Abstract
This edited collection provides an exceptional summary of camping as a protest strategy focused around the 2011 protest camp wave – Occupy, Indignados, Gezi Park. It picks up protest camping as ‘key expression of contemporary social movement politics’ (p.1). Doing so, the 17 distinct empirical cases in 15 different countries and broad theoretical perspectives establish the study of protest camps as an interdisciplinary research area. These cases include protest camps departing from classical examples as Occupy Wall Street such as the Calais migrant camp and a squatted house in Sao Paolo. Through this mix of cases the editors fundamentally question what we understand as a protest camp.
The theoretical structure of the book makes differences and commonalities of protest camps discussable by dividing the book into three parts: assembling and materialising, occupying and colonising, reproducing and re-creating. It takes the reader through the processes of assembling tents, taking space and maintaining this as a social structure. Despite the expected differences between the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong and the Israeli Tent Protest, the editors succeeded in making the book a coherent read, establishing a discussion on how people assemble at a specific space with their tents, umbrellas, barricades and food. Within this, each chapter gives insight into the experiences of people camping together with the busy, complex and careful consideration this entails.
What is camping?
The editors untangle the chaos of a lived camp by sorting activities into four types of infrastructures: media and communication, action, governance and re-creation. They place the building of infrastructure as the first point of interaction which turns the ad hoc protest at city square into a durable camp. For example, providing food can be ‘a way to connect to strangers and create a social bond’ (p. 63), where people spontaneously assemble (see Chapter 4 on Gezi Park). These relationships can become formalised in governance structures such as a general assembly (see Chapter 5 on Syntagma Square), even though not all camps follow the trend of the New Left for shared governance (see Chapter 13 on Israeli Tent Protest). By including cases as Anna Hazare’s public fast in New Delhi (see Chapter 15) where infrastructure took a very different form, the book pushes the definition of protest camping.
The importance of infrastructure for camping becomes clear around the issue of social reproduction, the labour that creates and re-creates humans’ ability to live and work together. The Mustapha Mahmoud camp was assembled by Sudanese migrants in front of the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) office in Cairo (Chapter 17) as a protest, but also developed a collective infrastructure for shelter, food, community and even a school, a clinic and organised security. In contrast, the anti-gentrification Free Curvy camp in Berlin (Chapter 19) was unable to create, and socially reproduce, a sustainable infrastructure that would allow it to endure across different interest groups, those who chose to temporarily camp as protesters and those who relied on camping in the city.
Developing an infrastructure for this from scratch quickly politicises normally taken-for-granted aspects of everyday life. Social movements have used camping to develop spaces for self-governing politics (Chapter 9 on the British climate camps and Chapter 10 on Occupy London) in which the collectively organised infrastructure – building up autonomous processes for social reproduction, media and communication, governance and political action – is as much an area of politics as public protest.
When is camping protest?
Protest camps create political spaces, but also have different strategies to attract attention and challenge politics. The first strategy that stands out in the book is camping in the direct line of power. ‘When Indigenous communities take up visible presence on the land – especially presence that disrupts the mobility of the capitalist economy of the settler state – this disruption forces issues of Indigenous discontent and struggles for freedom into the settler Canadian public discourse’ (Barker and Ross, 2017: 207, see Chapter 12). The bare assembling of materiality, made from bodies, tents or barricades has blocked the construction of roads, golf courses and more recently fracking sites.
Another strategy is claiming a space associated with democracy as a significant town square or a parliament park. Assembling at these specific spaces symbolically situates the protesters as ‘the people’. Interestingly, several chapters in the section ‘Occupying and colonising’ critically discuss who claims to be the ‘demos’, the body of citizens, in the context of the colonial history of the United States and Canada.
The book also collects accounts of the newest strategic development of the 2011 protest camp wave. Social media not only streams and tweets what happens at the camping site but also allows participation off-site (see Chapter 6 comparing the media usage of the Indignados and Occupy Wall Street), potentially extending the dynamics of a protest camp across national borders (see Chapter 5 on the Indignant movement in Greece).
Audience
This publication successfully summarises contemporary research on protest camps and critically questions ideas and practises of protest camps. For researchers starting to investigate the matter of protest camps, the book offers an excellent entry point to navigate the extant literature across academic disciplines. For the experienced reader, the book offers some new perspectives through its international cases and by ‘actively seek[ing] to question the boundaries of what counts as a ‘protest camp’’. (p. 6). The offered structure provides an interesting example to understand contemporary social movement organisation from a range of disciplinary perspectives.
While this book is not a how-to-build-a-protest-camp guide, the storytelling and interview material keep the book alive through the discussion of political theory and is open for non-academic audiences. This characteristic also makes the book suitable as a teaching resource across the social sciences. Individual chapters provide detailed descriptions of the research sites, which can be used as stand-alone case studies of network organising and social reproduction. The chapters also show the application of common theoretical frameworks as Lefebvre’s (1991) conception of space or organising as Deleuze and Guattari’s (2005) assemblage.
Conclusion
Reading Protest Camps in International Context has been a pleasure. The editors’ introduction includes an especially enjoyable historical tracing of protest camping back to the 1932 war veteran camps in Washington and the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in 1981, placing the 2011 protest camps as part of a longer political narrative. Methodologically, as with much research in this field, the empirical cases are dominated by a form of ‘activist ethnography’ that retains a degree of distance from the camps. More participative research methods could have been included, although many of the researchers were clearly politically invested in the sites they reported on. As a result, each chapter is personal, moving and contributes to our understanding of the camp as a global protest tactic.
