Petro-hegemony and the matrix of resistance: What can Standing Rock’s Water Protectors teach us about organizing for climate justice in the United States?

ABSTRACT

This article asks what scholars of climate justice politics and activists in the climate justice movement can learn from the Standing Rock Sioux’s fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in North Dakota. It reviews Patricia Hill Collins’ insights on intersectionality and the matrix of domination and suggests that the matrix of domination for which fossil fuel companies are responsible establishes the conditions for the possible emergence of what I call a matrix of resistance, rooted in intersectionality, collective liberation, and negotiating tensions between universalism and particularism. I go on to demonstrate how Gramsci’s theory of hegemony has been applied to understanding the fossil fuel industry’s power. Rereading Gramsci, I suggest that hegemony must combine three relations of power: consent, compliance, and coercion. Applying this to the fossil fuel industry, I introduce the term petro-hegemony. Drawing on preliminary field research, I show how petro-hegemony revealed itself during the struggle against the DAPL and argue that the Indigenous-led uprising provides clues into how the construction of a matrix of resistance might be used to strategically counter petro-hegemony.

KEYWORDS:

• Intersectionality
• Climate justice
• Gramsci
• Standing Rock
• Petro-hegemony

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Haluza-DeLay and Carter (2016) and Kinder (2016) have used the term petro-hegemony as another way of referring to the fossil fuel industry’s power. However, these authors do not take advantage of the term’s conceptual potential. In this paper, I am extending and developing it to provide a more detailed conceptual framework with which to better understand the different relationships of power the industry is able to influence.

2. See both Bosworth (2018) and Smucker and Premo (2014) for a fascinating discussion of the debates concerning populism in the North American Climate Justice Movement.

3. See Deer (2015), Buckley (2014), or Eligon (2013) for examples of Indigenous women’s disproportionate exposure to the impacts of fossil fuel companies. Fossil fuel development is often associated with the presence of ‘man camps’ that significantly increase exposure of Indigenous women to the trafficking, violence, drug-related crime, and higher rates of prostitution.

4. It is important to acknowledge here that while Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality, and its adoption into popular parlance is relatively recent, in social movement spaces, particularly those lead by feminist women of color, the understanding of what it describes is hardly new. As L.A. Kauffman reminds us in the United States it was ‘the women of color feminism created by the Combahee River Collective and others in the late 1970s and 1980s [that] laid the foundation for what would later be termed intersectionality’ (Kauffman 2017, 48).

5. I tend to move literature on the resource curse into the petro-capitalism subfield because it aligns more closely with the political economy of oil than it does with coercive state relations.

6. Declaring a definitive defeat or victory for any social movement is often very difficult and depends upon its variegated intended goals, its unforeseen consequences, the diverse ambitions of its participants, and the temporal framework upon which different actors are operating. In so far as the goal at Standing Rock was to prevent oil flowing across Indigenous ancestral lands and under the Missouri River, the campaign was indeed beaten. In so far as the campaign aided the resurgence of the politics of Indigenous sovereignty and drew attention to climate justice in the United States, it was an important victory.

7. To be clear, I do not mean to suggest here that because one version was stated in English it necessarily was universal and the phrase stated in Lakota was necessarily particular, but rather that the phrase stated in Lakota signaled the specificity of the struggle to the Sioux and placed it within an intersectional framework.

8. Here I am responding to the top-down politics of state recognition of First Nations’ rights that Glen Coulthard critiques in Red Skin, White Masks and suggesting that in addition to what he calls self-recognition, collective liberation requires a politics of co-recognition between constituents of native and non-native alliances. See Coulthard (2014).

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Theo LeQuesne

Theo LeQuesne is a PhD student in Global Studies at UC Santa Barbara. His research assesses the power of fossil fuel companies and the strategies climate justice campaigners deploy to counter it. During his field research Theo spent time with front-lines climate justice communities in British Columbia, Richmond CA, and Standing Rock ND. Theo has been active in the fossil fuel divestment movement, climate justice pedagogy, and youth activism at the United Nations climate talks.