Contesting Global Norms: Politics of Identity in Japanese Pro-Whaling Countermobilization

Anders Blok
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Anders Blok: Anders Blok holds an MA degree in Sociology and is currently PhD researcher at the Department of Sociology, Copenhagen University, Denmark. His PhD project deals with the knowledge politics of global environmental governance, building on the sociology of science, environment, and risk, and with cases involving biodiversity and climate change. From October 2005 to January 2007, he was postgraduate research student at Tohoku University, Japan, conducting research into Japanese whaling politics. His recent publications include "Experts on Public Trial: On Democratizing Expertise through a Danish Consensus Conference", Public Understanding of Science 16 (1) (2007); and "Actor-Networking Ceta-Sociality, or, What is Sociological about Contemporary Whales?", Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 15 (2007).

Global Environmental Politics, 2008, vol. 8, issue 2, pages 39-66

Abstract: Why are anti- and pro-whaling coalitions still engaged in morally heated confrontations over whales tracing back to the 1970s? Revisiting the global whaling controversy, this article applies insights from the political sociology of social movements to highlight the importance of the politics of identity embedded in an elite-driven pro-whaling countermovement in Japan. As is well documented, Japan has proven a most difficult context for the emerging "global" anti-whaling norm. Rather than simply reflecting material interests or cultural values, however, this sustained resistance should be approached from a processual and symbolic interactionist perspective as the construction of a pro-whaling moral universe integrated around strong and inflexible claims of collective identity. Empirically, the article analyzes the major discursive master frames constituting this pro-whaling identity. Arguing for the centrality of symbolic-moral framing, it further suggests three competing normative frameworks for making sense of the controversy in the wider context of global environmental norms-in-the-making. (c) 2008 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2008

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