Search Results

Despite protest camps’ increasing role as an organisational form of protest, little scholarship has considered protest camps as their own domain of enquiry. What protest camp scholarship that does exist has largely been sporadic and often views camps as either merely functional to the specific movements in which they were created, or sees them as ephemeral spaces that leave little legacy. In either case, the protest camp is regarded as just one site amongst many in the context of studying a specific social movement often grouped together with other social movement strategies such as street parties, demonstrations, assemblies and direct actions. In this introduction, the authors point to the importance to detail the unique spaces of protest camps, their sustaining infrastructures and the similarities and differences between protest camps across movements and locations. The authors also consider the lack of theory which conceptually develops the importance of the protest camp as a distinct entity and a lack of succinct empirical work on protest camps.

This chapter reveals the complexities of the Umbrella Movement by shifting the focus to the Mongkok protest camp, known as Occupy Mongkok. Occupy Mongkok was not just an extension of the Admiralty camp where the Umbrella Movement originated. Instead, Occupy Mongkok developed a movement environment and dynamics that not only distinguished it from the Admiralty camp but also challenged the city's political culture. First, despite sharing similar demographic features with their Admiralty counterparts, Mongkok protesters showed greater inclination to behave militantly, eschewing the civic, nonviolent repertoires that were characteristic of previous protests. Second, even though Occupy Mongkok drew cross-class participation, the protest camp also highlighted the role of the grassroots citizens—defined more in cultural than socioeconomic terms—in political contention, which had been neglected in the city's protracted struggle for democracy. Ultimately, Occupy Mongkok could be regarded as a transgressive episode of contention in Hong Kong's history of political activism.

This chapter concludes the volume by highlighting key themes that have run through the book and the case studies of diverse contemporary and historical protest camps contained within it. The chapter recognises that protest camps have come into being motivated by a diverse range of political imperatives and that these political motivations, as much as local context, shape the form that specific protest camps take. The conclusion reaffirms the importance of studying the infrastructural arrangements through which protest camps function. It highlights several of the contradictions posed by protest camping – both around the valorisation of territory and the act of camping itself, and the tensions arising out of attention to social reproduction and care within camps. Finally, the conclusion reflects on some of the gaps in existing research highlighted by the book, and outlines priority areas for future protest camps research.

This chapter develops a cultural analysis of live feeds, in the forms of video or text, and their role within the protest communications of the movements of the squares of 2011. Drawing on 50 interviews with activists, on observations of protest camps and on analysis of social media material, in the Spanish indignados, and Occupy Wall Street in the US, the author highlights how live streaming and live tweeting reflect the new populist worldview introduced by the 2011 protest wave. These practices have served these movements' aims of making protest camps public and transparent places, open to the entirety of the citizenry rather than to a small tribe of activists and have allowed the movement to construct a connection with "internet occupiers", sympathisers following events from home.

The present chapter discusses the cases of two protest camps at Maidan in Kiev in 2004 and 2013/2014. It aims to explain the resemblances and differences across the cases and focuses on such issues as resistance practices used by the protesters, resource mobilization strategies and emerging approaches to the camp’s governance and representation in decision making processes. The conceptual triad for space production and infrastructural approach is applied to examine protest camps as a unique organizational form of social movements. Linking together the (re)production of the space, newly adjusted spatial practices and space representation, this chapter argues that detected particular characteristics of Maidan-Sich 2014 can be interpreted as the marks of empowerment of the recently emerged civil society and make of it an important object of study for those who want to grasp the essence of the recent changes of political and social order in Ukraine.

This chapter discusses the case of the Free Curvy Occupation in Berlin-Kreuzberg. A protest camp against gentrification, the Free Cuvry Occupation also became a shelter for some of Berlin’s poorest inhabitants, who found shelter and relative security on the squatted vacant lot. The chapter considers the dual character of Free Cuvry as a protest camp and a homeless tent city against the backdrop of ongoing discussions over the ability of protest camps to provide care and support for destitute urban dwellers. The Free Cuvry case shows that protesting against gentrification while also providing shelter for homeless people is a unique and potentially powerful tactic of urban social movements. The case however also shows the limits and the difficulties of reconciling both characteristics. Highlighting the need for forming pragmatic coalitions and responding to political opportunities, the chapter provides some reflection regarding the viability of this tactic.

