Cultural Violence, Stigma and the Legacy of the Anti-Sealing Movement by Danita Catherine Burke

Author:Danita Catherine Burke
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000931259
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2023-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

Notably Sea Shepherd, the organization that Troake spoke about, states that it is a practitioner of non-violence (Sea Shepherd n.d.). However, Troake’s experience with Sea Shepherd activists raises a serious point about how organizations and their members and supporters interpret non-violence and what their boundaries are for acceptable actions, attitudes and behaviours in pursuit of their causes.

The navigation in activism and the concept of peaceful protests, which Greenpeace for example also argues is core to its practices, philosophy and identity (Greenpeace International 2018, 3–4; Greenpeace International 2020), is blurry when reflecting on the activism of its anti-sealing legacy. It harkens back to Johan Galtung’s (1990) point on experiences of cultural violence and the use of siege and sanctions tactics to try and force an outcome under the guise of non-violence: “To some, this is ‘non-violence’, since direct and immediate killing is avoided. To the victims … the actor avoids having to face the violence directly … meaning the loss of freedom and identity instead of loss of life and limbs” for those targeted (1990, 293).

According to Patrick Moore, former president of Greenpeace and an active anti-sealing protester for the organization in the 1970s–1980s before his controversial expulsion from the organization in 1986:

peacefulness, passivism is non-violence, but it doesn’t include inciting other people to violence against you. That is not passivism. In other words, by you making the first blow, or you chaining yourself to someone’s tractor who is trying to make a living with it, that is not peaceful … it is not peaceful to interfere with other peoples’ livelihoods in a way that threatens their livelihoods. That’s not peaceful.

(Moore 2021).

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