Caring for the whole: Spatial organization at the G20 protests in Hamburg

Abstract

Recounting the events of the #NoG20 protests in Hamburg in 2017, particularly the effects of the ban of one large scale protest camp by the authorities, this paper investigates how the protest was re-organized after the ban. Within a wide variety of existing forms of social movement organization (SMO), protest camps are increasingly visible and important, occurring on all continents and with increasing frequency. It appears that making a camp can be a strategy for network-based organization to materialize spatially where formal organizing is absent or eschewed. Based on interviews with participants and document analysis, the paper analyses the emergence of alternative hospitality structures, and of a new antagonism helping to forge a collective identity of the #NoG20 mobilisation. We structure our analysis through the notion of “care for the whole,” in which Rodrigo Nunes describes parameters of strategic action in networked SMO. We advance organizational thinking by extending this notion with two further dimensions: the literal caring for participants needs and its infrastructures; and the creation of a sense of community in narrative and representation. This can be applied in the analysis in any networked organization aspiring to be more democratic and open.

Introduction

Social movements need organizing to come into existence, to pursue goals and exert power and influence (Crossley, 2003; Den Hond et al., 2015; McCarthy and Zald, 2015; White and Wood, 2016a). Social movements organize in a variety of different forms, from local activist groups, to large global networks, from individual but coordinated acts of civil disobedience to massive demonstrations (Ahlquist and Levi, 2014; Böhm et al., 2010; Haug, 2013; Parker et al., 2014; Reinecke, 2018). The forms in which social movement groups organize are influenced by a number of factors, some pragmatic, some political and others serendipitous and contingent (Den Hond et al., 2015; Haug, 2013; Reinecke, 2018). Other factors, such as whether protests are organized in rural or urban contexts, and to what extent protest is permitted, matter, too (Clemens and Minkoff, 2004; Crossley, 2003; Mathieu, 2021). Within a wide variety of existing forms of social movement organizations (SMOs), protest camps are increasingly visible and important (Doherty, 1998; Feigenbaum et al., 2013; Ramadan, 2013; Roseneil, 1995). With a long history of cognate forms, protest camps today occur in all continents, and with increasing frequency (Brown et al., 2017; Feigenbaum et al., 2013; McCurdy et al. 2016). Research has provided some insights into why protestors have experimented with and increasingly used the organizational form of the camp. There are many practical reasons for camps to occur, for example to block certain unwanted developments or to mark symbolic places (Feigenbaum et al., 2013). In more organizational terms, protest camps can bring people together who are not already otherwise connected, be that via a political party or union, or via other membership-based organizations. They also provide a physical space for people connected in social media campaigns to get organized, meet, connect, take care of each other, and form stronger bonds. They can do so often in the absence of and by largely avoiding the formal elements or organization that are typical of membership-based organizations, such as hierarchies or sanctions (Feigenbaum et al., 2013; Frenzel, 2014).

It appears that making a camp can be a strategy for network-based organization to materialize where formal organization is absent or eschewed. Reading camps as a response to “the questions of organization” (Parker et al., 2014), their emergence can be seen in the context of ongoing attempts to contest and challenge the capitalist status quo, and they seem to follow the failure of other more traditional approaches to contestation (Nunes, 2014). In this sense, social movement activists critically debate what organization ought to look like, and this is guiding their organizational practice. With Nunes (2014) we contest that any such “ought” requires contrasting with what SMO “is” in any given context. A camp’s organizational reliance on territory and spatiality, from barricades to barrios, and on material infrastructures, from kitchen tents to libraries, to create a tangible sense of community or even “home” (Feigenbaum et al., 2013; Frenzel, 2014, 2020) also evokes a critical consideration of the relationship between formal and spatial-material dimensions of organization (Beyes and Steyaert, 2012; Dale et al., 2018), discussed in the so-called “spatial turn” in organization studies. With this in mind, this paper investigates the case of the planned protest camps at the G20 summit in Hamburg in 2017 (Assall, 2018; Komitee für Grundrechte und Demokratie, 2017; Malthaner and Teune, 2023; Malthaner et al., 2018; Mullis, 2018). We are curious about this case because police and public authorities unequivocally worked toward preventing the camps from coming into place and were partially successful. However, this did not stop the protest from getting organized and from camps occurring. This paper seeks to understand how the effective ban of a large-scale protest camp influenced the organization of protest in Hamburg. This will provide insight to critically advance the knowledge of organizational practices beyond formal organization. We will also provide deeper insight into the role of space and materiality in organization, heeding calls by the so called “spatial turn” in organization studies to consider material and experiential dimensions of organization (Beyes and Steyaert, 2012). We structure the inquiry through the notion of “care for the whole.” Taken from Nunes (2014) who uses it in a specific sense to describe parameters of strategic action in networked SMO, we consider two further dimensions of “care for the whole”: the literal caring for participants’ needs and desires in SMO and the way in which imaginary communities are formed in SMO.

Overall, we pursue an empirical research design, based on interviews with protest participants and camp organizers, and a range of secondary data. The paper starts with a discussion of the literature on the organizational forms of social movements. It then situates protest camps within this debate and highlights how spatial organization has been investigated in camps, adopting an analytical framework for the study of the case. After a discussion of the context of the Hamburg G20, we introduce our approaches to the field and methods employed. We then present our data to highlight the effects of the attempted banning of the protest camp, followed by an assessment of the theoretical implications.

