On the final day of 2022, Extinction Rebellion (XR) announced it had quit. No more would it bedeck major intersections in protest banners, no more would it get its activists carried off by police while reciting well-rehearsed lines about impending climate doom to camera.

XR then promptly didn’t quit. Instead, it shifted tactics towards larger protests with less ‘arrestable’ actions (although this is a moveable feast, largely dependant on just how the police and other authorities are feeling). The protest they called ‘The Big One’ drew 30,000 to Parliament Square in April 2023, some four months after they’d ostensibly shut down the show.

But this wasn’t a retreat on the part of the movement as a whole. The shift away from arrestable actions was possible because another group – with a substantial overlap in personnel – was already on the scene: Just Stop Oil (JSO). JSO carried the soup can of non-violent direct action, sometimes straight into jail.

This symbiotic relationship between more hard-core and more moderate bits of the same movement is what’s known as the radical flank effect. The idea is that a more radical group can take the ire of the public and police and, in a complex dance that doesn’t always work, thereby raise the public’s support for the more moderate faction. The classic example is the relationship between the apparently more moderate Martin Luther King Jr and the hardline Malcolm X. 

Now, JSO has made a similar announcement: it’s hung up the hi-vis. And like XR before it, it’s planning a remarkably similar phased end, with the “final Just Stop Oil action” taking place in Parliament Square on 26 April 2025.

Rumours of JSO’s demise may well be similarly greatly exaggerated. It will continue to do things. Organisations are, after all, not one thing: they are groups of people who cohere, however temporarily, around a goal, a tactical vocabulary (what they actually do) and a brand. Let’s take each of these in turn.

The goal.

When JSO was formed, activists told me that the purpose of the group was to get a quick win: to stop all new oil and gas licences. Bolstered by this, the climate movement could pat itself on the back, realise that direct action gets the goods, and proceed onwards to greater things. 

‘Quick’ is, of course, a relative term. But this initial demand, JSO notes, “is now government policy, making us one of the most successful civil resistance campaigns in recent history. We’ve kept over 4.4 billion barrels of oil in the ground and the courts have ruled new oil and gas licences unlawful.”

When JSO first declared victory shortly after the arrival of the Labour government in 2024, other groups were quick to point out that it wasn’t JSO’s alone. Some even told me that the group’s belligerence had made it more politically difficult for Ed Miliband, secretary of state for energy and climate change, to act.

And there’s another quibble. Licences, which have been stopped, aren’t the same as oil fields themselves, which means it’s entirely possible drilling will continue to expand under existing licences. Robert Palmer, the deputy director of Uplift, told me the next few months would be critical, with “the government still needing to implement its manifesto commitment to ending new licences, and decisions expected on whether to block the huge Rosebank oil field and Jackdaw gas field on climate grounds.”

JSO had always had a more diverse collection of goals than stopping all new oil and gas licences, of course, with frustration at the restrictiveness of climate mitigation as a goal leading it to try to halt buses taking migrants to the Bibby Stockholm (anti-migrant politics would only escalate in the climate crisis, it reasoned).

But where do similar low-hanging fruit exist now? It’s not hard to think of some. London is a financial centre. Offices housing industries that finance and facilitate planetary destruction abound: insurers, hedge funds, and the big asset owners who have recently pivoted away from ESG investing. Even if these companies are no longer funding projects in the UK, the global scale of the climate crisis justifies local action to make global change. It’s one of the slogans, after all.

The tactics.

Various parts of the Palestine movement have easily found the London offices of companies complicit in the genocide in Gaza, and have taken direct action against them. A great many buildings currently in drab shades of grey could be justifiably brightened with some orange paint. So if JSO doesn’t see the prospect of continuing disruptive direct action, it can’t be for lack of appropriate targets. 

But perhaps it doesn’t need to. JSO doesn’t leave the field of climate direct action in the UK empty. 

Much like with the transition from XR to JSO, other direct action groups have already taken up the mantle. The Tyre Extinguishers, which deflate the tyres of heavily polluting SUVs, are continuing their campaign. Shut the System, which recently cut internet cables at the offices of insurers complicit in the climate crisis has stepped up the intensity of sabotage still further.

Like the Palestine movement, the overall tendency from XR to JSO and onwards is towards more targeted direct action, in the context of an ever-growing understanding of the networks of power that keep both the climate crisis and the genocide in Palestine going.

There are more connections than just tactics between the Palestine movement and climate direct action. A spokesperson from JSO told me that instead of seeing itself as part of the environmental movement more widely, JSO always positioned itself as an organisation more concerned with averting a genocide.

If this seems hyperbolic, consider the work of climate scientist Timothy Lenton, who specialises in tipping points, and who JSO frequently cites in its communications. When I spoke to him in 2023, he was clear that the stakes of climate change were enormous. 

The brand.

JSO is a brand. It’s a pretty successful brand. Almost everyone knows what it is and what it wants – the name is the demand. And its actions were undeniably spectacular, in the sense they were designed to circulate online as images, videos and text in a maximally provocative way.

But this focus on branding and spectacle has drawn intense criticism. Nicholas Beuret, author of the forthcoming Or Something Worse: Why We Need to Disrupt the Climate Transition, told me “the empty theatre of disruption had eviscerated the substance of climate action.” This had “taken the power of direct action and turned it into ineffectual symbolism”.

