From climate-activism to climate-terrorism? The threat of a self-fulfilling prophecy

Abstract

Across the globe, government officials, politicians, and law enforcement agencies increasingly label or treat climate activists as criminals or terrorists. Employing theoretical insights from terrorism studies this contribution discusses the potential counterproductive effects of this approach. It investigates the likelihood that climate activists might eventually adopt violent methods to advance their political goals and argues that the trend to criminalize climate activists and label them as terrorists could potentially become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

1. Introduction

In 2022 Germany’s biggest tabloid Bild published an article with the headline “Climate activists are on the path of the RAF (Red Army Faction).” In the article, Bettina Röhl, daughter of RAF founder Ulrike Meinhof, explained that this left-wing terrorist group in the 1960s started with non-violent acts of sabotage, but over time radicalized. “Among the climate activists,” Röhl warned, “this hysterical ‘tipping point’ to violence and terror can happen very quickly” (Riffler, 2022). In this short contribution we will reflect on the question if Röhl’s warning is conceivable; could climate-activists ever become climate-terrorists? Building upon the work of McCauley and Moskalenko (2008) and Della Porta (1995), we contend that this possibility should not be dismissed outright.

2. Defining radicalization and terrorism

Before exploring this probability, it is important to define radicalization and terrorism. Radicalization can be considered a process, whereby people adopt a radical new idea contrary to the current status quo, like a controversial proposal of different societal norms and values. During this process people are willing to adopt increasingly extreme measures to achieve widespread behavioral change. This mindset can develop into the approval or even adoption of violence (De Bie, 2016; Doosje et al., 2016; NCTV, 2025; Neumann et al., 2007). Whether this form of violence can be considered terrorism, depends on the definition used. Complex in this regard is that there is no universally accepted one (Schmid, 2023). Academics usually adopt a definition that underscores a common understanding: an act of violence with an ideological motive that is aimed to create a psychological impact beyond the immediate victim (Richards, 2014). Scholars advise governments to adopt a narrow definition of terrorism, preventing a state to abuse the definition and the powers it consequentially gives them (Richards, 2014; Schmid, 2023). Governments, on the other hand, often use definitions that lack the intangible element of “creating a psychological impact” that is inherently difficult to prove. Government-formulated definitions may even exclude the element of “violence.” The Dutch National Coordinator for Terrorism and Security (NCTV, 2025), for example, states that an act that causes “disruptive damage” to society and is executed “from an ideological motive with the goal to establish societal changes,” can be considered terrorism. This is a much broader definition than many academics may use.

3. Climate activists’ actions and states’ responses

Environmental activism and its subdivision of climate activism have a long history of protesting against governments and large enterprises to protect the planet. The applied means to protest can however differ significantly, as does the frequency and intensity of protests. J. M. Brown (2021) summarizes this variety in a process called stepwise escalation. Configured as a pyramid, environmental activists can move from legal tactics at the bottom, to civil disobedience, sabotage and eventually violence at the top if their protests remain unresponsive.

Historically, legal tactics go as far back as the late 19th and early 20th century, when groups such as the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society lobbied against government initiatives in the U.S. to preserve wildlife and nature (J. M. Brown, 2021, p. 358). Disillusioned with the impact of such attempts, civil disobedience rose in the 1970s and 1980s in both the U.S. (J. M. Brown, 2021, p. 359) and Europe (Thabourey, 2021) when for instance Greenpeace protested nuclear testing by sailing through test zones. The more destructive measures of the pyramid were conducted no later than the 1960s and 1970s. Noteworthy are the failed release of bacteria in Chicago’s water supply system by Reconstruction, Society, Extermination in 1972, with the goal to “wipe out” the human race to protect the planet (Mareš, 2023) and monkeywrenching (destruction of equipment that could devastate nature) by environmental groups like Earth First!, Animal Libaration Front and Earth Liberation Front in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s (Mareš, 2023). Remarkably, governments have not only responded with legal means to such law-breaking behavior but have conducted destructive countermeasures themselves as well. Most notably is the Rainbow Warrior Affair, where the French secret service sabotaged—not to say, ‘blew up’—the Rainbow Warrior in 1985, a Greenpeace vessel protesting nuclear testing, leading to the death of one person (Wilson, 2010).