Networking social movement organization (SMO)

Studies of organization have addressed a wide variety of social movements and alternative organizations (SMO) (Böhm et al., 2010; Den Hond et al., 2015; McCarthy and Zald, 2015; Parker et al., 2007, 2014; White and Wood, 2016b). One strong tendency observed across the literature is for SMO to increasingly organize “without organizations” (Klandermans et al., 2014; Shirky, 2008; White and Wood, 2016a, Wilhoit and Kisselburgh 2015). The emergence of “organization without organizations” has shifted SMO research toward the consideration of networks (Juris, 2008), often seen in the context of the expansion of the use of ICTs and social media (Castells, 1996, 2012; Gerbaudo, 2012). Drawing partly on this, Ahrne and Brunsson (2011) see organization as a spectrum, ranging from a looser end of networked organization to the highly organized end of the institution, and identified “partial organization” as an in between concept which has been adapted for social movement studies (Den Hond et al., 2015; Harrison and Risager, 2016; Haug, 2013; Simsa and Totter, 2017). But the idea of “partial” or incomplete organization has been criticized, too, for implying a deficit in organization in SMOs, while not accounting for the fact that less formal types of organization are often the only viable option, or are actively and intentionally chosen for the perceived benefits they provide (Reedy, 2014; Simsa and Totter, 2017). SMO participants are often openly aspiring to build more de-centralized and democratic forms of organization; responding to perceived limits of more established organizational forms (such as political parties, e.g.), which are experienced as co-opted, dominated by internal hierarchies while limiting autonomy for participants.

This also follows broadly shared experiences of disappointment with the parties of the left and their co-optation, and the subsequent turn to approaches to organization inspired by feminist and anarchist ideas, among others (Böhm et al., 2010; Federici, 2004; Frenzel, 2014; Gordon, 2007; Maeckelbergh, 2011; Reedy, 2014; White and Wood, 2016a). Rethinking and enacting organization in network structures rather than formal organizations also allows for more openness for those not yet organized by creating low barriers to involvement, not least by conceptually refraining from considering them as outsiders.

But the normative tendency underlying the renewed “question of organization” (Parker et al., 2014), namely, to pursue networks as the more democratic and open form of organization, also needs to be critically reflected. According to Nunes (2014), networks are characterized by distributed leadership, rather than radical democracy. Rather than fully horizontal and equal, networks will have some nodes which are exceptionally well connected and therefore exert much greater power than others. Questions of power are not resolved in processes that assume a level playing field between all participants, as the agency of individual nodes and therefore their positionality matters. For Nunes, the real democratic potential of networks derives from their open communication, their diversity and openness: nodes with few connections may still be able to sway the whole network to pursue certain courses of action if such ideas resonate across the network. Strategic thinking and proposals for action are not just the domain of formal leadership, but potentially reside in every node, well connected or not. By the same token, proposals advanced by highly connected nodes may not be followed, as it remains fundamentally a decision for every single node to join in a specific proposal. Nunes postulates that to be successful any action needs to be proposed in the spirit of the “care for the whole” of the network. The voluntary connectivity in the network form brings inherent checks and balances for any collective action pursued. Studying social movements following the Arab spring, Nunes (2014) and other network thinkers such as Castells (2012) have also considered the new physical forms of protest such as the camps and assemblies that emerged very visibly in these contexts. They have noted the centrality of these forms for the “running of occupied spaces, for the amount of connections afforded by concentrating a large number of people in one place at one time, for generating and maintaining affective intensity” (Nunes, 2014: 36), or their role in “generating trust, without which no common action could be undertaken (. . .)” (Castells, 2012: 225). However, they have overall given limited attention to the spatial and material elements of organization.

Spacing SMO

Too much a focus on formal elements overlooks the fact that organization is an embodied experience, spatial and material, and that formal elements of organization need to be considered alongside the material and spatial settings in which they occur. Organizational research has increasingly recognized the important role of space and materiality to organization (Beyes and Steyaert, 2012; Dale and Burrell, 2008; Dale et al., 2018; Marrewijk and Yanow, 2010). This literature, sometimes described as “spatial turn” in organization studies (Beyes and Steyaert, 2012) has focused on the spatial organization of workplaces, or the relationship, in a wider sense, between abstract notions of organization such as hierarchy or cooperation and the spaces in which they materialize. Methodologically, this has led to a call to study “actual organization forms” (Dale and Burrell, 2008), rather than merely abstract notions of organization and to replace a distant abstract and representational view on organizations with attention to what organizations look like from within, and how they engage in “spacing” (Beyes and Steyaert, 2012). This call has to date mostly been applied to business organizations and their management or the resistance against it. In this area, transformations of office spaces and buildings, or the interaction of workers during their coffee breaks have been investigated (Dale and Burrell, 2008). A key question of the debate, however, has also related to power, and the possibility of democratic organization. In this vein, the “open plan offices” sometimes introduced as representing democratic culture, are questioned in light of the lived experiences of those who work in them (Dale et al., 2018). Drawing from this literature, focused on the materiality of space, and the experiences of workers, we can identify a different notion of “caring for the whole”: namely the consideration of the embodied experiences and needs of people in organizations. This is no longer only a question, in the sense of Nunes, of framing strategic proposals in such a way that resonate broadly in a network structure. Instead, it can be rephrased as the need and desire to care for each other in forms of organization, the relations expressed in organization, the mutual support provided, and the values embodied in practice.

