Framing the Local and the Global in the Anti‐nuclear Movement: Law and the Politics of Place
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2009.00458.x |
| Published date | 01 March 2009 |
| Date | 01 March 2009 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 36, NUMBER 1, MARCH 2009
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 94±109
Framing the Local and the Global in the Anti-nuclear
Movement: Law and the Politics of Place
Chris Hilson*
This article examines the politics of place in relation to legal mobiliza-
tion by the anti-nuclear movement. It examines two case examples ±
citizens' weapons inspections and civil disobedience strategies ± which
have involved the movement drawing upon the law in particular spatial
contexts. The article begins by examining a number of factors which
have been employed in recent social movement literature to explain
strategy choice, including ideology, resources, political and legal
opportunity, and framing. It then proceeds to argue that the issues of
scale, space, and place play an important role in relation to framing by
the movement in the two case examples. Both can be seen to involve
scalar reframing, with the movement attempting to resist localizing
tendencies and to replace them with a global frame. Both also involve
an attempt to reframe the issue of nuclear weapons away from the
contested frame of the past (unilateral disarmament) towards the more
universal and widely accepted frame of international law.
INTRODUCTION
The literature on social movements or contentious politics has, for some time
now, sought to explain why it is that certain movements adopt particular
strategies, ranging from political lobbying, through litigation, to demon-
strations and civil disobedience. In this line of analysis, the strategy or
`repertoire of contention' is thus the dependent variable and the independent
variables which might account for strategy choice include, among others,
political opportunity, legal opportunity, resources, ideology, identity, and
framing. Thus, for example, a social movement organization (SMO) might
decide to rely on lobbying as a strategy because political opportunities are
94
ß2009 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2009 Cardiff University Law School. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
*School of Law, University of Reading, Foxhill House, Whiteknights Road,
Earley, Reading RG6 7BA, England
c.j.hilson@reading.ac.uk
viewed as particularly favourable; similarly, litigation might be chosen
where legal opportunities through the courts seem promising.
The aim of this paper is to examine two related instances of legal
mobilization by the anti-nuclear movement. First, it looks at `citizens'
weapons inspections' at various nuclear sites in the United Kingdom
including, for example, the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) at
Aldermaston in Berkshire, which seek to adopt a similar type of
international-law based inspection regime for weapons of mass destruction
that the UN had enforced on Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Second, it explores
civil disobedience cases involving acts of criminal damage and often also
trespass onto nuclear sites, in which activists have essentially invited arrest
with a view to raising defence arguments about the international law legality
of nuclear weapons in the local criminal courts.
1
The paper begins by examining a range of variables which might explain
why the anti-nuclear movement adopted the above, law-related strategies.
However, it then proceeds to focus on just one of these variables ± framing,
which involves the purposeful construction of meaning or the `politics of
signification'
2
± examining in particular how both strategies involve an
attempt to resist, re-code and to benefit from a `politics of place'.
THE CASE EXAMPLES
1. Citizens' weapons inspections
The idea of citizens' weapons inspections arose from around the time
preceding the Iraq war when UNSCOM
3
weapons inspectors were mandated
to search for weapons of mass destruction held by Saddam Hussein. Peace
campaigners were struck by the apparent hypocrisy of the fact that these
inspections were authorized by the UN, with the five permanent members of
the Security Council themselves deploying nuclear weapons.
4
As a result, an
international network of groups employing citizen weapons inspections
95
1
Note that many protestors would contest the framing of the damage as `criminal'
and also the characterization of their action as `civil disobedience' ± instead arguing
that they are acting to prevent crime and that they are obeying a higher law (or even,
for certain religious protestors, that it is a matter of `divine obedience' ± see S.
Nepstad, Religion and War Resistance in the Plowshares Movement (2008) 61).
Similar civil disobedience action (followed by successful jury acquittal) has also
been taken recently in relation to climate change: see, for example,
www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/climate/coal-kingsnorth-six-on-trial-20080828>.
2R.Benford and D. Snow, `Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview
and Assessment' (2000) 26 Annual Rev. of Sociology 611, at 613.
3 The United Nations Special Commission established under resolution 687 of 3 April
1991 of the UN Security Council to carry out inspections of Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction.
4 .
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developed, ranging from international groups such as Greenpeace Inter-
national,
5
through national groups like Friends of the Earth UK, the Los
Alamos Study Group (United States),
6
Bombspotting (Belgium),
7
Friends of
the Earth Flanders and Brussels,
8
and Trident Ploughshares (United
Kingdom),
9
through to local groups such as the Aldermaston Women's
Peace Camp
10
and the Gloucestershire Weapons Inspectors.
11
Many of these
groups fall under the umbrella of Abolition 2000, a global network aimed at
abolishing nuclear weapons which has a Citizens' Weapons Inspection
Working Group designed to `support citizen groups who inspect sites and
report their findings to the public, United Nations, national governments and
other interested parties'.
