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ToolsDixon, Suzanne (2025) ‘Our police should be on the side of the public, not privileged green extremists’ : A human rights analysis of media framing and discourse about Extinction Rebellion protests 2018-2021. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.
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Abstract
Extinction Rebellion’s UK protests (2018-2021) were highly successful in drawing attention to their climate change cause. Their peaceful but often disruptive tactics were exercises of Articles 10 and 11 (freedom of expression/peaceful assembly) under the ECHR. However, much of the resultant news coverage was highly negative, representing the protesters as criminals and extremists, and criticising the police for failing to stop them. These protests prompted new legislation, which expanded police powers and instituted new criminal offences, creating broad restrictions on protest rights. Previous studies have analysed the media’s contribution to outcomes for a particular protest’s aims. In contrast, this study investigates how media coverage of these protests represented and contributed to outcomes for universal protest rights, allowing determination of how human rights are represented and what influence this may have had on those legislative outcomes.
This project adopts a novel methodological approach: by devising a hypothetical, legally-constructed human rights framework, the project evaluates and compares coverage from 15 news outlets using a mixed methods combination of quantitative framing and qualitative discourse analysis to find out how the protesters and their rights were represented. Human rights framing was largely absent from this coverage - featuring in only 94 of 2573 articles. Instead, the dominant framing promoted understanding of the protests as disruptive and criminal acts. The dominant media discourse used populist logics, representing the protesters as separate from and elite to the ‘people’. It used the potential for serious harm to the ‘people’ (e.g., blocking ambulances) to assign the state responsibility for the ‘necessary’ outcome of stopping the protests. This discourse excluded human rights principles and encouraged misunderstanding, both of the legal status and democratic value of protest. It prompted consistent discourse from police and politicians, which culminated in the creation of those broad legislative restrictions on protest rights.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Faculty \ School: | Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Law |
| Depositing User: | Chris White |
| Date Deposited: | 25 Jun 2026 13:57 |
| Last Modified: | 25 Jun 2026 13:57 |
| URI: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/103488 |
| DOI: |
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