Not everyone I spoke to was so critical of this spectacular politics. Zack Polanski, the deputy leader of the Green party, was more supportive. He saw a success in JSO’s tactics: “In the face of a climate crisis and successive governments, backed by legacy media, that refuse to tell the truth, they raised the alarm.” Although, as with almost everyone I spoke to, he acknowledged that the effects of the campaign had been complex – not least the repression it had faced.

The people.

It’s no secret that JSO has faced severe backlash from the state. The movement has been decimated through the imprisonment of its key activists – including co-founder Roger Hallam – but also many others. 

From inside the group, I heard that churn had increased: it was proving tricky to recruit when the jail time was no longer a mere possibility but a tangible prospect. A long-running criticism of both XR and JSO, that they recklessly endangered their actionists, seems to have finally had an effect on sign ups.

Is this the end of arrestable actions? A spokesperson for Shut the System, which doesn’t aim to get its activists arrested, told me that the winding down of JSO “clearly signals the end of individually accountable protest.” 

“People are no longer prepared to get arrested in the increasingly harsh legal climate,” they said. “It forces protest underground, where direct action is more easily sustained because protesters are not going straight to prison. 

“Direct action works, as Shut The System has seen with companies responding to our demands overnight. With a strategic focus on finance and the diligence of a secure underground movement, we still have hope to transform the system.”

All this makes me wonder: is vanguardism – at least in its ‘individually accountable’ form – exhausted? Certainly some of the vanguardists are. It’s clear that repression in the form of long sentences has had a dampening effect.

So what now?

But the repression is just one part of the story. Although Keir Starmer’s government has shown no signs of substantially changing the laws on protest, it’s clear that the organising conditions for radical movements have changed as we’ve entered a new era of thin centrist hegemony.

Rapid attempts to change government policy – what we might call in the terms of Italian communist theorist Antonio Gramsci a ‘war of maneuver’ – have given way to the broader but slower project of trying to influence the whole of political culture, a ‘war of position’.

The criticism that JSO focused too heavily on spectacle at the cost of building more robust organisations had already been anticipated by a recent change of direction in the wider movement. 

Back in early 2024, a more comprehensive set of campaigns were launched: JSO itself, Assemble, Youth Demand, and Robin Hood. 

Assemble is built on the recognition that the movement needs to bring more communities along with them. This is what Assemble co-founder Molly May Shelton described to me as the work of building an “alternative democratic mandate”.

What the new demands might be, they couldn’t immediately say – not for a lack of thinking, but because they will be decided collectively, through democratic means. Assemble has already been running local assemblies, crowdsourcing demands from open neighbourhood meet-ups with hours of street outreach to get people there.

For this, they have the support of Jeremy Corbyn’s Peace & Justice Project. For a touring campaign going around the country to find demands, they are working with the organisations that comprise We Demand Change.

The ambitions for constitutional change are grand. Although they’re also trying more conventional means – they ran 28 independent candidates in the 2024 general election –  they hope to ultimately replace the House of Lords with what they call a House of the People.

Starting in the middle of 2025, “the House of the People will debut as a parallel parliament. An accurate snapshot of the public will meet for three days: 50 people nominated by their communities and 50 people selected by democratic lottery. They will hear the concerns and hopes of local people, learn about the science from experts and set out a new course for our country to take.” The results will be written up into the People’s Charter: an alternative national mandate for government.

If this seems fanciful, Bertie Coyle, a JSO spokesperson, sees in the near future a mass “scales falling from the eyes” with regards to Starmerism, and the recognition that Labour, like the Tories, is fundamentally only “answerable to global capital”. Health secretary Wes Streeting, already rhetorically asked in parliament: “What is the point of the Conservative party?” We might ask, if they’ve become so similar, “what is the point of the Labour party?”

The collapse of the thin hegemony of Starmerism, Coyle argued, will make people start to search for alternatives outside the parliamentary process, in new forms of more radical democracy. It is into this emptiness that Assemble hopes to construct a viable alternative.

So, as Coyle told me, JSO’s announcement is the end of one campaign, but the beginning of a wider movement.

Some argued this showed the strategic sophistication of the campaign. Wolfgang Wopperer of the Movement Ecology Collective told me that ending JSO was “a good strategic move in the interest of the wider movement.”

“One thing JSO has learned that XR still hasn’t is that it’s a campaign, not a movement,” he said. “The movement as a whole needs constant experimentation to find the next thing that works, and that means ending campaigns once they’ve run their course.”

Still, there was criticism. Beuret told me that “there is a desperate need to organise on the ground around the lack of action on climate adaptation”.

“XR left a huge legacy of local activists, and with the resurgence of conservation-focused environmentalism, there’s a constituency that’s only half served by the Greens,” he said. “But just holding assemblies won’t organise that.”

Instead, he advocated for a strategy of blockades, “a form of organisation that not only shuts something down, but produces the ability to sustain that shutdown.”

My own concern is that this strategy from Assemble puts too much trust in the possibility of building alternative democratic institutions, especially given the increasingly urgent timeline of the climate crisis. And in a period of media saturation, whatever the new demands turn out to be, the campaign will struggle to get attention without a grabby or even dangerous press campaign.

But perhaps I shouldn’t worry. As a JSO spokesperson told me, “spectacular things are in the works.”