12
Citizen inspections are designed to bring openness and transparency to the
typically secretive siting of nuclear weapons in predominantly Northern
countries which are not subject to UN inspections. Justification for the
inspections is often legally-based: inspectors are typically portrayed as
upholding international law, with referenc e often made to the 1996
International Court of Justice (ICJ) Advisory Opinion on the Legality of
the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons.
13
The inspections themselves are
typically carried out by ordinary citizens but have occasionally included
Members of Parliament
14
and celebrities.
15
Inspectors often dress up for the
occasion in white boiler suits reminiscent of the news coverage of `official'
expert, scientific inspection teams in Iraq. They are invariably denied access
to the relevant facility, but in most instances, an inspection report
16
is
nevertheless completed, posted on the web, and sent to the relevant
authorities.
96
5 .
6 .
7
8
9
10
11 .
12
13 (1996) 35 ILM 809 and 1343.
14 For example, in the United Kingdom, at Aldermaston in 2006, Norman Baker MP.
See also the United States, where (Canadian) Vancouver East Member of Parliament
Libby Davies led an inspection team at Bangor nuclear submarine base in
Washington state.
15 Such as Anita Roddick, the (now deceased) Bodyshop founder, at Aldermaston in
2006.
16 Model report forms are available at
inspection5.php>.
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2. Civil disobedience
It would be misleading to seek to draw too great a contrast between citizen
weapons inspections and civil disobedience, since some citizen inspections
also involve civil disobedience.
17
However, for the most part, weapons
inspections involve lawful and symbolic non-violent direct action, whereas
the aim of civil disobedience actions is actively and openly to break the law
and to invite arrest, which is accepted without resistance.
18
The relevant
actions generally involve acts of alleged criminal damage to try to gain entry
to nuclear establishments, which, if successful, will be followed by alleged
offences of aggravated trespass and, typically, further acts of criminal
damage to `war' equipment.
19
In the United Kingdom, many of the actions
are undertaken by individuals associated with the Trident Ploughshares
movement. Although not a Christian organization, the name of this stems
from the biblical reference of turning swords into ploughshares, which often
underpins the nature of the damage activity undertaken: in many instances,
individuals have been arrested for hammering and thereby seeking to disable
aeroplanes, submarines, and other `war machines'. When brought before the
criminal courts, the individuals then typically seek to raise a defence to the
relevant criminal charges that they are acting to prevent a breach of
international law by the United Kingdom. Again, reference is often made
here to the illegality of nuclear weapons under international law based on,
among other things, the ICJ Advisory Opinion.
IDEOLOGY
It is no surprise to find groups such as Greenpeace and Trident Ploughshares
behind both types of action above. Ideologically, Greenpeace has its roots in
the Quaker movement and elements of Quakerism, such as bearing witness
to an unlawful and/or immoral act and speaking the truth to power, can be
seen in both the weapons inspections and the acts of open and accountable
civil disobedience (which characterized Greenpeace's very first whaling
actions). Although expressly non-religious in the United Kingdom,
20
the
97
17 M. Finn, `Citizens Inspect Aldermaston' in A. Zelter (ed.), Trident on Trial: The Case
for People's Disarmament (2001) 71.
18 For the distinction between symbolic non-violent action and civil disobedience, see
A. Carter, Direct Action (1962) (cited in P. Routledge, Terrains of Resistance (1993)
33).
19 The term `war' equipment is a conscious reframing made by many in the movement
of the more standard use of `defence' in such contexts.
20 See, further, Nepstad, op. cit., n. 1, pp. 190±1, who explains that, in contrast with the
United States, where the Plowshares movement has a strong Catholic underpinning,
there was a conscious choice made in the United Kingdom Ploughshares movement to
adopt a more inclusive, secular tone in order to maximize participation.
ß2009 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2009 Cardiff University Law School
history of the Ploughshares movement can also be traced back to Christian
and Quaker influences,
21
and a number of British Ploughshares activists are
committed to these faiths. Both Greenpeace and the Ploughshares movement
are also influenced by Gandhian ideology of non-violence (ahimsa) and his
satyagraha (the truth force) actions against British colonial authority such as
the famous salt march protest against the 1882 Raj Salt Act.
It is thus quite clear that ideology ± in other words, ideas, values, and beliefs
about the world ± plays a part in the choice of movement strategy.
22
This type
of open, accountable action lies in stark contrast with the type of covert
`ecotage' employed by more radical wings of the environmental movement
such as Earth First! or the Earth Liberation Front.
