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Oppression

This note is about oppression and oppression theory, especially on distributed oppression, more-than-human implications, 4E cognition, oppression in design, etc.

Definitions

Oppression is...

“[...] the vast and deep injustices some groups suffer as a consequence of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary interactions, media and cultural stereotypes, and structural features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms [...]”

"all oppressed people suffer some inhibition of their ability to develop and exercise their capacities and express their needs, thoughts, and feelings. In that abstract sense all oppressed people face a common condition."

Five 'faces' of oppression:

  • exploitation
  • marginalization
  • powerlessness
  • cultural imperialism
  • violence

Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Examples and Dimensions of Oppression

A preliminary grouping.1, 2, 3

Material and Spatial Oppression

  • Dispossession of habitat: Taking or enclosing lands, waters, nesting sites, migration corridors, and feeding grounds that communities need to live and reproduce. Example in this note: protected-area logics that displace local lifeworlds while claiming universal conservation categories.4
  • Forced displacement: Driving beings away from long-inhabited territories through extraction, conservation enclosure, urbanisation, militarisation, or climate disruption.4
  • Ecological fragmentation: Breaking connected ecologies into isolated patches, which reduces movement, gene flow, social learning, and resilience.

Epistemic and Ontological Oppression

  • Epistemological violence: Dismissing or overriding situated knowledges, including Indigenous ecological knowledge and embodied animal ways of sensing and learning.5, 6, 7
  • Cultural erasure: Destroying or discrediting practices, memory, language, ritual, and intergenerational teaching that sustain collective identity. Example in this note: Yellowstone as a model of historical erasure and sanitised landscape narratives.
  • Ontological reduction: Treating living beings as resources, data points, pests, or scenery rather than as agents with their own worlds and relations.5, 8
  • Representational capture: Speaking for others while filtering out their own priorities, then using those representations to justify further control.9, 10

Political, Institutional, and Economic Oppression

  • Denial of participation: Excluding affected beings and communities from decisions about land, infrastructure, policy, and design that shape their lives.11, 12, 13
  • Denial of innovation: Blocking local experimentation, adaptation, and care practices by imposing rigid categories, standards, or external management models.
  • Labour extraction without return: Taking work, care, ecological services, or value from communities while withholding security, recognition, and reciprocity.
  • Conservation dispossession: Protecting biodiversity by excluding local and Indigenous communities, producing justice harms in the name of ecological care.4, 9
  • Commodification of identity: Turning cultures, species, landscapes, or relations into market assets for tourism, branding, offsets, or speculative finance. Example in this note: ecotourism logics that package local cultures as products.

Temporal and Developmental Oppression

  • Temporal oppression (slow violence): Producing long-duration harms that accumulate across years and generations, often remaining hard to see in short policy cycles.14, 15
  • Denial of futures: Making it difficult or impossible for communities to persist, regenerate, or pass on capacities to future generations.
  • Capability suppression: Limiting opportunities to develop species-specific and community-specific capacities, including play, exploration, learning, sociality, and tool use.2, 3
  • Reproductive injustice: Disrupting conditions for reproduction and care through toxicity, stress, captivity, or destruction of breeding and nursery environments.
  • Affective oppression: Structuring chronic fear, stress, dependency, and insecurity that narrow behaviour, agency, and wellbeing.

Infrastructural and Informational Oppression

  • Infrastructural domination: Designing roads, fences, platforms, supply chains, and bureaucracies that systematically privilege some lifeways while disabling others.5
  • Algorithmic and classification oppression: Using categories, metrics, and optimisation systems that simplify complex lives and enforce damaging interventions.9, 10
  • Cumulative diminishment of potential: Layering small constraints that, over time, reduce adaptive range, creativity, and the ability to contribute to shared worlds.8

In Application to Nonhuman Beings

Dubeau, Mathieu. “Species-Being for Whom? The Five Faces of Interspecies Oppression.” Contemporary Political Theory 19, no. 4 (2020): 596–620. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-019-00363-7.

