I. Shifting Paradigms of Contestation in Metulia

Perhaps the most obvious shift in social contestation in Metulia, as elsewhere, has been the shift towards digital activism in response to the pandemic. Because this trend has received so much attention, however, I will focus on changes to in-person contestation.Footnote ¹⁶

One striking development in local in-person protests has been a noticeable surge in local right-wing social organizing, including anti-homeless organizing,Footnote ¹⁷ right-wing council candidates,Footnote ¹⁸ anti-vax rallies, and eventually weekly “Freedom Convoys” that saw thousands of participants congregate from around Vancouver Island to protest public health restrictions.Footnote ¹⁹ Similar convoys took place nationwide. These actions saw the mass use of vehicle convoys to slow traffic or block streets and the use of car horns to create noise protests or harass local businesses for public health compliance.Footnote ²⁰

At the same time, the rallies and marches that had long been a mainstay of progressive activism declined dramatically.Footnote ²¹ There were, of course, notable exceptions. Black Lives Matter (BLM) brought significant crowds to the streets.Footnote ²² BLM also helped popularize statue-removal tactics,Footnote ²³ which have since been incorporated into decolonial movements more prominently.Footnote ²⁴ The Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek blockades, which sought an end to old-growth logging, were perhaps the most prominent local site of contention during the pandemic.Footnote ²⁵ At its peak, Fairy Creek activists maintained over a dozen blockades, some lasting well over a year, in what would become the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history.Footnote ²⁶ Tactically, Fairy Creek revolved largely around suspending people from tripods, trees, bridges and cantilevers; and locking people into pipes buried in the road or embedded into logs, trenches, or vehicles (so-called “sleeping dragons”).

The first significant trend I perceive in this changing environment is that both Fairy Creek and the Freedom Convoys, in different ways, involved what activists term “hard-blocks”—the use of various devices to complicate arrest and removal, compared with “soft-block” tactics—people occupying space without attempting to physically complicate their removal.Footnote ²⁷ While activists in Fairy Creek complicated their removal with tripods and sleeping dragons, Freedom Convoy organizers, both locally and nationally, accomplished the same with vehicles, particularly large commercial trucks which cannot be easily towed.Footnote ²⁸

This represents a notable shift compared with recent mass struggles, including the fight against Old Growth logging at Clayoquot Sound (the previous record holder for the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history),Footnote ²⁹ the Protect the Inlet–led campaign against the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion (TMX), or even most of the rail and port blockades in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en, which relied predominantly on soft-block tactics.Footnote ³⁰ That is not to say that hard tactics are unique to the pandemic—they have a long and diverse history. Even recently, activists with the Tiny House Warriors (THW)Footnote ³¹ used them against TMX, with support from Metulia-based activists.Footnote ³² Anti-logging actions in the Walbran Valley in the 90s—cousins to the much larger Clayoquot Sound protests—employed very similar tactics to Fairy Creek, although on a vastly smaller scale.Footnote ³³ Some Wet’suwet’en solidarity actions used them as well, especially against banks.Footnote ³⁴ However, the Walbran activists, the THW, and Wet’suwet’en allies who used hard-blocks were all acting in the context of much larger movements in which soft-blocks were the norm. In Fairy Creek, we see mass actions whose dominant approach is hard-blocks. Indeed, Extinction Rebellion Victoria (XRVI), long one of Metulia’s most active users of hard-blocks, was one of the few pre-existing groups to maintain high levels of activity during the pandemic.Footnote ³⁵ Save Old Growth (SOG), a new group with close ties to both Fairy Creek and XRVI, also emerged from the pandemic, normalizing hard-block highway blockades that were far outside the norm even a few years earlier.Footnote ³⁶ Likewise, there have been previous attempts at “Freedom Convoys” and other vehicle-based disruptions, particularly on the prairies.Footnote ³⁷ However, these failed to engage the mainstream right in the way that recent convoy protests have. In this sense, recent movements suggest a growing role for hard-block tactics.