23
Such groups often fail to
see the point of transparent and accountable Ploughshares-type action, seeing
their role instead as one of avoiding arrest by an oppressive state and destroying
as much of the environmentally harmful (for example, GM) material as
possible without invited interference. Similar tensions can be found within the
anti-nuclear movement itself. At Faslane, for example ± the key Scottish
Trident submarine base ± in addition to a significant Ploughshares presence,
there is also a Peace Camp,
24
which is concerned with creating an alternative
lifestyle as well as engaging in anti-nuclear activity.
25
The ideology of the
camp also has strong anarchist elements, leading many within it to question the
Ploughshare reliance on state-based, court strategies.
26
POLITICAL AND LEGAL OPPORTUNITY
The idea of political opportunity structure (POS) or political opportunity
(PO) has been used for some time to help explain the rise of new social
movements at particular times and also their use of protest as a particular
strategy.
27
However, such `political process' theories tended to underplay or
ignore the role of law and litigation-based strategies in their analyses. In
recent years, the idea of legal opportunity structure (LOS)
28
or legal
98
21 id.
22 S. Buechler, Women's Movements in the United States: Woman Suffrage, Equal
Rights, and Beyond (1990) 85.
23 A. Nocella and S. Best, `A Fire in the Belly of the Beast: The Emergence of
Revolutionary Environmentalism' in Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the
Earth,eds. A. Nocella and S. Best (2006).
24 Faslane Peace Camp, at
25 D. Heller, `Resolving Culture Conflicts' in Zelter, op. cit., n. 17, p. 165.
26 id., pp. 166±7.
27 For example, see H. Kitschelt, `Political Opportunity Structures and Political Protest:
Anti-Nuclear Movements in Four Democracies' (1986) 16 Brit. J. of Political Science
57; S. Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics
(1994).
28 E. Andersen, Out of the Closets and Into the Courts: Legal Opportunity Structure and
Gay Rights Litigation (2005).
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opportunity (LO)
29
has thus been developed alongside POS/PO in order to
bridge this gap and to provide law with the focus it deserves when looking at
mobilization.
Of course, one could argue that, in a general sense, political opportunity for
the anti-nuclear movements in the new century should have been quite
favourable. After all, in a post-Cold War environment, the greatest security
threats now arguably come not from states but from terrorism, which nuclear
weapons are particularly ill-suited to combating. And specifically in the
United Kingdom, one might have thought that a Labour government with a
number of former Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) members in
the Cabinet, would be receptive to arguments about not proceeding with the
renewal of the United Kingdom's Trident-based nuclear weapons
programme.
30
However, this would be to ignore the role of global power
politics and state interests: for the key nuclear powers, maintaining their
nuclear presence is perceived as a prerequisite to continuing to play at the top
table internationally. For New Labour, an anti-nuclear stance may also have
appeared too much like O ld Labour with associated concerns about
electability.
31
For those reasons, it is perhaps not surprising that the decision
to replace Trident was approved by the Westminster Parliament in March
2007, albeit with Conservative support. However, not all political opportunity
within the United Kingdom is negative. Post-devolution, although the reten-
tion of Trident remains a reserved matter for the Westminster Parliament, the
Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) is very much anti-Trident and for a nuclear-
free Scotland. There is little doubt that anti-nuclear protestors have seized on
this difference and maintained both lobbying and protest activity to keep
Trident in the public eye.
32
In emphasizing Scottish hostility to Trident, the
aim is to maintain pressure on the Labour government, which has already lost
considerable ground to the SNP in recent years.
What then of legal opportunity? Certainly at first sight, existing LO/LOS
approaches will struggle to make sense of the actions taken here. Legal
opportunities were arguably opened up in what Andersen has described as
the `legal stock'
33
sense by the ICJ's Advisory Opinion on nuclear weapons,
which spelled out that the threat and use of such weapons would typically be
in breach of international law. And, of course, both the citizens' weapons
99
29 C. Hilson, `New Social Movements: The Role of Legal Opportunity' (2002) 9 J. of
European Public Policy 238.
30 However, history may suggest otherwise ± namely, the pro-nuclear stance of the
Wilson government in the 1960s, despite considerable anti-nuclear sympathy within
the Labour Party at the time.
31 L. Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament
Movement, 1971 ± Present (2003) 478.
32 `Faslane: Paying the Price of Protest' Herald,2October 2007, which details (in
addition to the Ploughshares and Peace Camp activity at Faslane mentioned above)
the `Faslane 365' blockade campaign which took place during 2006±2007.
33 Andersen, op. cit., n. 28, p. 20.
ß2009 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2009 Cardiff University Law School
inspections and the Ploughshares-type examples of civil disobedience have
made reference to this Opinion and thus relied on this legal opportunity.
34
However, in other respects, the terrain of legal opportunity in play here looks
very different to that examined in previous studies. These studies have, as
Vanhala states, tended to examine proactive litigation where SMOs are the
claimants commencing the relevant litigation proceedings.