The spatial practices of social movements have not been considered in the spatial turn literature of organization studies, but research on protest camps shows the relevance of considering how spaces of resistance are materially organized and experienced. Protest camps can be seen as an example of attempts to make space work for democratic and alternative organization. Various scholars have observed how camps decentralize power in neighborhood or barrio structures which support governance structures aimed at making collective decisions. (Feigenbaum et al., 2013; Halvorsen, 2012; Haug, 2013; Sörensen, 2018). Alongside collective kitchens, well-being tents, play and childcare areas, the infrastructures employed in camps attempt to create social and political alternatives to the status quo, designing the camp space as “alternative worlds” (Feigenbaum et al., 2013). Indeed, protest camps often aim to be places in which the wider-ranging political utopian aspirations of protesters are realized and made tangible, including such aspects as housing, feeding and caring provided for camp participants in solidarity economies, and practices of care, provided by and for camp participants in mutual aid (Pickerill and Krinsky, 2012). This matters not only to non-local participants, who often need camps as a base for feeding and sleeping. Camps spaces also try to provide comfort zones, spaces of relaxation and retreat during protests. Camps may sometimes not provide such positive experiences, but are rather perceived as stressful or dangerous spaces, and this may be the result of repression or internal conflict, or both. Participants’ experience of the camp space is, in any case, a key concern of SMO (Feigenbaum et al., 2013; Halvorsen, 2015; Reinecke, 2018). Such “care for the whole” in a material sense is often considered through the lens of infrastructure (Brown et al., 2017; Feigenbaum et al., 2013). Investigations of the spatiality and materiality of organizational forms in the context of SMO show how infrastructures are shared between movements, often focused on enabling a wide variety of smaller SMOs to utilize them. A marquee for meetings can be seen as independent of specific SMOs, with the groups administrating them making their own decisions on where to enact and enable SMO for a number of groups or with a view to supporting the wider convergence of smaller organizations (Pusey, 2010; Routledge, 2003). This work to create alternatives worlds of care and consideration through the employment of infrastructures arguably allows networks to materialize as “actual organizational forms,” such as protest camps.

Representing SMO

Protest camps’ relation to space is also deeply territorial but this is less about space than about representation. When camps occupy, take place and mark space (Cresswell, 1996), they claim territory and alter it, redetermine it as a space for alternatives, and make opposition visible and tangible in representations of difference to the status quo (Halvorsen, 2012). Such taking space is a highly performative political practice, which underpins representational claims: the camps are often declared to be autonomous territories, carving space out of the countries in which they are located. Such claims of “free republics” or “tentistans” may be considered comical or ironic, and yet most states have come into existence via no less outlandish claims and the performative practices that underpin them. Such rewriting of territory in the name of alternatives and representational practice of protest camps as communities of resistance allows for the formation of collective identities which are in the sense of Anderson (1983) “imaginary” rather than lived. Not everybody knows each other in a large-scale camp, but within them there can be a strong collective identity. This is linked to territory, and yet potentially spanning across geographically distant camps, such as in the Occupy protests (Feigenbaum et al., 2013). There is then, in a sense, a third reading of the notion of “care for the whole” and this concerns the positioning of a possible alternative, or in other words, ways of generalizing the specific concerns of smaller groups of activists into a wider representational frame. This concerns the ability to formulate and create joint narrative platforms in which protest can articulate itself that is related to direct and lived experiences in shared social spaces, but also able to transcend particularities and offer a common ground which extends beyond lived experiences: an idea or antagonism that can be shared abstractly and widely.

But how are such imaginary communities constructed in narrative and linked to territory claimed as “ours” different from the eschewed politics of representation that often underpin party politics or nation building? Are camps potentially overdetermined, or fetishized as spaces of resistance? Debating the spatial turn in organizational theory, Beyes and Steyaert (2012) critically comment on the frequent application of Lefèbvre’s (1991) spatial triad in organizational research and detect a “tendency to reify space, to turn spatial becoming into representations of the beings of organizational spaces, to prioritize the spatial products over the process of their production” (Beyes and Steyaert, 2012: 49). Often, they claim, spatial-turn literature may juxtaposition spaces set up and controlled by corporate and state power with quasi authentic spaces or spatial practice in which there is resistance and freedom from such structures. Through this reification, space is no longer approached as a lived category of experience, but rather only a representation of “us versus them,” as territorialized in spatial practice. This criticism, related here to knowledge production, appears to be highly relevant for understanding the way social movements engage in representational practice. Social movements may view their “spatial products” such as protest camps as “representations of beings” in which space is reified as a somewhat “authentic” space that stands in binary opposition to space controlled by the “status quo.” The problem here lies on the one hand, with the fiction involved in political representation and collective identities. More importantly, perhaps, the issue is also one of effectiveness of organization: the fetishization of protest camps, or their inherent processes of assembly, according to Nunes (2014: 36), leads the camps to “remain somewhat stuck in the (. . .) assumption that, once constituted, they should by right become the ‘sovereign’ deliberative space in their ‘jurisdiction’.” Such prioritization of the form of the camp over other potential ways of organizing may, according to Nunes, hinder the provision of effective organizational forms in any given context.

With three notions of “care for the whole” in SMO practice drawn out here, we now move to investigate events in Hamburg. Here, planned protest camps were blocked and hindered by the authorities, making it necessary for protestors to pursue alternative forms of organization. This situation is interesting in its own right, because in many ways the G20 protests in Hamburg escalated beyond what most of those affected, whether protesters themselves or authorities and wider civil society, had expected. The question here is whether and how the banning of camps affected the SMO. For the purpose of our study, we focus on the ways in which protesters organized following the effective prohibition of one out of two planned camps just a couple of days before the summit. While such camps have become a standard repertoire of summit protests, it is perhaps the moment of loss that emphasizes their functions and limits for SMO. In our analysis we show the ways in social movement organization unfolded in protesters’ practices during the G20 and in our interviews with activists and organizers afterward.

