Present tents: Protest camps in the contemporary world

This book examines protest camps as a key expression of contemporary social movement politics. From Tahrir Square to Syntagma Square, from Wall Street to the London Stock Exchange, 2011 was not just the year of the protester, but also the year of the protest camp. From the squares of Spain to the streets of Hong Kong, protest camps are a tactic used around the world. Though their history is much longer, since 2011, protest camps have gained prominence in waves of contentious politics, deployed by movements with a wide array of demands for social change. Through a series of international and interdisciplinary case studies, this book focuses on protest camps as unique organisational forms that transcend particular social movements’ contexts. Whether erected in a park in Istanbul or a street in Mexico City, the significance of political encampments rests in their position as distinctive material and mediated spaces where people come together to imagine alternative worlds and articulate contentious politics, often in confrontation with the state.

Despite protest camps’ increasing role as an organisational form of protest, little scholarship has considered protest camps as their own domain of enquiry. Some of the earliest scholarship on protest camps tended to view camps as either merely functional to the specific movements in which they were created, or saw them as organisational forms with little significance for the aims and objectives of social movements (McKay, 1998; Duncombe, 2002; Crossley, 2003; Chesters and Welsh, 2004; Della Porta et al, 2006; Pickerill and Chatterton, 2006; Brodkin, 2007). In either case, the protest camp is regarded as just one site among many in the context of studying a specific social movement, and often grouped together with other social movement tactics such as street parties, demonstrations, assemblies and direct actions.

In recent years, more scholarship on protest camps has appeared, mainly driven by reflections on the Arab Spring (Gerbaudo, 2012; Ramadan, 2013), 15M (Castañeda, 2012), and Occupy (Juris, 2012; Kidd, 2014; Pickerill and Krinsky, 2012), either individually, or as linked phenomena (Feigenbaum et al, 2013; Frenzel et al, 2014). There has also been work that draws comparisons between the strategic and tactical functions of past and present protest camps (Leidinger, 2011; 2015).