35
While there is a
recent example of this type of proactive litigation by the anti-nuclear
movement in the shape of the Marchiori case, legal opportunity in the sense
of judicial receptivity was weak there in so far as the relevant claim did not
succeed in immediate, purely instrumental terms.
36
In contrast, the citizens'
weapons inspections, though underpinned by a reference to international
law, do not involve litigation and the courts at all. And while the civil
disobedience cases do involve the courts, they are an example of what
Harlow and Rawlings have termed `reactive litigation',
37
where the social
movement actors are not the claimants but rather the defendants, with the
state being the party to have commenced proceedings, which are criminal
rather than civil in nature.
In relation to these reactive civil disobedience cases, there is a marked
difference in legal opportunity terms, between magistrates' courts and
Crown courts (or their relevant Scottish equivalents). With the former,
magistrates have tended to be extremely unreceptive to international law
arguments and legal opportunity has thus been poor.
38
In Crown courts,
however, judicial receptivity has been mixed. In some cases, judges were
unwilling to allow international law evidence,
39
while in others, such as the
Greenock case involving the `Trident Three' described further below, they
were more receptive to international law. However, even in cases where
judges were unreceptive, juries remained free to take note of international
law arguments and indeed, because of the unpredictability of juries, the
100
34 Indeed, Nepstad, op. cit., n. 1, pp. 188±90, traces the growth of the United Kingdom
Ploughshares movement (and the origins of Trident Ploughshares) to the Advisory
Opinion.
35 L. Vanhala, `Anti-discrimination Policy Actors and their use of Litigation Strategies:
The Influence of Identity Politics' (2009) 16 J. of European Publ ic Policy
(forthcoming).
36 R(Marchiori) v. Environmental Agency [2002] EWCA Civ 3, [2002] Eur. Law
Reports 225.
37 C. Harlow and R. Rawlings, Pressure Through Law (1992) 162; Vanhala, op. cit., n.
35.
38 See, for example, D. Fairhall, Common Ground: The Story of Greenham (2006) 96;
Heller, op. cit., n. 25, p. 167; A. Zelter, `Our Story' in Zelter, op. cit., n. 17, pp. 260,
269, 275.
39 See, for example, the 1998 Burghfield case against Sarah Hipperson and three others
before Reading Crown Court, arising from fence cutting at AWE Burghfield, where
the judge (Mowat) apparently instructed the jury to ignore international law
arguments that had been presented to them (S. Hipperson, Greenham: Non-Violent
Women v The Crown Prerogative (2005) 80±6).
ß2009 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2009 Cardiff University Law School
authorities have often been keen to keep cases away from the Crown courts
wherever possible.
40
And for good reason it would seem: writing in 2001,
Angie Zelter noted that, of the four major Trident Ploughshares jury trials in
England and Scotland, three resulted in acquittals and one in a hung jury.
41
Juries and Crown courts, in other words, offer a potentially favourable legal
opportunity, regardless of the disposition of the particular judge hearing the
case.
As regards receptivity of judges in Crown court proceedings, the higher
courts in both Scotland and England and Wales have since sought to close
down the glimmer of legal opportunity offered by the more receptive
members of the Crown court judiciary by ruling that international law
arguments do not provide a justification defence in relation to criminal protest
activity.
42
As Lord Hoffmann stated in the House of Lords in Rv. Jones:
the apprehension, however honest or reasonable, of acts which are thought to
be unlawful or contrary to the public interest, cannot justify the commission of
criminal acts and the issue of justification should be withdrawn from the jury.
Evidence to support the opinions of the protesters as to the legality of the acts
in question is irrelevant and inadmissible, disclosure going to this issue should
not be ordered and the services of international lawyers are not required.
43
What impact these higher court rulings have had on more recent case
outcomes will require further empirical investigation. However, as intimated
above, defendants ± though perhaps only those representing themselves ±
will still be tempted to put arguments about international law before juries,
which may well continue to take them into account, even if formally directed
not to. Legal opportunity has thus been dented by the relevant rulings, but
perhaps not dealt a fatal blow.
RESOURCE MOBILIZATION
Unlike political and legal process approaches, which stress the role of
external opportunities to movement mobilization, resource mobilization
theory
44
examines the internal resources available to groups.
45
The argument
101
40 See, in relation to Greenham, S. Roseneil, Disarming Patriarchy: Feminist and
Political Action at Greenham (1995) 108, who notes that there appeared to be an
attempt to keep cases within the summary justice system in order to avoid the
possibility of acquittals by sympathetic juries.
41 A. Zelter, `People's Disarmament' in Zelter, op. cit., n. 17, p. 53.
and Wales, see Rv. Jones [2006] UKHL 16, [2007] 1 A.C. 136.
43 Jones, id., at [94].
44 J. McCarthy and M. Zald, `Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial
Theory' (1977) 82 Am. J. of Sociology 1212; J.C. Jenkins, `Resource Mobilization
Theory and the Study of Social Movements' (1983) 9 Annual Rev. of Sociology 527.
