Anti-roads
direct action – camps, tunnels, tree occupations – has recently been in the news.
The
development of anti-roads camp near Hastings has led to speculation that
there might emerge an anti-roads movement like that of the 1990s, in response
to the government’s revival of the national roads programme,
In the 1990s,
my PhD research was focused on the No M11 Link Road Campaign, in Wanstead and
Leytonstone (east London), and identified a number of connections between the
social issue of road protests and psychological issues.
The starting
point of the research was an analysis of the participants’ own understandings –
of themselves, their actions and their social worlds. This analysis revealed a
number of contrasts with the understandings of those outside the anti-roads
movement. First, there was the question of ‘politics’. At that time, many
commentators were bemoaning the apparent indifference of young people to
politics. Yet this pessimistic view was based on a narrow conception of what
counts as ‘politics’; while many of the No M11 participants did not vote for
the political parties, they certainly saw their activity as a form of politics;
and they were deeply engaged, informed and passionate about it.
What was that
‘political’ activity? Whereas for most extra-parliamentary groups political
action consisted of ‘protest’ and demonstration marches, the No M11 participants rejected
this model in favour of ‘direct action’. Unlike ‘protest’, ‘direct action’ did
not mean simply asking the government to stop road-building, but actively preventing
this road-building through their own activities, such as occupying construction
sites.
The third
contrast was in terms of how this direct action was understood by those inside
and outside the campaign. The campaign maintained an ethos of ‘non-violence’,
and regarded any of those within the group who transgressed against this
principle as the exception. But those policing the campaign understood the
campaign as ‘violent’ because of damage caused to property (such as site fences), and they saw those
in the campaign who they accused of physically assaulting police officers as
representative of the whole group.
This last
contrast had a number of psychological consequences for campaign participants. Instead of being treated by the police as the respectable middle class
residents they felt themselves to be, they found themselves being treated as an oppositional group. This led
them to see themselves as oppositional. For
them, the local anti-roads campaign had initially been essentially about ‘saving Wanstead’; but now it was about opposing
the national roads programme, which they saw as being forced through by
government, using the police as a ‘political’ battering ram.
The M11 link
road was completed, but the government’s subsequent abandonment of the national roads
programme was widely attributed to the disruption caused by the campaigns in
Wanstead, Newbury, Fairmile and other places. In effect, campaign participants from
the No M11 and other groups succeeded in translating their own understanding
of road-building into ‘public opinion’. Road-building was now seen not just as a
‘technical’ matter, to be decided by highly controlled public enquiries, but as
a deeply political and controversial issue that groups could affect outside the
usual ‘political’ channels. Many participants’ newly political
understanding of the government’s roads programme became extended to an opposition to ‘car
culture’ and indeed to global environmental ‘injustice’. Hence the extension of
their participation from the local campaign to the anti-car Reclaim the Streets,
and from there to the worldwide anti-capitalist movement, made perfect sense.
As well as
these changes in their participation in collective action, for many people
there were changes in their personal lives. They made new friends, but
fell out with other people that they used to regard as friends. They changed
their consumer habits to become more ‘ethical’. They changed their views about
the importance of a respectable appearance and lifestyle. And many no longer
wanted anything to do with the police, even if their home was burgled.
The aim of my
research was to understand these processes of change. The work led to the
development of a new
model of identity change in collective action. We argued that identity was
the hinge between the psychological and the social, and helped explain the links between
experiences in the campaign and various profound psychological changes. Specifically,
we suggested that, through their identity-based action in the campaign ('defending Wanstead’, for example), many participants inadvertently changed the
very context (their relationship with others, such as the police and
government) that defined their identity. It was through construing the action
by others (i.e. police) as representative of a wider category of ‘injustice’,
and also in-group
boundaries as much broader (‘all those affected by injustice’), that experiences
in the No M11 anti-roads campaign led to wider social movement participation
and indeed created the sense many had of being ‘a different (radicalized, empowered)
person’.
One of the
research projects I am currently supervising is looking more closely at similar
psychological changes to those I observed at the No M11 campaign. The campaign
we are studying is one in Scandinavia where ‘locals’ are coming to identify as
‘activists’. They are also reporting changes in their personal lives that, on
the surface, are not obviously connected to the ‘environmental’ campaign they
first got involved in. The research will examine their construals of the actions they are involved in. We will examine the
extent to which the categories that participants use to conceptualize and talk about social
relations in the campaign are changing and are being applied to other
areas of their lives, leading to the observed changes in behaviour. What makes
them define a phenomenon in the campaign as ‘the same’ as one in the home, for
example? Judging by what we have seen in the anti-roads protests of the
1990s, this research is important not only for what it tells us about the
profound phenomenological impact of participation in collective action, but
also for the social and political significance of some of these psychological
changes.
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