| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
052514
|
|
|
|
|
| Publication |
2003.
|
| Summary/Abstract |
The Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and its sister organization the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) are believed responsible for some 600 criminal acts between 1996 and 2002 and some $43 million in damages. Committed to direct action and revolutionary violence, ELF relies on a leaderless resistance model of operations. They have no discernible organizational structure and rely on members who understand the organization's goals and orientation to take action on their own initiative, making identification and prosecution of perpetrators very difficult. ELF favors rollback of industrial civilization to preserve the environment. ELF is media saavy and unlike Islamist terrorists, generally "want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead." Their tactics emphasize attacks on property not people and include arson, sabotage, and vandalism designed to cause significant economic damage. Targets have included research laboratories, multi-national corporations, and the logging industry. ELF poses an immediate and direct threat to research facilities and labs involved in or seen as involved in research on genetically modified organisms, but could easily shift to nuclear industry targets.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 2 |
ID:
056222
|
|
|
| 3 |
ID:
080345
|
|
|
|
|
| Publication |
2007.
|
| Summary/Abstract |
Leaderless resistance is a strategy of opposition that allows for and encourages individuals or small cells to engage in acts of political violence entirely independent of any hierarchy of leadership or network of support. This article examines the development of the leaderless resistance strategy by the radical right and more recently by the radical environmentalist movement. While both movements use leaderless resistance to avoid detection, infiltration, and prosecution by the state, environmental groups like the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) benefit additionally because of the ideological inclusiveness that leaderless resistance fosters. Historically, ideological cleavages have rendered radical environmental groups such as Earth First! less effective than they would have been otherwise. Using leaderless resistance, however, the ELF eliminates all ideology extraneous to the specific cause of halting the degradation of nature. This elimination enables the ELF to mobilize a greater number of "direct actions
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 4 |
ID:
172177
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
This paper presents a case study of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), based on interviews of the group’s former affiliates. It examines the role of credit claims in organizing this underground leaderless resistance group’s activity. In addition to the external signaling functions of credit claims—demonstrating capability, issuing demands, and soliciting public support—credit claims serve a movement-building role in the ELF. By issuing credit claims in “aboveground” fora that other cells are known to read, ELF cells with no direct links are able to communicate information to one another. Credit-claiming communiqués serve four organizing functions for the ELF. They constitute the ELF underground as an imagined community, recruit new cells, set agendas for future actions, and enforce operational standards of behavior via an informal “peer review” process. This study of the ELF suggests broader insights, including possible organizing techniques that may be observed in white supremacist and Islamist cases.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|