Contemporary environmental activism, through both legal actions and civil disobedience, has been on the rise since the signing of the 2015 Paris Agreement (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2024; Sawin, 2019). Interestingly, Europe—despite, or perhaps because of, its leading role in global climate policy—has become a prominent stage for climate activism, where demonstrators frequently face strong governmental responses.

Possibly taking inspiration from Andreas Malm’s (2021) influential manifesto “How to Blow up a Pipeline”—in which he argues that the climate movement needs to escalate its tactics—climate activists appear to have been climbing J. M. Brown’s (2021) pyramid, using ever more confrontational modes of civil disobedience and organizing ever more disruptive types of direct action to alert their political and industrial leaders to pace up the process to counter climate change. To illustrate, in Britain, roadblocks on major motorways caused traffic chaos, protests at oil installations in Germany have disrupted supplies, while hundreds of activists in the Netherlands stormed Amsterdam’s airport to block private jets from coming and going (Alkoussaa & Jabkhiro, 2023; Reuters, 2022). These examples are just a tip of the iceberg; from Norway to Austria and Switzerland to Spain, activists have disrupted flights by breaking into airports or gluing themselves to runways (Arnold, 2024). In Berlin alone, Reuters reported, police have in recent years registered 4,500 incidents related to groups like “Letzte Generation” and “Extinction Rebellion” (Alkoussaa & Jabkhiro, 2023). While radical in nature, all these activist groups explicitly promote non-violent forms of protest and all actions have thus far been non-violent in nature.

The responses by many state authorities have been harsh. A 2024 position paper by U.N. Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders Michel Forst (2024) chronicles numerous reports of heavy-handed, and abusive policing, as well as increased forms of criminalization. The list is long and varied: in France, Poland, and Spain, environmental defenders have been tailed by the police and followed to their homes, while in France, Germany, and Spain, activists have had their phones tapped and vehicles tracked. Various countries use counterterrorism laws against environmental activists. In France, Germany, Spain, and the U.K., the homes of environmental defenders have been raided, while activists in Spain and the U.K. have also been searched or arrested at their workplaces. In Spain and the U.K., environmental movements have been infiltrated by undercover police, who have taken part in meetings at activists’ homes and engaged in intimate relationships with some of them. In Spain, several activists from Futuro Vegetal have been under investigation for allegedly belonging to “a criminal organization.” In the Netherlands, the police have been conducting house visits with climate activists to converse about the activists’ motivations. Although the intent behind such visits is presumably to make rapport, activists have stated that such visits are considered intimidating and incriminating (NRC, 2025). In Austria and Germany, authorities are prosecuting the climate movement Letzte Generation on the charge of “forming a criminal organization,” an offense that implies that an organization intends to commit serious crimes that pose significant threats to public safety. This allows for far-reaching powers of investigation, such as geolocating, telephone-tapping, and property searches. The charge also carries serious consequences for the movement, as members of the public are now unable to donate without risking prosecution for the criminal offense of “financing a criminal organization” (Forst, 2024). In the U.K., finally, in July 2024, five climate activists of “Just Stop Oil” were found guilty of “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance” and convicted to at least four years imprisonment for their role in shutting down a motorway (Mooney & Pickard, 2024). Media and politicians (both opposition and elected), regularly join the chorus of criminalizing climate activists, referring to them as “extremists” or even “terrorists” (Forst, 2024).

The Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatović (2023) called upon states to stop this “repressive tide,” arguing that climate activists often see their protests as a measure of last resort in the face of an urgency to act. They have, the Commissioner argued, “limited possibilities of formally participating in political decision-making.” Climate activists “are often denied a place at the policy table, denied transparency about environmentally damaging decision-making processes or projects, refused access to climate conferences, or relegated to remote, out-of-sight authorized protest areas” and “consequently feel compelled to rely on demonstrations or protests to make their voices heard.” This is underscored by the Guidelines on Freedom of Peaceful Assembly, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. The guidelines elaborate on the importance of protecting the exercise of peaceful civil disobedience, highlighting that “State responses, including arrests and penalties, should be proportional to the respective offenses,” that “any discretionary powers afforded to law enforcement officials should be narrowly framed” and that “domestic legislation designed to counter terrorism or extremism should narrowly define the terms ‘terrorism’ and ‘extremism’ so as not to include forms of civil disobedience and protest.”

