REMFORCE · In a Space of ‘Illegal Lawfulness': The Normative Order of Radical Environmental Movements and the Enforcement of International Environmental Law”

In response to the escalating climate crisis, environmental activists are increasingly resorting to radical methods to pressure states into fulfilling their international climate commitments. This marks another chapter in the long history of transnational radical environmentalism. For over half a century, profound dissatisfaction with the consistent failure of states to uphold their international environmental responsibilities has driven some transnational environmental organizations to employ radical tactics in their pursuit of conservation goals. Consequently, these organizations assert that they have successfully halted underground nuclear testing, secured global whale protection, and conserved ecosystems, prompted state revisions of climate policies, and achieved numerous other environmental objectives.While social science and legal scholarship have explored radical environmentalism from various perspectives, the scholarly debate mostly frames it as a social force grappling with the state's ongoing inability to fulfill its environmental promises. This project departs from this state-centric view of radical environmentalism. Utilizing the methods of social science and legal research, along with the theoretical framework of legal pluralism, REMFORCE seeks to uncover whether radical environmentalism of transnational environmental organizations has developed into a normative system of environmental enforcement parallel to the state-centric one. At the time of severe environmental challenges and the unprecedented disruption of the international legal order, REMFORCE aims to reconceptualize our understanding of the radical environmental movement as an auxiliary system of enforcement and provide deeper empirical insight into the role of radical non-state actors in the enforcement of international environmental law.