.5 °C compared to pre-industrial levels.
2. Ensure climate justice and equity.
3. Listen to the best united science currently available.
The Lausanne Declaration identified further details on how this might be done, such as calling for
the declaration of a ‘Europe-wide climate emergency, which includes goals, targets, and
mechanisms such as check-ups to ensure transparency and accountability’ (Fridays for Future,
2019: 7). However, strikers have generally resisted making or communicating specific policy
demands. The Lausanne meeting was followed by a second wave of strikes in September 2019
with an estimated 7.6 million people participating in 6000 protest events across 185 countries
(de Moor et al., 2020). The core youth strategy has been to use the strike tactic to collectively raise
their voices. Their simple message has been to call on political representatives and states to
respond to the climate crisis in a just way with the urgency that science requires.
| Item Type: |
Monograph
(Other)
|
| Keywords: |
disobedient youth; lessons; youth climate strike movement; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Social Sciences > Applied Social Studies |
| Item ID: |
14518 |
| Depositing User: |
Jamie Gorman
|
| Date Deposited: |
09 Jun 2021 12:41 |
| Publisher: |
EU-Council of Europe Youth Partnership |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
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