Gruen, Lori. “The Faces of Animal Oppression.” In Dancing with Iris: The Philosophy of Iris Marion Young, edited by Ann Ferguson and Mechthild Nagel, 161–72. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Wage Slavery

"It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm laborers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him. . . . What effective gain has the suppression of slavery brought him? . . . He is free, you say. Ah! That is his misfortune. The slave was precious to his master because of the money he had cost him. But the handicraftsman costs nothing to the rich voluptuary who employs him. . . . These men, it is said, have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence."

1767, Simon Linguet

Dispossession, Exclusion, Eviction, and Displacement

Oppression extends beyond humanity to encompass all living beings. Treat dispossession, exclusion, eviction, and displacement as forms of oppression affecting not only humans but also other animals, plants, and living beings. Consider these harms through multiple frameworks of justice: environmental, ecological, and planetary and in reference to the contrast between one world and many worlds. See Justice and Inclusion (Private) for broader contexts.

Protected areas exemplify this challenge. They often become cosmologies that guide actions by the IUCN, NGOs, and other agents, imposing a singular order on the world and displacing the existing lifeworlds of local and Indigenous communities.

Agriculture, aquaculture and other human practices can do the same to nonhuman communities and cultures whose worlds are often interconnected with those of human beings and communities.16, 17, 18, 19 To address such injustices, it is necessary to analyse concepts such as justice, parks, labour, and construction from the perspectives of all affected beings without prejudice. Then, these concepts can become arenas of negotiation, contestation, and collaborative innovation rather than unifying dispositions.

All life engages in niche construction (see Niche). If humans construct protected areas, so too do other life forms. The challenge is to make such construction genuinely inclusive and participatory, acknowledging the agency and knowledge of local and Indigenous peoples.

The IUCN and related conservation bodies often impose externally derived categories on the world, treating these categories as universal while disregarding national and local contexts. This process, sometimes called "generification,"20, 21 becomes a mechanism of dispossession when it restructures landscapes and practices to fit imposed frameworks.

The nature/culture dichotomy imposed on Indigenous peoples has had profound material and social consequences. It excludes Indigenous peoples from their lands or forces them to conform to romanticised stereotypes of "noble savages" that are impossible to live by in practice.22 See Indigenous for more.

In such contexts, Indigenous cultures and identities themselves become commodified—packaged as attractions for conservation tourism and ecotourism.23

The application of nature/culture dichotomy and an even stronger human/nonhuman dichotomy has an even stronger effect on nonhuman beings. It can lead to the exclusion of nonhuman communities and pervasive harms to their lifeways, including the destruction of habitats, the imposition of human-centric management practices, and the disruption of evolved relationships.

Case: In our practice, innovative artificial habitat structures informed by learning and innovating with nonhuman beings 24, 25, 16 create opportunities to extend and support the land management (Country) practices that Indigenous rangers are already engaged in or developing. These projects enable us to support local animals, learn from local living communities, build capacity through emerging technologies, strengthen collaborative networks, and create financial support and employment for local communities through ranger programs. Activities include design workshops with prototypes and hands-on making, site reinterpretation, installation and monitoring, and development of educational resources.

West, Paige, James Igoe, and Dan Brockington. “Parks and Peoples: The Social Impact of Protected Areas.” Annual Review of Anthropology 35, no. 2006 (2006): 251–77. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123308.

Brockington, Daniel, and James Igoe. “Eviction for Conservation: A Global Overview.” Conservation and Society 4, no. 3 (2006): 424.

Brockington, Dan, Rosaleen Duffy, and Jim Igoe. Nature Unbound: Conservation, Capitalism and the Future of Protected Areas. London: Earthscan, 2010.

Brockington, Dan. Fortress Conservation: The Preservation of the Mkomazi Game Reserve, Tanzania. Oxford: The International African Institute, 2002.

Büscher, Bram, Sian Sullivan, Katja Neves, Jim Igoe, and Dan Brockington. “Towards a Synthesized Critique of Neoliberal Biodiversity Conservation.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 23, no. 2 (2012): 4–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2012.674149.

