Petrocultural reactions - the campaign against Swedish Royal Dutch Shell in the 1990s

Other conference contribution, 2021

In 1996, May first was declared Send Shell to hell day on internet forums and in radical press. The Swedish autonomous movement followed suit under the name of “Snäckjägarna” (The Shell hunters). Following 6 months of momentum build-up, around 100 protest actions against Swedish Shell gas stations took place in the period May to November 1996. These ranged from graffiti to bomb threats and arsons. The actions followed international calls to question Shell on the company´s activities in Nigeria and especially its eventual complicity in the death sentence of the “Ogoni nine” the previous year.
In this paper both the campaign with resulting actions as well as the response to it in the form of strategies from the Swedish branch of Shell is analysed in order to shed light on how oil dependency was negotiated and challenged on a scale from the local gas station to the networks of global fossil capitalism. The paper draws on material from the RD Shell’s Swedish archives, the Swedish Security Service (SÄPO), as well as social movement sources and brings together petrocultural research with research on social movements and especially the field focusing on anti-corporate and “private” politics.(Dixon, 2016; Baron, 2003; Mannheim, 2000) By contrasting the campaign against Shell with the actions taken by Shell to mitigate the protests we follow the contentious repertoires of both parties as a relational process. (Tilly & Tarrow, 2007).
The campaign against Shell could be described as an important event in the rise of the alter-globalisation movement where multinational corporations came in the crosshairs of radical groups. The period also saw the rise of the CSR perspective as a way for corporations to deal with social and environmental demands from consumers. The period further coincides with oil and gasoline becoming a more contested fuel with the second IPCC report clearly attributing a large part of global warming to anthropogenic causes, and climate change becoming a more debated subject in the preparations for the Kyoto meeting 1997. The campaign against Shell made questions of environmental justice and the dependency on networks of oil extraction visible for consumers in Sweden and around world. Importantly for this panel this meant a focus beyond strict geopolitical or energy security reasons. Instead the paper highlights issues of justice and environment in the transnational infrastructure providing fossil fuels to a non-extractive nation and its highly car dependant population.
The extraction of oil in Nigeria and the dependence on this oil for consumption in Western countries like Sweden was not only an issue of energy security but also became one of moral and environmental concern during the early 1990s. How different actors responded and acted considering this development is therefore of crucial importance for understanding current and possible future campaigns against fossil fuel operations.