Slow justice: a framework for tracing diffusion and legacies of resistance

Efforts to advance environmental justice are often halting and uneven. How can we identify the longer-term significance of protests that seem have failed? In this article, turn work on injustice examine consequences movements over time across space. We draw scholarship Rob Nixon ‘slow violence’: rather than spectacular, visceral, immediate violence war, he argues degradation is a operates in cumulative, slow-moving, accretive, multi-causal ways. Borrowing – flipping Nixon’s conceptualization, suggest parallel process justice’ taking place. As with damage, mobilization for dispersed place, occur non-linear forms, operate at multiple scales. To track pathways through which slow emerges, develop three-part typology social movement connectivity. Using categories people, projects, processes, geographically temporally distanced social, material, governance legacies moments resistance. Through case study against fossil fuel infrastructure Mackenzie Valley northern Canada 1970s, use trace how moment shaped other efforts organizing, including campaigns different regions issue-areas. argue reframe understand outcomes making visible obscure, indirect, long-term accrued benefits work.