45 Kitschelt, op. cit., n. 27, pp. 59±60.
ß2009 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2009 Cardiff University Law School
is that SMOs must be able successfully to mobilize resources from the public
in order effectively to engage in collective action. As applied to strategy
choice, it has been argued that protest is typically cheaper as a strategy,
calling on fewer financial resources than litigation or political lobbying.
46
Vanhala has argued that while this is perhaps true of proactive litigation, it is
not true of reactive litigation of the civil disobedience type,
47
which typically
requires little or no actual financial expenditure by the individual apart from
a time commitment and potentially the payment of a criminal fine.
In fact, the picture is more complex here. It is true that both the citizens'
weapons inspections and the civil disobedience case examples lie at the
cheaper end of the financial resource spectrum, despite the latter being
litigation-based. However, while proactive litigation is generally resource
intensive for the larger interest groups within a movement, at a lower level,
members of the movement may be able to benefit from legal aid or pro bono
legal support. Thus, resources do not fully explain recourse to civil dis-
obedience-type, reactive litigation, because proactive litigation may in
practice be equally `cheap' to some within the movement. This was indeed
the case in the proactive Marchiori judicial review case mentioned earlier,
where the claimants were supported either by legal aid in the case of the
individual (Emanuela Marchiori), or by pro bono public interest lawyers in
the case of the interest group (Nuclear Awareness Group).
FRAMING
Vanhala has pointed to a need, in assessing strategy choice, to develop a
holistic account, based on a range of explanatory variables rather than just
one or two such as political and legal opportunity and resources.
48
In
drawing up such an account, she suggests that those who have studied legal
mobilization have tended to ignore framing as an important variable.
49
Framing is, as Benford and Snow put it, `meaning work'.
50
It is a process in
which social movements are `actively engaged as agents in a struggle over
the production of mobilizing and counter-mobilizing ideas and meanings'.
51
It is thus a contentious process in so far as `it involves the generation of
interpretive frames that not only differ from existing ones but that may also
challenge them'.
52
In looking at the use of litigation as a strategy by the
102
46 For example, Hilson, op. cit., n. 29.
47 Vanhala, op. cit., n. 35.
48 id.
49 id. Though compare, for example, M. Smith, `Framing Same-sex Marriage in Canada
and the United States: Goodridge, Halpern and The National Boundaries of Political
Discourse' (2007) 16 Social & Legal Studies 5.
50 Benford and Snow, op. cit., n. 2, p. 613.
51 id.
52 id., p. 614.
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disability movement, Vanhala's argument is that the way the movement had
reframed the issue of disability from being a medical condition to a rights-
based one led naturally to its using litigation in the courts as a strategy.
53
My claim here is that framing is similarly crucial to the two different
forms of legal mobilization here: international law-based citizens' weapons
inspections and civil disobedience resulting in reactive litigation. It has been
suggested that, where contradictory ideologies are at play, a social move-
ment may need to engage in a process of reframing or `keying' so as to meet
at an accepted ideological point.
54
Just as Vanhala suggests that the dis-
ability movement engaged in such a process, so too, one can argue, did the
anti-nuclear movement. During the 1970s±1980s, the British anti-nuclear
movement, spearheaded by CND, largely campaigned for unilateral nuclear
disarmament ±anideology at loggerheads with the government appeal to the
ideology of nuclear deterrence. In contrast, actions like the citizens'
weapons inspection and civil disobedience followed by court-based defences
have sought to reframe matters, stressing more the illegality of the
government's position on nuclear weapons as a matter of international
law. While there were elements of such an approach in earlier decades such
as at Greenham, this legal reframing became a more powerful possibility
after the legal opportunity presented by the ICJ Opinion in 1996. In place of
the clearly divergent and irreconcilable ideological positions of unilateral
disarmament versus deterrence, one now had a form of immanent critique,
where the movement were able to confront the government for failing to play
by the accepted and ideologically apparently neutral rules of international
law as confirmed by the ICJ.
THE POLITICS OF PLACE
However, just as Vanhala argues that framing has been missing from the
litigation literature, my contention is that insufficient attention has been paid
by it to geographical notions of spatiality. The interface between geography
and social movements has received increased attention in recent years, with
numerous studies examining how scale, space, and place affect and are
affected by collective action.
55
Needless to say, there have been numerous
103
53 Vanhala, op. cit., n. 35.
54 D. Snow and R. Benford, `Mobilization Forum: Comment on Oliver and Johnston'
(2000) 5 Mobilization 55.