Methods

The empirical research underpinning this paper was conducted over several months from late 2017 to summer 2018. The authors were part of a large research project that investigated several aspects of the G20 protests (Malthaner and Teune, 2023; Malthaner et al., 2018). In this context, about 65 interviews were conducted, in addition to other data collection techniques such as survey research, twitter analytics and media content analysis (Ullrich, 2018). Research results and a full study from the project were published in a report in September 2018 (Malthaner et al., 2018) as well as in an edited collection (Malthaner and Teune, 2023). In this paper, we draw specifically on six in-depth personal interviews conducted with camp organizers and others involved in the setting up of camp infrastructures. In addition to these six interviews, we also analyzed additional interview material from the wider research project, where references were made to the camps, including by protesters, planners and police. We also attended a number of meetings with activists as research was partly conducted during the first anniversary of the 2017 summit protests in July 2018. As with the wider project, extreme caution was employed to protect the anonymity of research participants in the light of ongoing police repression. This is why we have refrained from listing interviewees, or referring to their age, gender and specific roles in this paper. It is worth reflecting on our relationship to research participants. We approached them via personal networks and connections in some cases, in other cases because they were known actors from statements and reports. We expected a high level of concern considering repressive policing and ongoing court cases. We set out to carefully explain the procedures in place to protect identities and make sure full understanding of the study context was provided. We also considered the more abstract risk that our research would provide authorities with inside information into contemporary forms of resistance and its organization, effectively helping attempts to suppress them. However, none of the insight we have produced is based on secrets or even tacit understandings: rather, and we talk more about this in the discussion section, the emergence of new organizational forms is largely unplanned and contingent, but also plainly visible to anyone who cares to look.

We also considered our own positionality as researchers in this context (Deschner and Dorion 2020). A researcher working for the project and one of the authors participated in the protest events in Hamburg, and both authors had been participants in previous protest camps. While this provided us with a unique insight and underpinned relatively trustful relationships with research participants, neither of us was involved in organizing the #NoG20 camps. Rather, departing from an intimate understanding of protest camps functions and the emotional landscape of summit protests, the interviews facilitated finding a mutual understanding of how the ban of the camps felt for those involved. Given our aim is primarily to understand the organization of social movements, it was necessary to complement movement communication, press reports and data from more distant observers with insights into the SMO itself. Working with research participants, we found a significant willingness to share insights and information, as well as personal impressions from the protest events. We were able to relate well, based on experiences and knowledge of the situation. We were asked about what Urry (2000) has once called the “parasitical relationship” between social research and social reality. What would our research offer to movements? Did it not primarily serve to advance our own careers as researchers? We acknowledge that this is the case, while the utility of our research to movements is much more questionable. There are frequent calls today for critical inquiry to have real world effects, not the least in the notion of research impact. In our conversations with research participants, we pointed to our aim to formally record and document what had happened. One interviewee told us that academic work like ours can be useful in legal conflicts. Overall, we worked with those who shared our interest in advancing the collective understanding of organizational logics, while more skeptical voices did not respond. Empirically, our analytical strategy aims at understanding the consequences of the banning of one of the protest camp. How did this affect the organizational practices? We looked at the data to establish and narrate the planning and the unfolding of protest events, and to see how participants involved saw this happening, how they felt about it and what resulted for them. We also relied on a wider set of secondary data to underpin the interview accounts. This empirical research interest determined the way we present the data, in a largely temporal account, from planning phases to the unfolding of the protest events. This involved analyzing the interview and document-based data to understand why camps had been chosen as the preferred SMO form, and what happened as one of the camps became increasingly untenable. In analyzing the data, we were seeking to consider the relationship between the identified three dimensions of “care for the whole,” seeking to expand organizational theory’s understanding of network organization, in both formal, spatial-material and representational domains.

Planning the camps

Planning for protest actions against the G20 began over 18 months before the event, and the proposal of a protest camp was quickly on the table. On one level protest planners saw it a as necessity: providing space for those from outside town to be able to take part in protests. But in our interviews, we collected plenty of evidence that camps were pursued for other reasons too.

“Camps are really important (. . .) because you need a base, you need space to retreat to, to have plenary discussions, and a camp is also about occupation, about taking space.” (Interview)

In this quote one of our interlocutors highlights the organizational and political purposes of a camp beyond any needs for catering and shelter. The idea of a “base” is related to at least two functions: allowing for relaxation and backstage space from protest events; and for internal decision making among protestors. In various interviews, our participants referred to the role of camps in coordinating and networking between activist groups. This was reflected in a document produced by the camp planning collective which featured a neighborhood or barrio structure: the idea for the camp to provide a space for diverse groups (g20camp, n.d). The camp space was to cater for diversity in neighborhoods, allowing for different smaller groups and oppositional cultures to converge (Routledge, 2003) in the space of the camp.

The idea of the occupation, more politically, evokes the expression of dissent as embodied in the camp: a notion of secession from the status quo which is prevalent in many camp narratives. Several camp organizers and supporters we spoke to, hoped to create a living alternative to the G20 in the form of a camp. The camp would thus present an autonomous and independent version of (global) convergence, a challenge to the G20s claim to operate as a form of global governance. The camp was to embody an alternative form of collective organization; a better way to organize than the traditional forms of politics within the status quo of the international system. But despite such emphatic desire for a camp to emerge, there was quite some dissent among protestors, too. Many opposed the idea of creating a camp, often for fear of repression and worried about the energy it would require to organize. And far from being an agreed universal organizational approach, a camp ended up meaning different things to different movements in Hamburg.