Alongside this contentious escalation, the pandemic also saw many activists redirect energy from street protests to mutual aid. The largest local mutual aid group, “COVID-19 Coming Together (Victoria/Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ Lands),” garnered over 11,000 members in less than a month.Footnote ³⁸ The progressive Red Cedar initiative also arose during the pandemic as a mutual aid space for out-of-work restaurant employees cooking and delivering COVID-safe meals to at-risk, un- or under-employed, and unhoused people.Footnote ³⁹ The Community Care Tent arose as a grassroots harm reduction space for the unhoused community, many of whom had been forced out of shelter spaces by pandemic restrictions.Footnote ⁴⁰ Community Food Support began offering meal deliveries and operating a community fridge.Footnote ⁴¹ Community “care pods” emerged on the neighborhood level.Footnote ⁴² Activists even built illicit showers in city parks for the unhoused diaspora, sparking confrontation with the city.Footnote ⁴³ In many cases, these groups grew out of progressive communities and/or explicitly understand their organizing along anarchist lines, as building alternative institutions capable of challenging the capitalist state, or simply rendering it irrelevant.Footnote ⁴⁴ In other cases, mutual aid developed without an explicitly politicized mandate.Footnote ⁴⁵ Though explicitly right-wing uses of mutual aid are decidedly less common, the Freedom Convoys also spawned networks to supply and feed participants.Footnote ⁴⁶

These tactics, too, have considerable histories, particularly in the struggles of bipoc people.Footnote ⁴⁷ Mutual aid has long been an important part of progressive political strategy,Footnote ⁴⁸ and far-right groups have been experimenting with snow removal services, neighbourhood patrols, outreach to the unhoused, and other charitable or solidarity-based recruitment tools for years.Footnote ⁴⁹ Nevertheless, the pandemic undeniably made mutual aid a more prominent feature of the progressive repertoire, and far right movements have made solidarity with the unvaccinated a major recruiting tactic.Footnote ⁵⁰

All these movements are creatures of polycrisis—driven by but not reducible to the pandemic. Freedom Convoys fueled longstanding far-right movements with new opposition to public health measures; existing anti-poverty networks drew on pandemic-driven displacements to fuel new forms of support; even climate and Indigenous sovereignty–driven movements like Fairy Creek were fueled in important ways by widespread unemployment, the availability of government financial support, and the psychological strain and social isolation that the pandemic helped create.Footnote ⁵¹ In fact, activists first noticed logging in Fairy Creek while browsing satellite data to kill time during lockdown.Footnote ⁵² Here in Metulia, then, the pandemic is interacting with other crises, and doing so in ways that have resulted in a growing role for hard-blocks and mutual aid.

II. Thinking hard-blocks and mutual aid together

At first glance, the simultaneous turn towards relatively inward looking, non-confrontational mutual aid tactics and increasingly confrontational hard-block tactics seems puzzling. However, both involve forms of direct intervention that are not exclusively oriented around petitioning governments for redress. In that sense, both constitute a departure from the forms of contestation most associated with the liberal paradigm.

It is useful, then, to return briefly to the popularly understood foundations of modern liberalism—the myth of the social contract. The myth goes something like this: once upon a time, humans lived without organized society, robbing, killing and pillaging one another with impunity.Footnote ⁵³ Life was, as Hobbes famously put it, “nasty, brutish and short.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In order to escape this condition, humans contracted to pool all their authority in a single government that could make and enforce rules. The dominance of the state over its subjects is, then, the precondition of social life. Yann Allard-Tremblay’s concept of “governance as mastery” is helpful—the primary goal of governance isn’t the provision of substantive goods but simply the maintenance of effective top-down authority as a good in itself.Footnote ⁵⁵

As Tilly has shown, the material and ideological dominance of the centralized state—the star character of the liberal narrative—is historically associated with a shift away from repertoires of contestation that emphasize directly enacting immediate changes in local material conditions.Footnote ⁵⁶ Indeed, such tactics are delegitimized as threatening the very chaos the social contract was designed to escape. Instead, “modern” repertoires revolve around attempts to create change indirectly by influencing the state, especially through petitions, marches, rallies, etc. Such tactics both presume and accept the mastery of the state. This is not to say that “pre-modern” tactics disappeared—direct action and mutual aid have been a prominent part of modern social movement praxis, with bipoc communities showing particular leadership.Footnote ⁵⁷ Rather, it is to say that contemporary narratives delegitimize and criminalize direct tactics while valorizing forms of protest that petition the state.

