In 2019, the prime ministers of the United Kingdom and Australia both declared their intent to ban indirect, or secondary, boycotts. In the United Kingdom, the ban was directed against public bodies engaging in the “boycott, divest, and sanction” (BDS) campaign against Israel. In Australia, the proposed ban was directed against environmental action groups. Research on market-based activism to date has focused primarily on conceptualizing the use of the market by nonstate actors to achieve social change, with less attention paid to the role of the state in these dynamics. State efforts to curtail social movements’ repertoires of contention require careful scrutiny to understand the state's role in legitimizing or delegitimizing political activism and to reveal the complex power dynamics between corporations, social movements, and the state. This article analyzes two key instances of the state declaring an intent to prevent activists from protesting through the market. By investigating how indirect boycotts were problematized by state actors, we aim to reveal the rationale behind the state's intervention in marketplace politics. Our findings indicate that opposition to the political cause behind the boycott, rather than a problematization of the strategy itself, drives state intervention.

Many people argue that we should practice conscientious consumption. Faced with goods from gravely flawed production processes, such as wood from clear-cut rainforests or electronics containing conflict minerals, they argue that we should enact personal policies to routinely shun tainted goods and select pure(r) goods. However, consumers typically should be relatively uncertain about which flaws in global supply chains are grave and the connection of purchases to those grave flaws. The threat of significant uncertainty makes conscientious consumption appear to be no better, or even worse, than an overlooked option. This overlooked option is consumption with relinquishment: disregarding each product’s possible connections with upstream grave flaws and using the time, money, and energy saved in this way to address grave flaws directly.

Many have depicted a steady rise in lifestyle politics. Individuals are increasingly using everyday life choices about consumption, transportation, or modes of living to address political, environmental, or ethical issues. While celebrated by some as an expansion of political participation, others worry this trend may be detrimental for democracy, for instance, by reducing citizens to consumers. Implicit in this common critique is the notion that lifestyle politics will replace, rather than coexist with or lead to, other forms of political participation. We provide the first detailed longitudinal analysis to test these hypotheses. Using unique panel data from 1538 politically active individuals from the Flemish region of Belgium (2017–18), we demonstrate that over time, lifestyle politics functions as a gateway into institutionalized and non-institutionalized modes of political participation and that this relationship is mediated by individuals’ increased political concerns.