Although we exclusively referred above to the European context regarding state responses to contemporary environmental activism, in many other parts of the world, similar dynamics are at play. From Australia (Ritchie, 2023) to the Philippines (Aspinwall, 2024) and New Zealand (Civicus Monitor, 2023) to Canada (Fu, 2023) and the U.S. (J. M. Brown, 2025), climate activists engage in ever more confrontational non-violent direct actions, while state authorities respond with ever more repressive language and measures. Around the world, governments are increasingly deploying the language and methods of counterterrorism to repress climate movements (Hover, 2023).

This should trigger a warning and requires further elaborations. One risk of disproportionate interventions, as implied by Dunja Mijatovic above, is that activism in general will be reduced to a bare, unimpactful minimum. A second risk is the worsening of an alleged security threat. More specific, Jeremiah Asaka (2024) encourages environmental security scholars to focus more on the effects of maladaptation of climate policies regarding security issues. Maladaptation refers to the situation “where climate action (or inaction) produces the opposite result of what they were intended to achieve leading to worsening of existing security problems […]” (Asaka, 2024, p. 222). In the next section, we will explore the possibility that harsh government responses to climate activism can have a counterproductive effect, henceforth developing into a more severe security issue.

4. Radicalization and condensation

Radicalization processes witnessed in different social movements show potential parallel dynamics when compared to the development of the climate activist movement. In this context, notably McCauley and Moskalenko’s (2008, p. 425) concept of “condensation,” colored in with Della Porta’s (1995, p. 80) reciprocal adaptation of tactics is relevant to further explore. Both concepts refer to situations whereby punitive state responses to an activist or radical group, can eventually lead to a counterproductive effect. Instead of deterring the group from continuing its activities, the punitive response by the government may actually condense the group into a smaller group of core members who are triggered to escalate their behavior. In other words, this may set in motion a self-fulfilling-prophecy.

If we take a closer look at the climate activist movement, following the earlier work of Spadaro (2020), we argue that punitive government responses to climate protests may indeed have the potential to condense the movement and, as such, act as a hypothetical trigger for induced radical behavior. According to McCauley and Moskalenko, condensation processes can especially be seen with groups that initially have weak popular support but manage to attract “sympathy recruits” (moderate recruits that may think the same, but initially act moderately within the parameters of J. M. Brown’s (2021)legal tactics or civil disobedience). Climate activist groups such as Extinction Rebellion, Letzte Generation and Just Stop Oil can in this respect serve as an example. As illustrated above, these groups’ unorthodox actions, such as public sit-ins and road blockades, initially led to highly televised police responses which, in turn, among some segments of society created sympathy for the activists. When the public perceives police responses as disproportionate to the non-violent civil disobedience of protestors, this can attract new recruits. Initial sympathy for the cause may begin as distant support, within J. M. Brown’s (2021) parameters of legal tactics, but can grow into active participation and the mobilization of new activists. As a result, larger and potentially more serious actions, like civil disobedience, may be carried out by an expanding group of activists. We have witnessed this dynamic with regards to climate activism in many European countries. In Germany, for example, the arrest of several climate activists of Letzte Generation who conducted road blocks in 2023 was heavily criticized by the public and led to increased support for the movement’s cause (NRC, 2023).

A subsequent consequence, however, is that a continued cycle of action-reaction may create a complex internal dynamic within the activist movement, potentially resulting in fewer, but more radicalized, participants. Once the influx of sympathy recruits stabilizes, continued or ever more punitive police responses can eventually deter moderate participants. Moderate recruits, who imagined they would peacefully protest for the noble cause of preserving earth, but instead see themselves confronted with criminalization and state repression, may disband. They may consider the “cost” of direct involvement at a certain stage simply as too high, leading to the disengagement of the relatively new sympathy recruits. Della Porta (1995, pp. 79–80) similarly argued that the weight of state repression is difficult to overstate, “discouraging mass and peaceful protest while fueling the most radical fringes.” There are indications that such disengagement already takes place in certain climate movements. Activists from Just Stop Oil, for example, announced in April 2025 to stop protesting due to the high prison sentences given to fellow activists in the U.K. because of their involvement in the highway blockade in 2022 (NRC, 2025).

