The time of Extinction Rebellion: the clash of kairos and chronos amidst the climate emergency

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes Extinction Rebellion, a radical social movement organization committed to averting social collapse from climate change. Extinction Rebellion faces enormous pressure due to the limited time available to compel the government to take dramatic climate action. This pressure is articulated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change who states in its 2022 Summary for Policy Makers, “Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all” (p. 35). It is my argument that Extinction Rebellion must manage the opportune moment to prevent climate collapse––kairos, as it is threatened by the advancing time of climate change––chronos. Extinction Rebellion finds itself amidst this temporal clash, a tension that shapes its organizational identity, even as the social movement organization uses that same tension to shape its own identity. I analyze Extinction Rebellion's progression along its life cycle as a social movement organization, from its inception, through a crisis, to its resulting transformation. In each stage, I examine Extinction Rebellion’s protests, press releases, and media coverage to understand how it constructs its organizational identity through discourses of kairos and chronos. I argue that Extinction Rebellion initially, through public disruption, calls itself into being as an organization with an identity committed to rebellion. However, it abandons public disruption to court the public’s favor, using family-friendly protests and targeted actions against fossil fuel corporations, which, in turn, threatens its identity as a rebellious organization. By analyzing the tension between kairos and chronos in Extinction Rebellion’s discourse, this study contributes to a broader understanding of how social movements negotiate temporality and their identity in the face of the accelerating risk of climate catastrophe.