Future tents: protest camps and social movement organisation

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.

Political education in protest camps: spatialising dissensus and reconfiguring places of youth activist ritual in Mexico City

This chapter examines how young protest campers in post-1968 Mexico City engage in political education to the effect of reconfiguring places of ritualized activism and cultivating spaces of politics. The analysis identifies two countervailing processes: 1) political education creatively drawing on material and symbolic resources that sediment in places to intensify political antagonism, and 2) political education paradoxically reifying sedimented identities and vocabularies through which state power is exercised. The focus on young protest campers channelling their activism through categories by which the 1968 student movement and its repression are commemorated reveals that this mode of social reproduction may maintain a police order protest campers ostensibly converge to disrupt. It also shows that, for young people channelled along a lifecourse trajectory towards adulthood, political education may enable young activists to creatively articulate solidarities for more thoroughgoing disruption of state power.

Civil/political society, protest and fasting: the case of Anna Hazare and the 2011 anti-corruption campaign in India

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.

Introduction: occupying and colonising

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.

Security is no accident: considering safe(r) spaces in the transnational Migrant Solidarity camps of Calais1

This chapter examines the theory and organisational practices of ensuring ‘safety’ for those participating in transnational migrant solidarity collectives. It uses ethnographic materials gained from participatory activist scholarship in Calais and London migrant solidarity collectives and assesses the ability of these groups to respond to the differentiated vulnerabilities that individuals bring to the protest camp- particularly in terms of the experiences and responses to structural oppression such as racism, sexism and homophobia. The current preference for safer spaces policies as one way of mediating conflict in activist collectives will be examined in terms of who may be left behind when individual trauma or addiction can leave people unable or unwilling to act according to the rules that these policies prescribe, and seeks different modes of collaboration that may not always feel safe or comfortable for all involved.

Introduction: reproducing and re-creating

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?

Democratic deficit in the Israeli Tent Protests: chronicle of a failed intervention

This chapter offers an insider’s account and analysis of the failed efforts to democratise the Israeli Tent Protest movement and impose accountability on its founders. Following an account of the movement’s development and early tensions around leadership, the democratization efforts are recounted from a first-person perspective. The analysis critically relates the process to the proposals made by Jo Freeman in her well-known article “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”, albeit concluding that its framework is inadequate for explaining the dynamics involved. Instead, it is argued that the democratisation process failed because of the founders’ media-oriented mentality and their reliance on professional campaign advisors who were openly contemptuous towards horizontalism. This highlights the explanatory significance of personal, agency-based analyses in discussions of power within movement networks.

Reoccupation and resurgence: indigenous protest camps in Canada

In the face of ongoing Canadian colonialism and displacement, blockading has become an important tactic through which Indigenous communities reassert their traditional forms of place-based culture and governance. This chapter will examine three important reclamation sites in Canada over the past twenty five years, ranging from the spontaneous and relatively-short lived blockades of the Oka Crisis near the Kanesatake and Kahnawake Mohawk reserves in Quebec (1990), through the long-term Anishinaabe anti-clearcutting blockade at Grassy Narrows in northern Ontario (begun in 2002), to the growing and evolving anti-pipeline reclamation site in Unist’ot’en territory, in the British Columbia interior, which began in 2009. These three sites can reveal important lessons about Indigenous resurgence and the efficacy of protest camps as reoccupations of stolen land.

Losing space in Occupy London: fetishising the protest camp

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.

Feeds from the square: live streaming, live tweeting and the self-representation of protest camps

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.