Igoe, Jim, and Dan Brockington. “Neoliberal Conservation: A Brief Introduction.” Conservation and Society 5, no. 4 (2007): 432.

Igoe, Jim, Katja Neves, and Dan Brockington. “A Spectacular Eco-Tour around the Historic Bloc: Theorising the Convergence of Biodiversity Conservation and Capitalist Expansion.” Antipode 42, no. 3 (2010): 486–512. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00761.x.

West, Paige. Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

Zhang, Adela. “The Corporate Effect: Making Capitalist Space and Peasant Dispossession in the Peruvian Andes.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 41, no. 2 (2023): 310–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758231164402.

Similar behaviours include:

Fairhead, James, Melissa Leach, and Ian Scoones. “Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation of Nature?” The Journal of Peasant Studies 39, no. 2 (2012): 237–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2012.671770.

Kelly, Alice B. “Conservation Practice as Primitive Accumulation.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 38, no. 4 (2011): 683–701. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2011.607695.

It is also important to emphasise that critiques of conservation can miss the mark when they rely on caricatures of science. In historical examples, the relevant contrast is between early modern positions, such as Descartes' mechanistic account of animal bodies and strong mind-body dualis

On relevant debates, see:

Simpson, Fergus O’Leary, Lorenzo Pellegrini, Olajide Akinleye-Martins, Leif Brottem, Elie Lunanga, Christopher Day, Elias Maombi Ndatabaye, et al. “When Everything Is Violence, Nothing Is Violence: Response to Koot et al. (2020).” Conservation Biology, 2025, e70337. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.70337.

Washington, Haydn, John J. Piccolo, Helen Kopnina, and Fergus O’Leary Simpson. “Ecological and Social Justice Should Proceed Hand-in-Hand in Conservation.” Biological Conservation 290 (2024): 110456. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2024.110456.

References

Aagaard, Jesper. “4E Cognition and the Dogma of Harmony.” Philosophical Psychology 34, no. 2 (2021): 165–81. https://doi.org/10/g83w9g.

Fabry, Regina E. “Self-Narration in the Oppressive Niche.” Topoi, 2024. https://doi.org/10/g83tvk.

Liao, Shen-yi, and Bryce Huebner. “Oppressive Things.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103, no. 1 (2021): 92–113. https://doi.org/10/g83w9q.

Notes

Footnotes

  1. Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.˄

  2. Dubeau, Mathieu. “Species-Being for Whom? The Five Faces of Interspecies Oppression.” Contemporary Political Theory 19, no. 4 (2020): 596–620. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-019-00363-7.˄

  3. Gruen, Lori. “The Faces of Animal Oppression.” In Dancing with Iris: The Philosophy of Iris Marion Young, edited by Ann Ferguson and Mechthild Nagel, 161–72. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.˄

  4. West, Paige, James Igoe, and Dan Brockington. “Parks and Peoples: The Social Impact of Protected Areas.” Annual Review of Anthropology 35 (2006): 251–77.˄

  5. Liao, Shen-yi, and Bryce Huebner. “Oppressive Things.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103, no. 1 (2021): 92–113. https://doi.org/10/g83w9q.˄

  6. Lopez, Andrew. “Nonhuman Animals and Epistemic Injustice.” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 25, no. 1 (2023): 136–63. https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v25i1.2201.˄

  7. Gosselin, Laure, and Mathilde Gauquelin. “Rethinking Knowledge Cumulation: Foregrounding Epistemic Justice in Environmental Governance Research.” Environmental Policy and Governance, 2025. https://doi.org/10/g9rvb4.˄

  8. Fabry, Regina E. “Self-Narration in the Oppressive Niche.” Topoi, 2024. https://doi.org/10/g83tvk.˄

  9. Goldstein, Jenny E., Dan Brockington, Chris Sandbrook, Patrick Meyfroidt, Jonas Geldmann, Tobias Kuemmerle, Marion Pfeifer, et al. “Environmental Data Justice Is Key for Developing More Effective Area-Based Conservation Approaches.” Nature Reviews Biodiversity 2, no. 2 (2026): 116–26. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44358-025-00126-w.˄