About a year before the summit, two alternative approaches to protest camping emerged and the camp organization split. They differed not necessarily in the way the camps would have looked, but certainly in the representational practices that underpinned them. One camp (Altona Protest Camp, APC) pursued a top-down organized approach, with little involvement of participants and a focus on the provision of basic infrastructure. Control over the camp organization remained in the hand of a few central organizers. The other camp, the so called “anti-capitalist camp” (ACC) on which our further investigation focusses, was largely supported by less formally organized autonomous and anarchist groups and emphasized the importance of seeing the camp as a radically democratic space in which participants had significant autonomy and influence in the organization. Both camps interacted independently, and very differently with the authorities and there were also significant differences in the legal strategies (Thurn et al., 2018). Reflecting on the early split, one activist involved with the ACC explained

“Who is the camp for? I think in the end this was a bit of an absurd argument which we have to overcome. But in the end, there were some more traditional lefties who saw this differently (. . .) what I would say is: the camp needs to be there in the first place, and then we can talk about what we do together, for example which forms of protest we agree on.”

Here we see expressed again the role of the camp quite explicitly not just as a place to rest and recoup, but as an essential tool to share and exchange between different groups in the camp on the ways the overall collective protest should unfold.

Repression

The Hamburg authorities seem to have resolved to prevent camps from the beginning of their own preparation processes for the summit. In the minutes of a planning meeting released in the context of the public parliamentary inquiry into the G20, the head of police was quoted in October 2016, saying that any camps were to be treated as “special events” rather than as political assemblies (Thurn et al., 2018). By categorizing camps as “special events” the authorities attempted to deny the planned camps the constitutional protection extended to assemblies or protests. They aimed to treat camps via commercial events rules, in which highly laborious and expensive health and safety regulations are placed on organizers, which are effectively impossible to meet for non-commercial organizations. In later statements, authorities and politicians in the Hamburg government justified their hostility to the camps with wider security concerns. The attempted banning of the camps was a question of maintaining wider control in what was without doubt a complex setting (Malthaner et al., 2018). The authorities wanted protest to happen but without causing surprises or trouble. Some of our interviewers questioned this justification and pointed to a long tradition of repressive policing in Hamburg. It is well documented that key actors on both sides, police and protesters, personally know each other and have battled over questions of civil liberties and autonomy for years (Matthies and Schuhmacher, 2018).

The camp organizers of the ACC continued to plan their camp regardless of the early attempts to prevent it. A laborious legal battle emerged between the authorities and the camp organizers. As activists involved in the process told us, their expectation was to win the argument in the end. Various legal conflicts over camps in the past had indicated the tendency of courts to determine that protest camps are to be treated as political assemblies. It would expand the scope of this paper to dwell on the historical detail of legal conflicts around camps which is attracting increasing attention (Franke and Schröter, 2017; Rusteberg, 2017; Thurn et al., 2018). In Hamburg, the surprising twist came with what one of our interviewees called the “coup.” Just a few days prior to the summit, on the 2nd July 2017 (See Figure 1 for a timeline), protesters claim that city authorities ignored a court ruling in the camp’s favor and prevented the camp from being set up. At this point, dozens of people had arrived at the camp site, attempting to set the camp up, including its key infrastructures such as kitchen tents, larger marquees used for collective assemblies, as well as sanitation and other facilities. In the next section, we look at the effects of this direct repression of the planned protest camp, in relation to how space is produced and made available as an organizational device as building the ACC becomes impossible. We look at reports from the backstage of an emerging multi-sided camp structure, or what we would call—in a wider sense—an urban hospitality structure.

Figure 1.

Timeline of camp related events at Hamburg G20.

Yes, we camp: From barrios to urban hospitality structures

Activists shifted their approach to SMO in light of the unexpected level of hostility to protest camps in the 3 days between the 2^nd and 4^th July: While in a legal stand-off between interpretations of court-rulings, the police only allowed the building of assembly-like infrastructures in the two camps and prevented any facilities for sleeping or feeding protesters to be constructed. It became clear that alternatives had to be created. This was to some extend a practical concern but is also offered a new political opportunity. In light of the pictures of police preventing protestors from setting up camp, a wave of mobilization occurred far beyond those immediately involved in the ACC planning. A new contestation emerged under the motto “Yes we camp,” in which hundreds of activists attempted to spontaneously occupy smaller urban spaces in the city. Demonstrations took place across the city in which protesters carried tents, playing cat and mouse with the police who in most cases quickly dismantled any emergent camps. Center left and liberal voices in the city joined the radical left in their decrying of heavy-handed policing, demanding a “right to sleep” for protesters who came in from afar. The “Yes we camp” movement used symbols of tents in a number of public places. As on interviewee told us: “With their heavy-handedness (toward the anti-capitalist camp), the police managed to mobilize even more center-left people to join the protests.” Part of this extension was a wave of solidarity, with offers to house activists in private homes coordinated via Twitter and other channels. Several civil society organizations, including a number of churches and football clubs, opened their private land for smaller camps to house protesters.

One of the landlords of such a space told us:

“When they (protesters) were moved off the Entenwerder park (where ACC was planned), I knew that the protesters would not just go home. We had a chat with the church governance body and decided it was matter of Christian principles to host people seeking shelter. We did not invite them actively, but when we had activists asking whether they could build a camp, we let them.”

Between the 2^nd and 4^th July a whole set of alternative camps emerged. About 50 smaller camps and support structures were created in various locations in the city. They had from 20 to 400 participants and were distributed widely. Some took place in immediate vicinity to the G20 summit, in neighborhoods such as Karolinenviertel, St Pauli and Sternschanze, all of which have a long history of radical left-wing organizing and infrastructure. Others also took place much further afield. In some cases, the new camps were mostly sleeping spaces, but some of the small camps also offered workshops and held assemblies. Beyond small camp spaces, there was the creation of a “Bettenbörse” offering private accommodation to protesters. But beyond such solutions specifically connected to sleeping, there were multiple additional places providing support and services structures for the protest. One interviewee told us:

“We had a network of info-points, little camps, social centres, parks, 40-50 in total (. . .) in effect a mobile structure: often these were groups with infrastructures who had planned to be at the camp, but then found new places.”