Robin Celikates summarizes “the classical liberal definition that one can find in the work of the most influential [liberal] theorists of civil disobedience such as John Rawls (1971), Ronald Dworkin (1985), and, to a lesser extent, Jürgen Habermas (1985): civil disobedience occurs when citizens break the law in public, nonviolent, morally justified, and communicative ways in order to press for local changes in the political and legal order of a community, while recognizing the general legitimacy of that order.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In this sense, “legitimate” civil disobedience is portrayed as “purely or primarily symbolic” and occurring “within the limits of fidelity to law.”Footnote ⁵⁹

A key feature of this account is that it draws a bright line between persuasion and coercion.Footnote ⁶⁰ Legitimate disobedience can make a moral appeal to persuade power holders or members of the public, it cannot interfere with their freedoms, impose costs on their actions, or otherwise coerce them into courses of action they did not freely choose. “When protestors stop trying to merely persuade and start actively interfering with the conduct of others, they move from civil disobedience to ‘civil blackmail.’”Footnote ⁶¹

Modern, liberal repertoires of contestation therefore both presume and work to preserve the mastery of the state. By constructing disobedience as an appeal to, rather than a challenge to, the law, liberal accounts make accepting state authority a precondition for legitimately challenging its policies.Footnote ⁶² By barring coercive action, such accounts preserve the state’s monopoly on violence. Of course, the actual practice of even the figures and movements most associated with liberal forms of civil disobedience—Thoreau, Gandhi, King, and others—have always exceeded such a neat liberal definition, employing forms of coercion, revolution, and secrecy to create a repertoire that is far more expansive—and far more radical—than liberal theorists might suggest.Footnote ⁶³ The force of the liberal model is not that it accurately describes movement practice, but rather that it provides a normative framework that allows authorities to distinguish between “good” and “bad” protestors, thereby justifying the repression of the later.Footnote ⁶⁴ In this way, liberal narratives of contestation play an important role in buttressing the liberal paradigm of governance.

Hard-block tactics challenge this paradigm in at least two ways. First, they are not entirely persuasive in nature. While they certainly act as symbolic methods of communication, their function is not only to call on the conscience of the onlooker, but also to physically impede the movement of others—to deny them access to space, to disrupt the flow of capital, to disrupt the circulation of political power, to make certain courses of action more costly, etc. In this sense, hard-blocks are coercive, or at least more coercive than soft-blocks.

Second, while both Fairy Creek and the Freedom Convoy made appeals to dominant institutions, both also called those institutions into question. The Freedom Convoy, at least its national body, envisioned protest leaders partnering with the Senate and the Governor General to depose an elected parliament,Footnote ⁶⁵ or, alternatively, protestors might treat themselves as legislators and enter into an extra-parliamentary coalition with opposition parties for the same purpose.Footnote ⁶⁶ Both cases make some appeal to existing institutions, but either would amount to a coup d’état. While Fairy Creek participants called on the state for policy change, many simultaneously denied the jurisdiction of the Crown on unceded lands, or simply refuted the legitimacy of a state that is causing ecological collapse.Footnote ⁶⁷ Neither setting was unambiguously characterized by the acceptance of, or appeals to, existing institutions. Rather, both bear an ambivalent, or perhaps polyvalent, relationship to the state.Footnote ⁶⁸

Despite their less threatening appearances, practices of mutual aid also push the boundaries of liberal paradigms of governance. Historically, the suppression of mutual aid has been a key strategy by which the state cultivates dependency and cements its own power.Footnote ⁶⁹ The resulting dearth of spontaneous social cooperation is then held out as proof that humans are fundamentally uncooperative, and that without a sovereign to compel cooperation, there would be no organized society. Thus, we are taught to expect that disasters, during which state structures break down, will “reveal civilisation as a thin veneer, beneath which lies brutal human nature. From this perspective, the best we can hope for from most people under crisis is selfish indifference; at worst, they will swiftly turn to violence.”Footnote ⁷⁰ When people band together, rather than going for each other’s throats, in times of social disorder,Footnote ⁷¹ they contradict liberal justifications for state control and coercion, and with it the justification for confining political activity to the liberal repertoire.

Like hard blocks, mutual aid tactics depart from liberal paradigms of contestation by seeking direct, local interventions rather than, or as well as, appealing to the state for policy reform. In its more radical variants, mutual aid constitutes a revolutionary strategy that aims to render state institutions irrelevant, starving them of participation until they wither away and die.Footnote ⁷² Of course, many of the mutual aid groups that arose during the pandemic are not explicitly anarchist in their self-understanding,Footnote ⁷³ and many would likely balk at the idea of a stateless society. Nevertheless, even “apolitical” uses of mutual aid are oriented towards acting directly on material conditions, rather than, or alongside, seeking state aid. Frequently, such groups arise in response to state failures, and thus take the non-mastery of the established order as their point of departure, if not their destination.