Although the outflow of moderate activists will shrink the movement in quantity, it does not necessarily deteriorate the movement in “quality,” as those who remain may increase their commitment to the cause. It is then possible that a smaller fraction of the activist movement condenses into a (new) group of highly radicalized individuals, which ends up in a cycle of escalating behavior between them and state actors. Interesting examples of (radical) movements that in the past have gone through similar processes are South Africa’s antiapartheid movement African National Congress (ANC; Davenport et al., 2005), far-left Marxist militant organizations such as the Weather Underground (Van Dongen, 2013), Germany’s RAF and Italy’s Brigate Rosso (Della Porta, 1995), or the religious jihadist movement in Europe (De Bie, 2016). Also environmental activist movements have been met with state repression that triggers reaction. Historically, the Earth Liberation Front met heavy state repression that led to an above ground support network that facilitated clandestine cells to continue operations (Loadenthal, 2013), and may have even inspired other environmental activists to conduct sabotage (J. M. Brown, 2021, p. 365). More recently, in 2022, a forest defender in Atlanta, Georgia, was shot and killed by the police during a “tree sit,” which induced a cycle of intensified actions between the Stop Cop City/Defend the Atlanta Forest activists and local police: from sabotage and arson by the activists, to raids and consequential charges of terrorism by the government (J. M. Brown, 2025).

This contemporary example perfectly illustrates the action-reaction spiral underlying the condensation theory. Moreover, Della Porta (1995, p. 158) warns for an irrevocable dynamic in that regard, when she describes how the repression of the state, with consequential lethal casualties, triggered a perception of no return among left-wing activists in Germany and Italy. This war rhetoric justified the activists to conduct more violent countermeasures against the government itself.

For this to happen and the extent to which the commitment to the cause and escalation of behavior develops, depends upon the strength and the underlying dynamic of the relationships between the climate activists. According to many radicalization studies, individuals in a radical environment increase their bond due to the experiences they share and the distance they feel from the out-group. The different underlying social-psychological mechanisms (e.g., cognitive opening, risky shift, fraternal relative deprivation) create a sort of kinship or brotherhood that generates a form of responsibility (Carlsson et al., 2020; De Bie, 2016; Doosje et al., 2016; McCauley & Moskalenko, 2008; Sageman, 2008). Two of such processes are worth mentioning in relation to condensation.

Firstly, fraternal relative deprivation (Runciman, 1966; Tomislav & Dinca, 2022) means that activists share a particular sense of injustice that increases their interpersonal bond. This bond over a shared negative experience can be so strong that activists may escalate their behavior due to the harm done to fellow group members, despite them not being personally victimized. According to the condensation theory you may develop a form of “survival guilt” during this state as soon as one of your comrades suffers from the state repression. Fellow activists who are imprisoned, injured, or even killed in the case of police brutality, need to be avenged. The activists who are lucky enough not to experience these severe consequences will most likely intensify their activist or radical mindset leading to new radical actions that may include violent behavior. The threshold to adopt violent behavior has been lowered due to the constant animosity by the government and the repression that followed (McCauley & Moskalenko, 2008). Della Porta (1995, p. 160) illustrated this process when describing how activists believed that the state conducted a dirty war against them and that the deaths of fellow comrades should not be seen as casualties, but as murders. In other words, hard police tactics would lead to hard protest tactics and vice versa (p. 80), further fueling the animosity and inducing reciprocal violent repercussion.

Secondly, risky shift refers to a parallel process where the average opinion within a small group of likeminded people tends to shift toward extremity if most members favor a similar opinion beforehand (R. Brown, 1986; McCauley & Moskalenko, 2008). So, if the similarity in opinion can be found in the fact that all activists of a climate movement want zero emission as soon as possible, according to the risky shift concept, it is likely that this group will consider more extreme measures over time in order to accomplish this goal.

5. Conclusion

This article hypothesized that continued repression of climate activists may trigger a process of political condensation where moderate voices are silenced or demobilized. Combined with the fact that populist governments in the Global North scale back their investment in climate policy and increasingly delegitimize environmental movements through the criminalization of civil disobedience as terrorism, this could result in a smaller core of more radicalized actors who feel excluded from democratic participation. In such a scenario, the state’s preemptive framing of climate activists as extremists or terrorists risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once individuals are unfairly treated as security threats, the resulting sense of marginalization and injustice can reinforce the very dynamics that radicalization theories warn against. It is then not difficult to imagine that a condensed climate movement extrapolates the meaning of a local casualty, like the one in Atlanta, Georgia (see J. M. Brown, 2025), to a higher level. Similar war rhetoric, as observed by Della Porta (1995) in Italy and Germany could be adopted in the future. It is not important whether activists are correct in believing that the government is fighting a dirty war against climate activists. The perception alone could already trigger the use of violence.