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Extinction and settler Rebellion: Kyle R. Matthews, Sophie Bond, Karen Nairn, ‘Diffusion as a colonizing process and the challenges of decolonizing Extinction Rebellion Aotearoa New Zealand’, Social Movement Studies, 2025

03Jun25

Abstract: The Extinction Rebellion (XR) model, including three demands and a disruptive theory of change, were transferred from the imperial center of the United Kingdom to Aotearoa. Initially activists assumed that the model required no significant modification to be applied in this new context and built local groups and conducted protests in ways that were like XR in the UK. Yet by late 2019, in response to the critiques of a caucus of Māori and their allies, Extinction Rebellion Aotearoa New Zealand (XRANZ) began to adapt the XR model with the aim of decolonizing it. They did this by adding a fourth demand, translating the demands and principles into Māori, and focusing XRANZ’s activism on a critique of the relationships between colonization and the climate crisis. Through this work there were significant challenges and pushback from some XRANZ members, and outcomes were partial at best. We make four interrelated arguments about these acts of adaptation: that processes of knowledge transfer from one context to another can be colonizing; that confronting the ways that colonial knowledge is entangled with climate activism requires significant work; that XRANZ’s is instructive for XR chapters in other settler-colonial contexts; and that transnational knowledge diffusion needs to be considered through a decolonial lens.


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