Both mutual aid and hard-blocks therefore suggest that diverse actors on both the left and right are working to exert immediate influence on material conditions, rather than, or, more often, in addition to, influencing state policy. In this way, both challenge liberal paradigms of governance and the state-centric repertoires of contestation that go with them.

III. From Local to Global

The growth of hard-block and mutual aid tactics in and around Metulia is, of course, a local phenomenon. However, a review of the broader literature on social movement advocacy during the pandemic suggests larger national and international trends towards direct political interventions, including political violence and riots,Footnote ⁷⁴ direct action non-cooperation,Footnote ⁷⁵ mutual aid,Footnote ⁷⁶ and more. Nor are these fringe phenomena—recent protests are seeing mass middle-class involvement, reversing decades-old trends.Footnote ⁷⁷ As in Metulia, these direct tactics sit alongside a surge of digital activism and a range of creative state-oriented tactics.Footnote ⁷⁸ The point is not that the hard-block and mutual aid tactics are the only, or even the most important, shifts, either locally or globally. Rather, they stand as examples that illustrate and participate in a broader moment of experimentation.Footnote ⁷⁹ According to Erica Chenoweth, social movements around the world are entering “a new phase of tactical innovation” as they begin “updating and renewing the outdated playbook that has led them to rely exclusively on protest at the expense of methods such as noncooperation and the development of alternative institutions.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Jonathan Pinckney and Miranda Rivers similarly emphasize a broadening repertoire, as movements experiment beyond the traditional street protests that have dominated recent decades and enter a mode of creative “tactical diversification.”Footnote ⁸¹

IV. A Jurisgenerative Moment

Cover’s work on law and narrative suggests one way to understand this era of experimentation. As Cover puts it, law has important narrative dimensions, working to generate state legitimacy by positing an understanding of the past and present and a vision of the future, and bridging the two together with a plausible program of conduct.Footnote ⁸² For example, we might say that the social contract myth posits a past of chaos and violence, a future of security and order, and state mastery acting as the bridge that brings us from one to the other. For Cover, the problem with law is that there is too much of it.Footnote ⁸³ This is true both in the sense that diverse social groups will develop their own divergent understandings of state law and in the sense that they will develop their own distinct narratives and, in some cases, will consider these “laws” supreme over state law.Footnote ⁸⁴ Social groups are, in this sense, law-making or jurisgenerative. In order to maintain its normative monopoly, the state must be law-killing or jurispathic, working to supress, destroy, absorb, coopt, delegitimize or criminalize competing narratives and the normative systems they support.Footnote ⁸⁵ We might say that the social contract myth plays this role by delegitimizing forms of social organization that do not rely on state mastery as chaotic and dangerous. If state narratives become unconvincing, however, their jurispathic capacity is undermined, allowing social actors to develop and popularize their own competing narratives more easily.Footnote ⁸⁶

Indeed, Miconi et al. suggest that one effect of the pandemic is precisely that it undercuts people’s capacity to envision a positive future under existing systems.Footnote ⁸⁷ Both the new precarities being experienced by the privileged and the increased inequalities being faced by the marginalized work to make the deficiencies of the dominant order more visible,Footnote ⁸⁸ undercutting its output legitimacy.Footnote ⁸⁹ Donatella Della Porta further suggests that when citizens are asked to sacrifice for the good of society, their expectations from society tend to grow.Footnote ⁹⁰ Thus, increased expectations meet decreased outputs, making dominant narratives less compelling. The normative challenge is particularly acute for a governance paradigm built on mastery, as the pandemic reveals the radical limits of the state’s ability to exert control and provide security. Footnote ⁹¹ As Jorgensen et al. explain, the resulting “pandemic fatigue” is driving discontent not just with public health measures, but with the entire political establishment, fueling a radically anti-establishment politics across the political spectrum.Footnote ⁹²

Moreover, sudden changes in governance caused by the pandemic can open up the political imaginary,Footnote ⁹³ creating “spaces for reflection about a future that cannot be thought of as being in continuity with the past.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Indeed, the pandemic has made actual policy outcomes that were barely thinkable a few short years ago. The Overton window is expanding. As Turner et al. put it, during sudden breaks in political routine “usual conventions cease to guide social action and people collectively transcend, bypass, or subvert established institutional patterns and structures.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Speaking to the interplay of these trends, Claus Offe argues that the pandemic has thrown existing epistemic regimes into crises—as the uncertainties of COVID reveal the limits of expert knowledge, non-experts feel increasingly emboldened to make sense of the situation for themselves.Footnote ⁹⁶ Likewise, Turner et al. argue that the public is no longer passively accepting expert narratives but, rather, is increasingly involved in generating its own.Footnote ⁹⁷

