A new paper, written by CDWI member Associate Professor Erin O’Brien (pictured), and co-authored by Dr Hope Johnson and Yu-An Murray, has been published in Business and Politics.
The article, Banning indirect boycotts: Contentious interactions and the role of the state in marketplace activism, analyses two key instances of the state declaring an intent to prevent activists from protesting through the market – the UK’s attempt to ban the ‘boycott, divest and sanction’ (BDS) campaign against Israel, and the Australian Government’s attempt to ban environmental activists from engaging in secondary boycotts to target mining companies. By investigating how indirect boycotts were problematized by state actors, we aim to reveal the rationale behind the state’s intervention in marketplace politics. Our findings indicate that opposition to the political cause behind the boycott, rather than a problematization of the strategy itself, drives state intervention.
The article is available online at Cambridge University Press.