The openMovements series invites leading social scientists to share their research results and perspectives on contemporary social struggles.
Between October 2014 and March 2016 I studied how the climate movement was mobilizing around the COP21 climate summit in Paris. Although the focus of this research was academic, I have long wondered whether my research could in any way be useful to those involved in the movement. Despite several activists’ encouragement, I hesitated to take up this role. I felt there was little I could teach organizers who seemed perfectly capable of self-reflexion about what could be improved. It is therefore with the greatest humility that I present some of my main findings, and the lessons that may possibly be learned. I have the greatest respect for the difficulty of the tasks movement organizers faced in the run up to Paris – amplified by the terrorist attacks that struck Paris just two weeks before the summit, and by the ‘state of emergency’ that was subsequently installed. I also realize this piece comes late. How useful my findings still are for future mobilization is for others to decide. Nonetheless, as Erik Olin Wright puts it, “[emancipatory] social science, rather than simply social criticism or social philosophy, recognizes the importance (…) of systematic scientific knowledge about how the world works.”
