Searching for Ecoterrorism: The Crucial Case of the Unabomber

Fleming, Sean

Abstract

A key finding of recent scholarship on political violence is that environmentalists rarely, if ever, use lethal violence. Many scholars have argued that "ecoterrorism"is a misnomer for what is more accurately termed "ecotage."Large-n studies of environmental activism have identified only one apparent example of an environmentally motivated terrorist: the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. The Unabomber case is therefore a "crucial case"for evaluating the Peaceful Environmentalist Thesis - the generalization that environmentalists do not use lethal violence. Pioneering a forensic method of ideology analysis, this article uses previously unexamined archival material to assess the Unabomber's affinities with three environmental ideologies: radical environmentalism, green anarchism, and right-wing ecologism. It shows that the Unabomber's ideology is not environmentalist in intellectual origins or in conceptual structure, and that his motivations were anti-technological rather than pro-ecological. The Unabomber case demonstrates how ideology analysis can complement and strengthen research on political violence.

Citation

Fleming, S. (2024). Searching for Ecoterrorism: The Crucial Case of the Unabomber. American Political Science Review, 204, Article 109926. https://doi.org/10.1017/S000305542300148X

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Dec 20, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Feb 6, 2024
• Publication Date: 2024-10
• Deposit Date: Dec 20, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 6, 2024
• Journal: American Political Science Review
• Print ISSN: 0003-0554
• Electronic ISSN: 1537-5943
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 204
• Article Number: 109926
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S000305542300148X
• Keywords: Political Science and International Relations; Sociology and Political Science
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/28711786
• Publisher URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/searching-for-ecoterrorism-the-crucial-case-of-the-unabomber/EC862D788A13F848A001D6DD097C272E