Denial as Colonial Governance: Climate Denialism and Structural  Violence, Ana Gretel Echazú Böschemeier and Lucrecia Raquel Greco. 

Synonyms: Climate change denialism; Climate denial; 
Climate negationism.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2026 
N. Wallenhorst, C. Wulf (eds.), Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene, 
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51703-7_328-1 

Introduction 
Climate change denial is the refusal to accept the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate disruption, often rooted in ideological resistance, corporate interests, and state complicity. It operates asan institutionalized form of negation that reinforces hegemonic epistemologies and delays transformative action. 

Anna Freud (1936), in her foundational psychoanalytic work, described denial as a defense mechanism by which the ego protects itself from distressing realities by refusing to acknowledge them. While originally formulated to explain individual psychic processes, this concept can be extended to understand denial as a collective social phenomenon, wherein groups, institutions, or even entire societiesresist systematically and in an organized articulated way confronting uncomfortable truths—such as ecological collapse or historical violence. 
Denialism today can be understood as a mode of epistemic domination that strategically rejects or delegitimizes historically situated, empirically grounded, and collectively produced plural knowledge—often those that challenge dominant political, economic, or civilizational projects (Szwako and Ratton 2022). 
It operates not as mere skepticism or critical inquiry, but as a systematic refusal to understand and accept reality, a politically motivated refusal to engage with uncomfortable truths, particularly those that threaten systems of established privilege, extractivism, and colonial order. Denialism mimics critical engagement, positioning itself against evidences through discrediting the very conditions under which such evidence is produced—be that climate data, Indigenous testimony, or public health research. Denialism encourages escapism and the evasion of present realities. 
Certain expressions of melancholy and escapism align with a conservative ethos (Vieira 2018), functioning as alternative modes of  disengagement—a refusal to be implicated in the world—or as forms of reactive rejection. The concept of denialism encompasses both of these dynamics: a paradoxical engagement in the act of disengaging, and a violent resistance to any condition that might threaten a prior, idealized moral order. 
To deny, in this sense, is closely aligned with the act of reacting: both are oriented not toward transformation, but in the direction of the restoration of a supposed pristine, essentialistic worldview. At the same time, turning attention to the theme of denialism through Arendt’s notions of love of the world (amor mundi) and the idea of an active life (vita activa), both in their broadest political sense (Arendt 2003), invites consideration of how the refusal to engage with reality— through the denial of science or historical injustices—constitutes a withdrawal from the responsibilities of political action and shared world-making. 
In current debates, it is possible to observe a range of positions that—situated within post-truth regimes (Cesarino 2021)—oppose the consensuses, findings, procedures, and discussions generated and sustainedby scientific communities (Szwako and Ratton 2022; Echazú Böschemeier and Antunes Almeida 2023). “Scientific communities” are understood here in a broad sense, encompassing the biological and exact sciences, the humanities, communication, and education, among others. 
This proposal remains open to inter-epistemic dialogue. This entails the need to think about denialism beyond the boundaries of Wester sciences—that is, to consider all forms of negation directed at the production of other knowledges as those Indigenous and traditional knowledges founded in life management. 

Artículo completo Denial as Colonial 
Governance: Climate Denialism and Structural 
Violence in © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2026 
N. Wallenhorst, C. Wulf (eds.), Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene, 
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51703-7_328-1