55 See, for example, B. Miller, Geography and Social Movements: Comparing
Antinuclear Activism in the Boston Area (2000); W. Sewell, `Space in Contentious
Politics' in Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics,eds. S. Aminzade
et al. (2001); Routledge, op. cit., n. 18; D. Martin and B. Miller, `Space and
Contentious Politics' (2003) 8 Mobilization 143; G. Franquemagne `From Larzac to
the Altermondialist Mobilisation: Space in Environmental Movements' (2007) 16
Environmental Politics 826.
ß2009 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2009 Cardiff University Law School
disputes about the precise meaning and relationship between these various
spatial terms. For example, there is a tendency to see place as territorially
bounded, local, and particular, and in that sense in direct contrast to space,
which is associated with the unbounded, global, and universal.
56
Authors
such as Massey contest this view, arguing that place is really just a coming
together of socially constructed relational networks ± in other words space ±
at particular nodes.
57
On this account, place is just a snapshot view of space:
far from being opposites, the relational dynamics of the two are the same.
Nevertheless, like Leitner et al.,
58
the position adopted here is that all of
these spatialities potentially matter to social movement strategy and it is
therefore important to examine them all. One can agree with Massey that, in
theory, the distinction between place and space is overdrawn, while at the
same time appreciating that social movements often thrive on emphasizing
distinctions and conflicts.
1. Citizens' weapons inspections
Beginning with the citizens' weapons inspections, these can be seen as a
continuation of the problematizing of place first instigated by the anti-
nuclear women's camps at Greenham Common in the 1980s. In Cresswell's
terms,
59
Greenham involved women who were `out of place' and it was this
apparent jarring which made their protest all the more powerful. Thus, on the
one hand, they were women out in the public sphere protesting rather than
behaving themselves as wives and mothers within the typical nuclear family
home. But in addition, they were also women forming local communities of
place in the camps outside the base, in contrast to the predominantly male,
patriarchal, abstract, and global
60
space inside the nuclear base itself. Unlike
Greenham, the citizens' weapons inspections do not involve an attempt to
create a community of place. However, like Greenham, they rely on the
politics of spatiality by seeking to prick the normalization of such nuclear
establishments within their local landscapes. As Couldry has noted of
Greenham, `[f]or existing residents of the area, the camp publicized a
104
56 A tendency described (though not shared) by, for example, D. Massey, Space, Place
and Gender (1994) 5, 152±6; and A. Escobar, `Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on
Globalism and Subaltern Strategies of Localization' (2001) 20 Political Geography
139.
57 Massey, id., p. 154.
58 H. Leitner et al., `The Spatialities of Contentious Politics' (2008) 33 Transactions of
the Institute of British Geographers 157.
59 T. Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgressions (1996)
99.
60 Nuclear weapons being, as Couldry observes, the ultimate example of weapons of
global significance and concern (N. Couldry, `Disrupting the Media Frame at
Greenham Common: A New Chapter in the History of Mediations' (1999) 21 Media,
Culture and Society 337, at 348).
ß2009 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2009 Cardiff University Law School
disturbing aspect of their immediate environment that had been
naturalized.'
61
And as the Los Alamos Study Group has similarly stated in
relation to citizens' weapons inspections, `the verification process serves as a
popular check against illicit government activities, and the perpetuation and
normalization of potentially dangerous policies.'
62
In spatial terms, nuclear
establishments often become an invisible part of their local communities:
they become swallowed by surrounding place. What the citizens' weapons
inspections seek to achieve is to reframe this localizing scalar effect by using
the theatre of an international weapons inspection more normally associated
with `truly' international places like Iraq. The sense of performance (with
people often dressed up in expert white radiation protection suits and hard
hats) is important to such events
63
and, as performance, may strike many as
the theatre of the absurd.
64
However, therein, at the same time, lies its power
and its weakness: the appearance of incongruity ± of the event seeming `out
of place' in Cresswell's terms ± is counter-hegemonic but perhaps at the
same time underlines the sheer weight of the hegemonic force of the existing
politics of place.
2. Civil disobedience
As for the civil disobedience case example, this too involves the politics of
spatiality. There is a number of senses in which this is so. First, lawyers and
those studying litigation have tended to ignore the `material geography' of
the court buildings themselves.
65
Court buildings exist in particular locales
and this setting and place matters to the deployment of litigation as a
strategy. The spatiality of the court matters ± not just in terms of court
architecture, which has been studied,
66
but also in terms of its place and
scale. For many protestors, the court is simply another site for enacting the
theatre of direct action.
67
For that reason alone, the location of the court
buildings matter. This can be seen in the context of the actions of the so-
called `Trident Three', who in 1999 committed sabotage on a floating
105
61 id., p. 341.
62 .
63 For the importance of performance in environmental protest, see B. Szerszynski,
`Performing Politics: The Dramatics of Environmental Protest' in Culture and
Economy After the Cultural Turn,eds. L. Ray and A. Sayer (1999).
64 Witness reaction on YouTube to videos of the Aldermaston citizens' inspection, with
some comments referring to the protestors as `numpties' and such like:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-SILV3JB44&feature=related>.
