Mobilising political intersectionality in Czechia’s climate movement: Opportunities and pitfalls of coalition building in a post-socialist semi-periphery

Political intersectionality is now increasingly mobilised by social movements and their coalitions advocating for climate justice in different contexts around the world. Employing feminist action research, we explore (1) individual, (2) organisational and (3) societal levels of political intersectionality in the Czech climate movement. Our focus on spatiotemporal factors reveals the opportunities and pitfalls of intersectional coalition building in a post-socialist semi-periphery. In a societal context distorted by a long history of climate scepticism, depoliticised interpretations of socioeconomic grievances and persistently large gender inequalities, recent experiments with political intersectionality in the Czech climate movement have the potential to influence public debates and climate action. We show that coalition building in the movement is currently complicated by internal inequalities between grassroots movements and mainstream NGOs. Their different approaches to intersectionality have led to the reproduction of techno-managerial approaches to climate change that obscure a systemic critique of oppressive hegemonic forces while decreasing the visibility and interests of women and other marginalised groups of people.