Places that hosted these structures were established organizations, including alternative housing projects (often former squats), churches or alternative social centers. In light of these developments, a general assembly at the ACC decided on the 4^th July to give up on organizing the large-scale camp all together. After repression and adversity, and after days of active mobilization of alternatives, a new SMO had emerged, distributed, networked with spaces of different character, some small camps, some just providing food and drinks, or information and a wide range of private housing options, too. Importantly not all of these had emerged after the “coup.” Some had been planned all along, but then became part of the new distributed SMO.

Vignette Arivati Park

One case we find remarkable is the infrastructure that emerged in the so called “Arivati Park.” This is a tiny green space at the intersection of Karolinenviertel, St. Pauli and Sternschanze neighborhood, three central neighborhoods each with a history and well-established infrastructures of urban protest movements. Local residents had organized to take over the park for the duration of the summit, mainly to express their opposition to the G20 publicly. This was initially planned without any specific relation to any of the large-scale camps. When it became clear that the ACC was not going forward, places like Arivati Park were faced with the question of whether to invite people to camp there. In Arivati Park, located on public land, a decision was made not to do that, in order to protect an agreement with the police that had ruled out anyone using the space for sleeping. Instead, the park offered food and a cultural program and space to relax after protest actions. One person we spoke to, described the positive experiences with this structure, the lived solidarity in the middle of the chaos, in particular as tensions escalated toward the end of the week of the summit. The space remained an “oasis” with massive police presence outside, but somewhat shielded from the wider repression on the outside. We heard and read from various secondary sources about the positive experiences with this and other structures of the expanded city-wide distributed SMO; the landlord of one of the small replacement camps just called it: “Life” and was almost enthusiastic about the level of organizational skills and knowledge, as well as the good nature of those building the camp.

Overall, our sources indicate that the experience and reports of repression against protesters at the initial location of the camp led to spatial reorganization, which included a mobilizing of pre-existing activist infrastructures in the city for the specific larger audiences that were generated by the camp repression. This was arguably enabled by a new joint antagonism, which bound the spaces together: no longer the territory of the shared occupied space of the camp, but a symbolic frame, under the slogan of “yes we camp” that brought together a much wider protest coalition, providing distributed hospitality across the city.

In the next section we look at the experience of protest campers in these new spaces, and specifically how their experience was influenced by the absence of larger organized camp spaces.

Experiences of distributed spatial organization

The relatively spontaneous response of activists under the “yes we camp” frame was a significant achievement, but it was fueled by creativity, loss, and defiance at the same time. Indeed, one key effect of the repression of the ACC was a widely spread collective sense of grievance. Perceived as a “coup” by some, and by even more as overly heavy-handed policing, the anti-camp actions of the authorities led to an early escalation which was attributed by many we spoke to as partly responsible for the later wider escalation of protests: our interviewees spoke of “anger” and a “sense of having basic rights attacked.” One interviewee said: “the fact that people were hunted away from the camp site, this would have caused aggressions and those who were already up for it, well they had a reason now.” The new emergent structure also had weaknesses, which our interlocutors identified by contrasting their experience in Hamburg to being in a large-scale camp. Interviewees told us about the functions of camps in terms of spatial experience by contrasting this to what happened in Hamburg.

“Calming down, focus for the next day, dealing with the experience of such masses of people, the tensions. . .camps are a well-known solution to this: you are there for just about a day and a half and it becomes familiar: get up in the morning, knowing where to wash, where there is breakfast, what the latest news is, seeing that different people and groups are there, and you don’t need the phone, no stupid social media.”

There was clearly some level of disorientation and a lack of collective communication structures with the wider emergent SMO. While social media allow for information (and misinformation) to pass around quickly, the new constellations brought a lack of structured collective sense—and decision-making. One interviewee compared the camp to the distributed structures that emerged, saying:

“It was a lot more exhausting for protesters, longer ways, lack of the push of solidarity you get with a camp: when you come out of your tent you see cool people everywhere, and you know you will doing some great actions with them. Instead, we woke up in some back alley, and the first thing you see is police. I believe this was very exhausting for many.”

For the organizers of these spaces, this also meant a greater distance from what can be described as more mobile “users,” who then had less say in what these places were and how they were run. Overall, we saw the emergence of “hospitality” structures which provided for guests. In contrast, protest camps aim to offer experiences in which host and guest boundaries become less obvious which creates a sense of “home place” and intimacy (Feigenbaum et al., 2013).

Thus, in terms of how the new structure was experienced, we found the large-scale camp was “missed,” pointing to the limits, potentially, of a representational framework such as the symbolic “camp” that had emerged through the ban. In the next section we turn to evaluating this set of data on the spatial organization of the Hamburg G20 protests, relating it back to our research questions and the wider literature.

Discussion

Our aim for this paper is to document and interpret the effect of the banning of one large protest camp on the overall protest events, and on social movement organization (SMO) at the G20 in Hamburg. We do this against a backdrop of intersecting debates in organizational theory, which we structured around the notion of “care for the whole.” Drawn from Nunes (2014), and here referring to a parameter of strategic thinking for SMO, we used the notion of “care for the whole” to highlight two additional dimensions of SMO: care for participants in the sense of the material and spatial affordances of SMO, and care in the sense of narrative framing which allows the formation of collective identities in SMO.

