ECREA16-Abstract

Thursday, November 10

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al politics (“politics”) and ideological political expressions (“the political. The study also elaborates on agonistic (Mouffe 2013) rather than deliberative

(Habermas, 1981) views of democracy. Thereby it evokes the idea that conflict is essential to democracy (Roberts-Miller, 2002). The agonistic take differs

however from an antagonistic one in that it builds on respect and concern for the opponent (Chambers, 2001). The main method is qualitative, including

observations (Iorio, 2011), semi-structured interviews (Bryman, 1996) and critical discourse analysis (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985; Winter-Jørgensen & Phillips,

2002) of the transcripts. 11 people were interviewed in Durban 2011, 17 in Paris 2015. The interviewees come from all continents of the world, and belong

to groups like the Sami, the Inuit, the Pygmé, the Maori. In addition to this, the study draws on quantitative and qualitative studies of mainstream media

material from the four aforementioned COPs, mainly Swedish material analysed by the author, but also studies from other countries included in an interna‑

tional project where the Swedish analyses constituted one country example among many others. In the Swedish coverage climate change has for instance

been represented as a“win-or-loose game politics”played out between states, which clashes both with the broader ideological expressions from indigenous

activist groups generally operating at the summit margins, and with a framing of climate change as a factual issue. In addition to descriptions of observed

activism/alternative political events of indigenous peoples, the paper describes also the institutional politics of the meetings, their political structure, and

the constitution of state delegations with an eye to transnational justice (Fraser 2008, 2014; Owen 2014), discussing i.e.“party status”and“observer status”

in relation to indigenous peoples.