Stop Cop City!—Understanding the Strategic Choices of Protest Movements

How do protest movements choose their strategies and tactics? Do they think of violence and nonviolence the same way that scholars do? This article explores the roots of protest behavior via immersive fieldwork and more than two dozen interviews of activists in the Stop Cop City/Defend the Atlanta Forest campaign. Stop Cop City adopts a mixed approach, incorporating classic forms of nonviolent resistance, as well as sabotage, property destruction, and other tactics that the protest literature portrays as violent. Forest defenders’ eclecticism is a strategic response to state repression and the complex operational environment of an urban forest. It also follows from the social convergence of environmental and racial justice movements, whose tactics (particularly tree sitting and riot) have cross-pollinated. The anarchist disavowal of leadership and “peace police” and an anti-capitalist morality classifying property destruction as nonviolent create favorable conditions for mixing. A final social factor, intersectionality, increases environmentalists’ willingness to escalate, given the life-or-death stakes for Black Americans resisting police violence. The movement’s support community tolerates property destruction because of the same intersectional perspective, lowering the political cost of tactics that might otherwise prove divisive or counterproductive.