This chapter examines textile as a political tool and the architecture that facilitates this tool in protest camps by focusing on the use of textile rather than the form of protest. The author focuses on textile as a geopolitical agent and begins to compile a list of textile qualities as well as their spatial and geopolitical importance. The chapters draws from existing research on historic protest camps and the author’s empirical research from camps in Oslo, Norway and Silwan, East Jerusalem, Israel/Palestine. The author introduces Eyal Weizman’s term `political plastic´ as a framework to understand how architecture can create geopolitics. By combining Judith Butler’s argument of bodies creating politics in public spaces with Weizman’s theories, the chapter aims to create a new perspective for understanding the geopolitics of the protest camp.

The chapter uses interviews and secondary literature to analyse the Mustapha Mahmoud Sudanese refugee protest camp, which took place in Cairo, Egypt, in 2005 in front of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) local office. To date, Mustapha Mahmoud is deemed one of the largest public protests that took place in modern Egypt before the 2011 uprising. Two elements in particular are highlighted. First, the material infrastructure that allowed social reproduction within the camp – although not free form contradictions and oppressive elements – was essential to the constitution of Mustapha Mahmoud as a political public space autonomous from humanitarian governance. Second, ethnographic research in Cairo shows how, ten years after its forced eviction, the camp still had its own ‘legacy’, representing an important precedent for refugee communities and local activists alike. The chapter’s conclusion highlights the need for ethnographic research which is attentive to the ambivalence and contradictions of refugee protests, as well as to how specific camps’ practices and know-how are transmitted to other groups across time.

This chapter examines the case study of Occupy London and argues that the protest camp is inevitably susceptible to fetishisation, understood as the subordination of process to form. It begins by examining the work of Henri Lefebvre and John Holloway – two authors who discuss the challenges of creating counter forms from below - in order to ground the discussion in theoretical debates surrounding fetishisation and institutionalisation. Based on militant research with Occupy London – involving interviews, ethnography and archive analysis - the remainder of the chapter examines the losing of Occupy London’s principal occupied space, the camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral, and points toward a wider set of issues surrounding protests camps and territorial forms of struggle. It concludes by conceptualising the protest camp as an antagonistic form that necessarily exists against-and-beyond the social movements that constitute it.

In this section introduction the authors consider the different elements that are brought together to create the material and social infrastructures of camps. Taking seriously the material and social infrastructures of camps, they examine the spatial division of labour within protest camps. They also introduce how the architecture of the public squares and gardens that are occupied by protesters can shape the ways in which politics is practised within them. Protest camps are seldom spontaneous, and it is necessary to understand better the processes by which camps are planned, and the ways in which political practices travel between camps over time. This includes the important role of media and communication infrastructure. The authors highlight the need to examine the relationship between the physical space of occupation and the mediated or virtual space. Of interest are the media practices used to maintain and amplify spaces of protest, with particular attention given to the role of media - and social media in particular - in maintaining and amplifying corporeal protest camp sites.

The book’s second section - ‘Occupying and Colonizing’ - addresses a different set of spatial politics posed by protest camps. The authors are concerned here with the politics of occupying (public) space for protest and the tensions that can arise from this. Urban protest camps, in particular, frequently seek to occupy public space in order to draw attention to the policies of political and economic elites. The authors question how certain ‘publics’ are brought into being by protest camps, whilst the existence of others might be elided or erased. This section addresses the constitutive power of protest camps as a political and communicative space. Here, the spatial character of a protest camp as its own sphere of life and communication creates a disposition between the two, something that leads to various relationships from clear cut antagonism between ‘the camp’ and ‘the outside’ to more heterotopic overlaps, as well as more blurred boundaries in communication and action.

The chapter engages with the notion of ‘political refrain’, adapted from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, to offer some reflections on the strengths and limitations of protest camps in the action repertoire available to social movements. In the present study, ‘camping’ was a recurring thematic for British environmental protest, especially in the mobilisations of the Camp for Climate Action. Camps played more than a simple organisational role and signified a desire to prefigure alternative social and ecological configurations. The camp-form, however, took on a logic of its own, locking the protest movement into repertoire dependency, which signified the problematic tension between organisational continuity and tactical innovation. Unable to resolve this tension, and with British climate activism so fundamentally tied to the imaginary of the protest camp, the emergence of a new political praxis was prevented.