65 Couldry, op. cit., n. 60, p. 338 makes a similar observation about the locale of media
production space such as studios, which I have applied here to courts.
66 See, for example, L. Mulcahy, `Architects of Justice: The Politics of Courtroom
Design' (2007) 16 Social and Legal Studies 383.
67 See, for example, R. Johnson, `Alice Through the Fence: Greenham Women and the
Law' in Nuclear Weapons, the Peace Movement and the Law,eds. J. Dewar et al.
(1986) 163; Fairhall, op. cit., n. 38, p. 94.
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scientific laboratory (Maytime)onLoch Goil in Scotland, which was
involved with maintaining the crucial acoustic silence of the Trident nuclear
submarine fleet. John Mayer, one of the defence lawyers in their subsequent
prosecution, highlights how it was probably no accident that they ended up
being placed for trial initially in Dunoon, where their alleged crime had
taken place ± a `sleepy' island town in the West Highlands, `remote from the
big cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh [which] would ensure that the trial
passed off with as little fuss as possible'.
68
In the end, according to Mayer,
because the complexity of the trial looked likely to swamp the Dunoon court
for weeks, it was eventually sent to the nearest mainland town, Greenock ±
itself rather remote and described by Mayer in terms of it being `a town of
faded glory'.
69
Thus, where the court is geographically within the country
matters in terms of the publicity the case is likely to attract. In the event, as
Mayer observes, this decision to try the case `well out of the way' seriously
backfired because the local Sheriff (Margaret Gimblett) instructed the jury to
find the accused not guilty.
70
Where the court is within the particular town or
city itself may also make a difference: in the case of Greenock, for example,
Mayer describes how the location of the Sheriff Court is `in an out-of-the-
way street, almost an aside to what is happening in the town'.
71
This too will
impact on publicity.
Second, where a court is located will influence the social profile of its
relevant actors ± whether those actors are local magistrates or members of
the jury. Certain Crown courts are preferred by defence lawyers because
juries there are more likely to be drawn from social classes which are likely
to treat police evidence with some caution. Within the context of the civil
disobedience cases under examination here, Sarah Hipperson ± a Greenham
protestor ± felt that the hostile reception shown to the Greenham women's
arguments by West Berkshire Magistrates' Court in Newbury could in part
be traced to the fact that the lay magistrates were drawn from the
conservative, local area.
72
This area was indifferent to Cruise missiles, but
very much against the intrusive `mess' of the camps and the presence of
visibly `different' women around the town.
73
Next, as Creswell has forcefully argued, places are important in defining
socially acceptable norms of behaviour.
74
What is normal is, in other words,
constructed geographically: what is normal behaviour for one place may thus
be regarded as out of place in another. We have seen this above in the
context of the Greenham women at the airbase, where their gendered camps
106
68 J. Mayer, Nuclear Peace: The Story of the Trident Three (2002) 100±1.
69 id., p. 135.
70 id., pp. 258±60.
71 id., p. 135.
72 Hipperson, op. cit., n. 39, p. 61.
73 Roseneil, op. cit., n. 40, pp. 128±35.
74 Cresswell, op. cit., n. 59, p. 105
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appeared out of place alongside the equally, but oppositely, gendered
airbase. However, this out-of- placeness can also be seen in relation to the
presence of anti-nuclear protestors within the criminal justice system. Many
of the actors and commentators on magistrates' court cases involving both
Greenham women in the 1980s and, more recently, anti-Trident activists in
the 1990s-2000s, have remarked on the often unruly behaviour of the
defendants, in marked contrast to the usual hierarchy and order expected
within courts as reverential places. As Fairhall notes, at Greenham, when
magistrates tried to cut short women trying to put forward lengthy
justifications for their actions, the latter:
responded either by talking on regardless, or perhaps breaking into song. The
solemn rituals of the law were being mocked, or at least ignored. There was
pandemonium in court, not silence.
75
And, at both Greenham and in recent Trident cases, defendants and
sympathetic movement supporters attending court would often fail to obey
the usher's call to rise, instead remaining seated, particularly if the court had
itself failed to show respect to the defendants by failing to listen
appropriately to arguments about justification for their actions.
76
This sense of the protestors being out of place within the criminal justice
system can be found not only within the courts, but also in prison, where
many anti-nuclear protestors have ended up over the years ± occasionally for
the gravity of their initial offences ± but more often than not for refusing, as a
matter of principle, to pay the typical fines imposed for criminal damage
convictions. In prison, the protestors are often regarded by other prisoners and
prison officers as out of place ± not this time because of their behaviour while
in prison (though occasionally for this),
77
but because of the very different
nature of the `criminal' actions which brought them there.
78
In this sense, they
are out of place because prison is constructed as an appropriate place for
`proper' criminals and not for `political prisoners' like the protestors.