We observed that the necessary change of the organizational form of protest after the effective ban, from relying on one large scale camp to several smaller more distributed camps, went on almost seamlessly. We think there are several reasons for this, some of which are specifically linked to the organizational practices prevalent in the protest movement in Hamburg. Many activists had preferred not to camp and had not planned to be involved in the camp organization in the first place. Instead, they organized alternative social spaces such as the Arivati Park, which later became a crucial backbone of the protest organization in the absence of the ACC. An alternative large-scale camp, the APC was able to go ahead, due to a different interaction with the authorities. In both instances we see the benefit of diversity in organizational approaches to SMO in the run up to the G20. Instead of understanding the absence of unity among activists as a problem, the case shows that when facing adversity, multiple approaches to organization provide organizational resilience without obstructing situational solidarity as we could see in the “Yes we camp” actions. And even though the “coup” against the ACC was somewhat unexpected, for many protestors it was clear from early on that the ACC would be facing significant difficulties: the organization of alternatives was thus further encouraged by the repressive approach authorities took to the ACC. This confirms Nunes’s (2014) reflection that camps and assemblies, despite being highly visible and often contested, are not to be mistaken for the actual extent of social movement network organization in a specific context. They constitute a specific action and form, pursued strategically with the “care for the whole” in mind, that is, to provide space and openness for many or all nodes in the network organization. But as we have seen, while the call resonated, there were others who made other proposals which also resonated, leading to plans for a diversity of territorializations of organizational forms, at least two large scale camps, as well as smaller neighborhood-based infrastructures. The development of a network of protest infrastructures with smaller camps and other infrastructures spread around the city was further enhanced by the symbolic polarization the conflict over the ACC caused. The “coup” created circumstances in which strategic proposals and actions beyond the ACC came to resonate more widely. We can speak of a new expanded “camp” around the slogan “yes we camp,” a symbolic camp rather than an actual one, reflecting a much wider network organization.

Far from being only symbolic in practice, this involved the creation of several new infrastructures, places to rest, eat and converge, too, spontaneously, and based on the mobilization of new nodes into the SMO network. Here people beyond the core activist circles mobilizing for the ACC “cared for the whole,” not only in the sense of Nunes making action proposals, but as a practical extension of hospitality to protestors.

The actual spaces in which protesters organized were smaller camps, and other spatial infrastructures distributed over the cityscape. With these alternatives established, many of the instrumental functions of protest camps, such as providing some space for sleeping, eating and resting, were met. There was also little evidence for a reduced participation in the protests as result of the attempted repression of camps.

We did see that the distributed camp space influenced the experience of protests. People ending up in smaller camps or in isolated locations felt less connected, missing the immediacy that they expected from the ACC and that large scale camps tend to provide. And the new structure also lacked the distinct ability of large-scale protest camps to generate collective agreements over protest tactics and approaches. The protest organization lost some of its ability to share, develop and update tactical and strategic agreements between autonomous groups. This may well have contributed to the later escalation of the protests. Despite a shared sense of disorientation, many mini camps and other structures still provided significant positive experiences, too. Many smaller camps also held assemblies, food was available at various points, action and post-action support was in place across a wide array of places. Such infrastructures of care, even if only ephemeral and temporal, create their own material changes to the city. Indeed, we can probably see them in some sense as a continuity from the historic experiences of squatting and other grassroots urbanism, and from the seemingly spontaneous solidarity extended to refugees, visible in particular in the summer of 2015. We can see here the relevance of more than just formal elements of organization, such as hierarchy, membership, sanctions, or rules, but also their spatial and material realities for SMO practice. As previous research on camps has shown, it is spatial and material fixes that enable camps to avoid formal elements of organization, but far from resulting in “partial organization” such techniques enable participants to achieve their democratic aspirations within large scale organizations, namely, to be more inclusive, enabling greater autonomy and ensure participation. Thus, protest camps emerged to “organize without organizations,” through the production of spatial and material infrastructures (Frenzel, 2020; Frenzel et al., 2014; Feigenbaum et al., 2013). But such infrastructures, as we have seen here, do not depend on large-scale camps. They seem to be able to form, at least in urban contexts such as in this case, based on latent distributed infrastructure of hospitality, able to bring together and care for strangers. Their materiality seems to be inscribed into the city, like a collective memory and capacity, growing over years of experience.