  10. Maliao, Ronald, and Béla Tóthmérész. “Beyond Conditional Visibility: Operationalizing Epistemic Justice in Conservation Science.” Environmental Conservation 53, no. 2 (2026): 57–61. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0376892926100381.˄

  11. van Dijk, Jiska, Juliette Young, Marie Vandewalle, Allan Watt, and Karla Locher. “Transformative Change for Biodiversity Requires More Inclusive and Participatory Framing of Research Agendas.” Biodiversity and Conservation 32, no. 11 (2023): 3669–79. https://doi.org/10/gwkn56.˄

  12. Roudavski, Stanislav. “The Ladder of More-than-Human Participation: A Framework for Inclusive Design.” Cultural Science 14, no. 1 (2024): 110–19. https://doi.org/10.2478/csj-2024-0015.˄

  13. Youn, Hoyoung, and Joon Sang Baek. “Assemblage-Based Stakeholder Analysis in Design: A Conceptual Framework through the Lenses of Post-Anthropocentrism.” CoDesign 20, no. 4 (2024): 585–606. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2024.2358966.˄

  14. Arcari, Paula. “Slow Violence Against Animals: Unseen Spectacles in Racing and at Zoos.” Geoforum 144 (2023): 103820. https://doi.org/10/g83xpc.˄

  15. Davies, Thom. “Slow Violence and Toxic Geographies: ‘Out of Sight’ to Whom?” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 40, no. 2 (2022): 409–27. https://doi.org/10/gg3q4k.˄

  16. Lorimer, Jamie. “Worlding and Weirding with Beaver: A More-than-Human Political Ecology of Ecosystem Engineering.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 50, no. 2 (2025): e12698. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12698.˄

  17. San, Phyo Su, and Maya Kóvskaya. “Multispecies Mutualistic Resilience: Riverine Lifeworlds along the Irrawaddy River.” Forest and Society 10, no. 1 (2026): 406–31. https://doi.org/10.65844/2549-4333.1260.˄

  18. Fuentes, Agustín, and Marcus Baynes-Rock. “Anthropogenic Landscapes, Human Action and the Process of Co-Construction with Other Species: Making Anthromes in the Anthropocene.” Land 6, no. 1 (2017): 15. https://doi.org/10.3390/land6010015.˄

  19. Flachs, Andrew, Cristiana Bastos, Deborah Heath, and Sita Venkateswar. “Introduction to Special Collection: Plant-Anthropo-Genesis: The Co-Production of Plant–People Lifeworlds.” Journal of Ethnobiology 44, no. 1 (2024): 3–10. https://doi.org/10.1177/02780771241228068.˄

  20. Errington, Frederick, and Deborah Gewertz. “On the Generification of Culture: From Blow Fish to Melanesian.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7, no. 3 (2001): 509–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.00075.˄

  21. West, Paige, and James G. Carrier. Ecotourism and Authenticity: Getting Away from It All? 45, no. 4 (2004): 483–98. https://doi.org/10.7916/D88W3BD4.˄

  22. West, Paige. “Environmental Non Governmental Organizations and the Nature of Ethnographic Inquiry.” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 45, no. 2 (2001): 55–77.˄

  23. Igoe, Jim. “Global Indigenism and Spaceship Earth: Convergence, Space, and Re-Entry Friction.” Globalizations 2, no. 3 (2005): 377–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747730500367975.˄

  24. Parker, Dan, Kylie Soanes, and Stanislav Roudavski. “Learning with Owls: Human–Wildlife Coexistence as a Guide for Urban Design.” People and Nature 7, no. 7 (2025): 1619–38. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.70067.˄

  25. Parker, Dan, Stanislav Roudavski, Chiara Bettega, Luigi Marchesi, Paolo Pedrini, Mattia Brambilla, and Kylie Soanes. “Which Design Is Better? A Lifecycle Approach to the Sustainable Management of Artificial Habitat–Structures.” Conservation Science and Practice 7, no. 8 (2025): e70084. https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.70084.˄

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