79
There is a further important sense in which the actions of many of the
anti-nuclear protestors in court appear out of place, and one which returns us
once again to the central issue of framing. As mentioned briefly above, many
protestors ± particularly since the ICJ Advisory Opinion ± have sought to
raise collateral, international law defences to charges brought against them in
local criminal courts.
80
Here again there is a scalar incongruity along the
107
75 Fairhall, op. cit., n. 38, p. 95.
76 Hipperson, op. cit., n. 39, pp. 61±2; Zelter, op. cit., n. 17, pp. 262, 282±3.
77 See, for example, Fairhall, op. cit., n. 38, p. 97.
78 id., pp. 96±7; M. Armstrong, `Prison Thoughts 1' in Zelter, op. cit., n. 17, p. 127.
79 Though interestingly, one of the protestors, Rebecca, did not see herself as out of
place ± seeing her fellow prisoners as also in a sense `political' ± see Fairhall, op. cit.,
n. 38, p. 97.
80 Though of course not all defences raise international law points ± see, for example,
Hipperson, op. cit., n. 39, p. 81 (self-defence).
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lines of that seen above in relation to citizen weapon inspections. Just as it
may seem odd to have an international law inspection more often associated
with places such as Iraq in a local setting such as the Atomic Weapons
Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire, so too it seems odd to hear
arguments about international law in local criminal courts. Here then, it is
not so much the defendants themselves but rather the nature of the arguments
raised by them (or, if represented, by their lawyers) which appear out of
place: local courts are more used to hearing run-of-the-mill cases involving
local criminals than the exotica of cases with `foreign' defendants raising
complex, international law-based defence arguments. The place for
international law, many might think, is in `truly' international court settings
such as The Hague. At most, and perhaps increasingly often these days, one
might expect to see international law arguments being made before higher
national courts. However, it still seems an unexpected affront to the system
for such arguments to be heard before a local criminal court. This perhaps
goes some way to explaining why, as we saw earlier, most magistrates'
courts ± both during Greenham time and more recently ± have tended to
ignore international law arguments. They are out of place in such courts. It
may also help to explain, again as we saw earlier, why the higher courts in
both Scotland and England and Wales have since placed a firm brake on the
ability to raise such arguments as justificatory defences for criminal protest
activity.
In terms of framing, a number of observations can be made. First, by
deliberately framing their defences in terms of international law in parochial,
local court settings, there is again a sense of the theatre of the absurd at play
here: the striking scalar juxtaposition undoubtedly adds a degree of power to
their case in a rhetorical sense while, at the same time, reducing its power in
strictly legal terms because of its bravura, `out-of-place' absurdity. Second,
one might point to a tension in the context of the account given earlier of
how reframing can be seen as a way of bridging ideological gulfs. On the one
hand, there is a certain consistency here with such an account in so far as the
prosecution's attempts to frame the actions of protestors as, say, criminal
damage ± a very spatially localized form of crime ± are resisted and reframed
in globalized terms by the protestors as efforts to prevent criminal breaches
of international law in accorda nce with the Nuremberg principle s.
81
However, on the other hand, Angie Zelter ± one of the key founder
members of the United Kingdom Ploughshares movement ± has also sought
to reframe `criminal damage' in terms of `people's disarmament'.
82
This not
only lacks a globalized, international frame, but also involves a step back
towards the contested ideological waters of the intractable disarmament
108
81 See, for example, Zelter, op. cit., n. 17, pp. 48±52.
82 id. See, for example, the title of the book itself and also pp. 47, 52. On p. 52, she
simultaneously also refers to the other frame of `nuclear crime prevention'.
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versus deterrence debate. In this respect, there is a potential for
inconsistencies to creep in to different forms of framing.
CONCLUSION
The argument that has been made in this article is that, in studying the use of
law by social movements, issues of space, pla ce, and scale matter.
Geography is, in other words, crucial to legal mobilization. We have seen
this in a number of respects. However, for the purposes of the current issue,
the most noteworthy example lies in relation to the use of international law
in both citizens' weapons inspections and civil disobedience court cases. In
both of these contexts, international law is relied upon as a frame for two
reasons: first, because it presents an apparently more neutral framing to
movement claims than previous, contested calls for unilateral disarmament;
and second, in relation to the politics of place, because it enables the anti-
nuclear movement to attempt to resist localizing tendencies and to reassert
issues as properly global ones. However, as we have seen, this international
or globalized reframing, in the particular local contexts in which it is
employed (military bases, criminal courts), is at the same time potentially a
source of strength and weakness. The power of the frame derives from the
scalar contrast it involves and seeks to close up. However, for some people ±
perhaps many ± the scalar contrast may lead them to feel that the frame is
simply too much `out of place' and therefore in the realms of the absurd.
109
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