This dissertation explores the power of the fossil fuel industry and the strategies narratives and tactics climate justice activists in frontlines struggles to keep fossil fuels in the ground are using to challenge that power. It asks how might the climate justice movement better understand the power of the fossil fuel industry and through that understanding develop strategies and tactics that can respond to it? It deploys a Gramscian theoretical framework to assess, explore, and critique social movement and industry interventions in hegemonic power relations. It offers a rereading of hegemony and argues that rather than emphasizing relations of consent to the exclusion of other power relations, scholars and activists might understand hegemony as synthesizing and balancing relations of consent, coercion, and compliance. Counter-hegemonic social movement strategy must, therefore, intervene in each one of these power relations.

This reformulated version of hegemony is developed in and applied to community led struggles against the fossil fuel industry in the context of climate justice with two more concepts: petro-hegemony and the carbon rebellion. Petro-hegemony synthesizes petro-culture, petro-capitalism, and the petro-state to organize interventions in relations of consent, compliance, and coercion, to maintain and advance the interests of fossil fuel industry. The carbon rebellion is the counter hegemonic formation through which the climate justice movement could organize strategies and tactics that intervene in each of the hegemonic relations of power to challenge petro-hegemony. Between petro-hegemony and the carbon rebellion exist three terrains of struggle, each characterized by a different relation of power. The dissertation argues that if climate justice activists are to counter petro-hegemony they must challenge the fossil fuel industry at different points of intervention existing on each one of these terrains.

The dissertation places this theoretical strategic framework in conversation with empirical field work and analysis in two case study sites: the First Nations-led resistance to the Trans Mountain tar sands pipeline in Coast Salish Territory, British Columbia, and a grassroots community uprising for climate and environmental justice in the wake of confrontation with Chevron and its plans to expand its oil refinery to process heavier crude oil in Richmond, California. The fieldwork included 10 weeks of participant action research, 27 key informant interviews, the curation of an online archive of over 1500 articles, Tweets, Facebook posts, videos and memes, and in-depth discourse analysis. Developing this theoretical framework in conversation with fieldwork yields three further conceptual categories that could advance counter hegemonic strategies for climate justice. These are intersectional populism, the spectrum of strategy, and aggregating to scale. This dissertation concludes that each of these conceptual advances are critical to facilitating the emergence and flourishing of carbon rebellion as a counter hegemonic formation capable of defeating petro-hegemony.

Reviewing and reiterating the claim that curriculum content is inherently political and never neutral, this thesis explores the legacies of British colonization on Jamaican education by looking at education reforms and curriculum evolution to track the presence of culturally relevant classroom material in the Anglophone Caribbean. Both England and Jamaica have utilized education for re-constructing national identity and priorities as they negotiate historical narratives and canonized curriculum material when presented with the forces and processes of globalization. Syllabi from five secondary schools in Kingston, Jamaica are used for a case study. While the curriculum content in Jamaican secondary schools is now inclusive and culturally relevant, the education structure itself is a colonial vestige, in terms of the excessive standardized testing that tracks students into each grade level. While the canonization of previously excluded Caribbean authors into the curriculum by the Caribbean Examinations Council has effectively introduced culturally relevant course material, additional recommendations include cultivating a meta-curriculum, whereby teachers and students engage in classroom discussion about why and how the required curriculum material was selected, in order to better understand the political nature of curriculum choice and the ramifications it can have in terms of indoctrinating ideas about nationality, historical narratives, and identity.

Despite apartheid’s 1994 de jure abolition, contemporary university students in South Africa transgressively protest for ongoing, radical, de facto “decolonization” that they allege, and I agree, has not occurred. My thesis historicizes and analyzes the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) and Open Stellenbosch (OS) protests at University of Cape Town (UCT) and Stellenbosch University (SU), respectively. I analyze how university students’ protests drive counter-hegemonic social movements locally, regionally, and potentially globally. I highlight marginalized students’ imagination and articulation of alternatives to global neoliberalism, which is transgressive and perceived as radical.

I contextualize this case study of contemporary counter-hegemony in South Africa through a theoretical-conceptual approach, and a deep, colonial, historical approach. I present three critical premises: (1) neoliberalism is de-democratization and covert authoritarianism; (2) universities are potential sites of critical democratization; and (3) marginalized university students drive a radical, transgressive imagination of alternative worlds.

I provide critical historical background to situate South Africa within Contemporary Globalization before chronicling the emergent themes of ongoing protests. Following my South Africa case study, I briefly compare RMF and OS to other university student protests around the globe, including California and Germany. I suggest that under Contemporary Globalization, apparently dissimilar social movements share much in common, including universities’ simultaneous assimilation into, and potential for resistance against, the new, covert authoritarianism and de-democratization of global neoliberalism.

In May of 1990, the Marxist state of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) and the tribal-military polity of the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) unified to form the Republic of Yemen. However, this unification of physical borders also engendered the clash of legal and ideological borderlands of the two states. Soon, questions over the proper allocation of resources and distribution of power throughout the former regions emerged as well as questions over the role of non-government actors in the decision-making processes and the role of women in the newly unified Yemeni state. The unification period of Yemen (1989-1995) thus became a period of great change, struggle, and compromise. This study focuses on the story of Yemeni women before, during, and after this period.

It attempts to do this by focusing on two dimensions of Yemeni women’s experience during this period: (1) the evolution of their legal rights and their consequential de jure marginalization and (2) women’s de facto (dis)empowerment as experience on the ground throughout the country’s twenty governorates and capital city Sana’a. In order to explore these dimensions thoroughly, this study uses a multi-methodological approach. It is rooted in both qualitative (legal analysis) and quantitative (regression analysis) methodologies.

This thesis explores the first of these dimensions by analyzing the constitutions and family laws of the former YAR, the former PDRY, the unified Republic of Yemen, and the amended legal codes of the unified Republic of Yemen post the 1994 Civil War. I argue that after the victory of the former YAR in the 1994 Civil War, the YAR’s patriarchal legal vision of family law prevailed. This ultimately contributed to the deterioration of the legal rights of Yemeni women, particularly those women coming from the poorer and lower class of Yemeni society.

The study investigates the second dimension by using the 2013 Yemen’s National Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) to (1) measure the well-being of women in the country’s twenty governorates and capital city and (2) understand the effects the varying levels of state presence in each of these governorates has on the welfare of the women living there. Through a regression analysis, this approach allows us to better understand the relationship between state presence and women’s well-being. This, as well as the rich dataset and sample size of the DHS, gives us a glimpse of the de facto (dis)empowerment of Yemeni women throughout the country. The study finds that in almost all dimensions of ‘well-being,’ those women living in regions with greater state presence enjoy greater levels of well-being than those living in regions with less state presence.

Today, Yemen continues to be the poorest country in the Middle East, and the ongoing war has pushed the country to the brink of famine. We know through many studies on gender and development that women and children make up the poorest segment of societies and that women and children often bear the greatest casualties in conflicts and humanitarian crises. Yet, the current literature on Yemen often focuses on issues of counter-terrorism, security, or tribal conflict with little focus on gender. Thus, it is imperative that we expand the literature further to include the stories and experiences of banat al Yaman. This thesis serves as an invitation to further explore the stories of these women