If this is true of our primary narratives—narratives about society and its trajectory—we might also expect it to be true of the secondary narratives which discipline our conceptions of effective, legitimate resistance. Indeed, we have seen how liberalism’s secondary narratives—its paradigms of contestation—are also jurispathic, working to suppress and delegitimize forms of contestation that sideline or challenge the state. One possible explanation for increased tactical experimentation is thus that the waning hegemony of liberalism is occurring not only at the primary but also at the secondary level.

Indeed, both Chenoweth and Ortiz et al. show that while nonviolent contention has surged dramatically in recent decades, success rates have fallen.Footnote ⁹⁸ In part, this may be because states have become more entrenched and more adept at countering conventional forms of resistance. However, Chenoweth argues that a more important set of factors lies in movements themselves, and in particular in a recent over-reliance on street protest and digital activism.Footnote ⁹⁹ Regardless, after decades defined by unprecedented mass protests across the world, many major movements, from Occupy, the Arab Spring, and Europe’s Square movements, to youth climate strikes and the global environmental movement, to Black Lives Matter, Indigenous resurgence, the Colour and Umbrella revolutions, and others, have struggled to realize anything close to the transformative changes they envision.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Most glaringly, liberal modes of contestation have utterly failed to prevent catastrophic climate collapse—even in the face of considerable public mobilization, emissions continue to rise and meaningful changes remain elusive, to say the least.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In this context, the idea that accepted forms of contestation represent a viable path to social change is ever less persuasive. The same way decreased output challenges primary liberal narratives, the decreased efficacy of liberal modes of contestation challenges secondary narratives as well.Footnote ¹⁰² Indeed, recent protests are not only larger and more common, they are also more direct, increasingly organized outside of mainstream organizations, and increasingly oriented towards contesting the political system itself, precisely because that system has proved so resistant to past mobilizations.Footnote ¹⁰³ Liberal paradigms of contestation may therefore be struggling to provide a narrative that social actors find plausible. As a result, repertoires are loosening and the range of experimentation is growing. Once again, the pandemic contributes to this trend—as public health restrictions made many standard tactics unsafe or impractical, activists were forced to innovate.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This introduces new modes of contestation at a time when old norms are less determinative, helping produce the current era of experimentation. Such a loosening of repertoires is hardly unprecedented,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ but it is nevertheless a significant feature of the present conjuncture.

If liberal secondary narratives are indeed waning, Cover suggests we should expect to see two types of jurisgenerative activity: the insular and the redemptive. Insular strategies focus on building autonomous normative worlds independent of the dominant order, while redemptive strategies focus on transforming the world by contesting existing systems.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Of course, these strategies are not totally discrete.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Nevertheless, we might say that groups using hard-block tactics are primarily engaged in redemptive strategies. Mutual aid, on the other hand, is largely insular. One way to understand the surge of hard-block tactics and mutual aid practices is thus to say that contestation is becoming increasingly jurisgenerative, as groups lose faith in the state-centric narratives and repertoires that characterize liberal forms of disobedience and respond by creating their own normative projects complete with their own norms of contestation.

The present era of experimentation may therefore be a symptom of the decline of liberal hegemony—a decline which leaves fertile space for alternative narratives of society and resistance to emerge. The questions of which norms and repertoires will fill this space, and how they will interact, are key questions of the present conjuncture. Some movements react to the decline of the mastery narrative by seeking more horizontal forms of social organization—in other words, they abandon mastery as a paradigm of governance, attacking or sidelining hierarchical structures.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Others seek to recuperate mastery,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ reasserting old hierarchies and privileges without the moderating influence of liberal norms.

This article suggests that the interplay of, and competition between, such alternative paradigms may already be reshaping paradigms of governance in lasting but unpredictable ways. Indeed, we may now be entering what Tarrow calls a “cycle of contention”—as each group experiments, it creates opportunities and threats, both for the state and for other contentious actors.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Each affected actor responds with experiments of its own, setting in motion cascading, relational cycles of conflict, norm generation, and tactical diversification. The results of such cycles are open-ended and, indeed, constitute a crucial terrain of struggle.