The title of the final section is ‘Reproducing and Re-creating’. Considering camps as home places - places where people feed, care for and house each other, means to see them as sites where social reproduction takes place. This raises a number of questions, for example concerning the balance between social reproduction and more confrontational forms of political contestations (as well as the highly contested expectations about who should participate in each of these functions). Because they can become a temporary home for many people, questions of physical, psychological, and symbolic safety (especially for women and minority groups) have frequently been the cause of tension within camps. How do campers struggle to realize some of their political hopes within the space of the camp - not just their ‘big’ hopes for a more just, equal and sustainable society; but their hopes for a transformation of everyday social relations between people?

This chapter examines the August 2011 New Delhi fast against corruption conducted by Anna Hazare. The fast was the largest political mobilisation in India for many years, and attracted widespread coverage. It is argued that approaching this fast as a protest camp has the potential to create a more contextually grounded and nuanced understanding of the events surrounding the fast. The chapter does this by examining the conceptual debate about civil society that structured many commentaries on the fast. These were often based on Partha Chatterjee’s concept of ‘political society’, in which ‘civil’ society is seen as an élite zone which excludes marginal communities who instead occupy ‘political’ society. Whilst conceptually useful, the chapter argues that a protest camps-based approach helps to interrogate the divide between civil/political society, and that such an approach to the Anna Hazare fast would create space for more ethnographic, grounded accounts of political practise.

Chapter 4, “Acampada Sol: the Chrysalis and the Crucible,” shows how the camp was a distinct “event” with a specific internal logic, and draws on participant testimonies to transmit the emotional experience of what was a life-changing event for participants. It argues that the camp was a chrysalis, a protected stage of development within which the 15-M movement was born, and a crucible, in that it served as a container into which old and new elements fused together under an exceptional situation of emotional intensity to create something new: a more consolidated ethos and political culture, as well as new sets of social relations that would go on to generate a broad network of interrelated assemblies, collectives, events, and political projects, all organized around a collective identity and a political culture referred to in Spain simply as “15-M.” Due to sustained and intense interaction in space and time, movement camps provide a unique opportunity for building the social capital that can develop from mobilization and sustain movements over time. In its deliberative and experiential experimentation with democracy, the camp engendered an emerging imaginary that coupled reform of democratic forms (in social, economic, and political institutions) with substantive content that drew on the key ideational frameworks of the movement traditions present in the square.

The Marconi Occupation is a squat in downtown Sao Paulo, Brazil, organized by the Movement Housing for All (Movimento Moradia Para Todos, in Portuguese). An abandoned office building was occupied by the protesters in 2012, and the author lived here as well for a period of four months. Marconi became an example on common life, providing housing but also multiple collective activities to the inhabitants but also to outsiders, transforming everyday social relations between people. Although, those relations and structures were ephemeral: what constituted the protest camp vanished with time and change, stressing the existing tension between social reproduction and political action. Those issues were intertwined and collided in the quotidian of this alternative laboratory of common life and autonomous governance. Despite the short life of the initiative, however, the wave of reverberation of the movement can still be felt and the experience is still embodied in the ones involved.

Chapter 5 analyzes the impact and significance of Acampada Sol for the development of the 15-M movement. Acampada Sol was one of many “occupation” camps that combined a pro-democracy and anti-austerity orientation. Demands for greater democracy form a central shared theme across a wide range of protest sites and forms of protest within and beyond Europe. But not all of these resulted in strong and sustained movements afterward, and not all mass mobilizations in times of crisis result in the emergence of social movements. This chapter argues that the experience of Acampada Sol had two crucial impacts that served to fuel and sustain the 15-M movement. The first was to establish democracy as the central problematic around which the movement cohered. The second was to consolidate a political culture and a collective identity that would sustain the movement, enabling it to expand and evolve. Autonomous, feminist, and hacker ethics forged a political culture that would strengthen the movement’s political identity and efficacy.

Part II traces 15-M from its origins to the end of the occupation of Madrid’s central plaza, the Puerta del Sol. The Introduction to Part II argues for the need to distinguish analytically between the original 15-M protest, the 15-M occupation camps of the squares (or acamapadas), and the 15-M movement that adopted this label following the original protests and occupations. Although the three are closely connected, each have distinct features that shape their emergence and evolution. Distinguishing between them allows us to evaluate claims about spontaneity, newness, and the role of digital media and tools in creating new organizing logics of collective action. It also introduces key aspects of the Spanish asambleario autonomous movement culture that deeply influenced the organizational forms and orientations of the 15-M movement.