Beyond infrastructures and materiality, this evokes a third dimension of “care for the whole” relevant for organization, namely the representational practices in which “imaginary communities” of protesters are forged. In protest camps this is often done via the story of a protest camp as territorialized alterity. Camps are proclaimed to be “free states” or “republics” with marked boundaries to the “status quo” controlled by capital and the state, a place in which the normal rules of the status quo do not apply, “rechts-freier” (German; lawless) space as right-wing commentary would have it. Critically we must challenge this as a fiction. It may read as a “tendency to reify space, turning spatial becoming into representations of the beings of organizational spaces, to prioritize the spatial products over the process of their production” (Beyes and Steyaert, 2012: 49). It may indicate a fetishization of the camp form, in which they are seen as the ultimate answer to the question of organization (Nunes, 2014). Ironically it was the authorities in Hamburg who ended up fetishizing the ACC, by assuming that a ban would be the end of (disruptive) protest. It turned out that protest did not depend on this camp. All the while, ACC organizers insisted on holding the camp, fighting political and legal battles resisting the ban. Did they do this because they fetichized the camp as an organizational form? Perhaps some did. But ACCs “imaginary community” never materialized in a territory. A tangible shared space experienced “as a whole” did not come into existence. But a sense of togetherness was achieved anyhow, in a much larger sense, by the antagonism that resulted from the conflict over the camp. A new symbolic “camp” emerged under the banner “Yes we camp.” Protesters, whether keen to camp or not, united for the right to camp and formed a strong alliance with direct organizational consequences: many smaller camps were enabled by the solidarity emerging from the new antagonism that had evolved. Research has previously observed the ability of distributed supportive infrastructures in an urban context to provide an experience of the whole for SMO. Earlier urban summit protests did produce such experiences and convergences (Routledge, 2003), often based on similar overarching antagonisms (The Free Association, 2010), while not relying on camps. Being forced to move from organizing a large-scale camp to a more distributed form of urban SMO, activists in Hamburg addressed what some researchers have flagged as a limitation of protest camps, namely their overreliance on territory for organizational purposes (Halvorsen, 2012). We saw how the representational, more abstract antagonism did the work of binding the whole together, allowing for a much wider variety of smaller scale organizational forms to operate together. But without organizers insisting on ACC until the very last moment, leading to “the coup,” this wider antagonism may not have emerged. The “representational” or metaphorical reading of space in organization, as expressed in the protest camp claim to territory, has a political function and provides evidence for the need to “care for the whole” in the third sense—namely to create a viable sense of togetherness, often via an antagonism. What is interesting here is that this insistence on the camp, perhaps its fetishization, emphatically did not prevent alternative SMO from emerging as Nunes (2014) fears. Indeed, it seems it rather helped, and the formation of alternative SMO was enhanced.

Conclusion

This paper discussed SMO in the context of the G20 protests in Hamburg in 2017. It focused on the attempts of protesters to build large-scale protest camps which were hindered and partly repressed by the authorities. The banning of the ACC was arguably an own goal for the authorities, creating a much wider opposition united around the relatively radical demands of the anarchist groups. The enmeshing in the SMO network of latent material infrastructures in the city went far beyond what the banned camp would have been able to achieve. We found that overall SMO demonstrated remarkable resilience in the face of the authorities’ hostility to protest camps, creating alternatives to host thousands of protesters and enabling protest, civil disobedience and political debate of alternatives to be pursued. They did so mainly by relying on alternative SMO practices and infrastructures which exist in Hamburg, as in many urban contexts. But the existing structures expanded in the course of the events. This wider SMO came to include a variety of institutions, groups and otherwise non-affiliated actors and partly replaced the organizational functions of protest camps in a distribute form of SMO, forming a new and wider symbolic “camp” that tied them together.

In theoretical terms, our contribution critically expands organizational theory after the spatial turn. We considered the notion of “care for the whole” inspired by Nunes’s (2014) use of the strategic framing of impulses in a network but expanded to consider two further dimensions for SMO: the literal care for the participants, their material needs, and the infrastructures built to support this care; and the care for the whole as a political act of creating a community of resistance in narrative and representation. We saw the relevance of the impulse explaining the ability of SMO to survive after the “coup.” Extending insight from the spatial turn in organizational theory to SMOs, we confirmed the centrality of care infrastructures. We also evidenced how they seem to exist, at least in Hamburg, in a state of latency, built over decades in which the material reality of the city is transformed, ready to provide care to strangers. Finally, we were able to show that the emergent quality of organizing is not inhibited by uses of representational fiction, or perhaps fetichized insistence of organizational forms such as the camp. Politically such a fiction will be useful to forge a community of resistance, and it may be necessary to “care for the whole” across spatially distributed materializations of an SMO network. The protesters challenging the G20 did so by proposing and living alternatives of how they believe the world should be run. A protest camp can be powerful tool to show this. But actual camps attract relatively small communities of protestors. They reach much wider audiences in their representational function: when they provoke, as in this case, a strong counter-reaction, and when they galvanize, as in previous cases such as Occupy, the imagination of large parts of the population.

Beyond the empirical field of SMO, investigating how organizations “care for the whole” may provide a new line of inquiry for organization studies after the spatial turn.

The three dimensions of “care for the whole” enable specifically the critical evaluation of organizations’ frequent claims to be, or aspire to become more inclusive and democratic, in the dimensions of strategy and leadership, the literal care for members and their well-being, and the forging of organizational identity.

There is also a methodical insight here. A focus on the lived experience of camp activists in Hamburg would have produced a different picture; the “whole” felt disorganized to many participants, and we may have been tempted to understand this because of the absence of a large-scale protest camp, had we not considered the wider symbolic framing of the protests as a result of the ban on the camp, as expressed by those drawn into the conflict, providing alternative spaces for protesters to stay and supporting the right to camp and building new infrastructures of care and resistance. The challenge to the attempted ban produced a new reality, in which both urban infrastructures emerged in a wide variety, but also a new wider shared antagonism around a symbolic “camp” which helped by binding the distributed infrastructures together in a symbolic community.

Our insight suggests that the emergent SMO lacked the communicative functionalities of an actual protest camp, however this is something that may be addressed. For some time, there has been the expectation that advanced ICT and social media may allow more virtual notions of togetherness to emerge and replace the need for physical proximity (Castells, 1996; Juris, 2008), while a simple replacement idea has been questioned in light of the continued importance of experiences and materialities in space (Nunes, 2014; Rossiter, 2006). However, ICTs have been shown to be able to support the representational practices of SMO, particularly when combined with specific physical contexts and a level of grounding in concrete locations and practices (Daskalaki and Kokkinidis, 2017). Our paper remains limited on many accounts. We add to the emergent picture of what happened at the G20 in Hamburg, but even as we focus on the SMO here, our account remains partial and in need of further research, which we encourage and for which we hopefully provided some inspiration.