Protest Camps

Anna Feigenbaum, Fabian Frenzel, Patrick McCurdy

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781780323565
• eBook ISBN: 9781780323589
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From Tahrir Square to Occupy, from the Red Shirts in Thailand to the Teachers in Oaxaca, protest camps are a highly visible feature of social movements' activism across the world. They are spaces where people come together to imagine alternative worlds and articulate contentious politics, often in confrontation with the state. Drawing on over fifty different protest camps from around the world over the past fifty years, this book offers a ground-breaking and detailed investigation into protest camps from a global perspective - a story that, until now, has remained untold.

Taking the reader on a journey across different cultural, political and geographical landscapes of protest, and drawing on a wealth of original interview material, the authors demonstrate that protest camps are unique spaces in which activists can enact radical and often experiential forms of democratic politics.

1 | INFRASTRUCTURES AND PRACTICES OF PROTEST CAMPING

Shoulder straps dig in at either side of my neck, my tent swaying as I walk, smacking the skin of my legs. I go over my backpack’s contents one more time in my head: jumper, water, toilet roll – toothbrush? Setting off I looked just like any other camper or festival-goer, only my destination was a protest. We arrived on site at dusk, the day before the camp’s official opening. The night before the campsite was successfully squatted as dozens of climate activists took to the land, securing the entrance with tripods. Tents and tarps went up. Supplies were wheel-barrowed in along makeshift roads paved with hay, plywood and cardboard. I turned up as the central marquee was being assembled. A huge white canvas construction still dotted with the paint of protests past. Campers were tugging on long, thick lengths of rope as others drove stakes into the ground to lift this fabric shelter that would become our communal home for the next week. Part carnival, part boot camp. I looked on awestruck and a bit afraid. What was this alternative world I had just walked into? (Climate Camp, Heathrow, 2007)

Introduction

What makes protest camps distinguishable from other modes of protest is largely their attempt to create sustainable (if ephemeral) structures for ongoing protest and daily living. Whether in the forests of Tasmania or the crowded streets of Thailand, to function at the most basic level as sites of ongoing protest and daily living, camps need to figure out how people will sleep, what they will eat, and where they will go to the bathroom. This aspect of protest camping is similar to recreational camps, as well as base camps and other campsites (Hailey 2009). Beyond basic bodily needs, as sites of ongoing protest, protest camps develop ways for protesters to communicate with one another and methods for organising their campaigns, direct actions and day-to-day operations. There is also often some form of legal support and medical care available to protesters. Additionally, many protest camps contain spaces for well-being, including places for prayer, meditation, entertainment, socialising, education and cultural exchange. To create these spaces, protest campers bring together and develop particular infrastructures and practices. As campers build communal kitchens, libraries, education spaces and solar-powered showers, they become entangled in experiments in alternative ways of living together. Their communication, governance, protest actions and practices of re-creating everyday life are shaped through their communal relationships. This is perhaps what most makes protest camps distinct from other overt forms of protest, such as marches and demonstrations. They are at once protest spaces and homeplaces.

Protest camps and crafting a homeplace

Building on the work of bell hooks (1990), Jeff Juris (2008) refers to alter-globalisation convergence centres (some of which involved protest camps) as ‘homeplaces’. For hooks, the homeplace is not something structurally static or already there, but rather something that is made. Describing spaces for refuge and nurturing built by black women to resist capitalist patriarchy, hooks argues that the ‘task of making homeplace’ involved constructing a safe space for growth, development and to ‘nurture our spirits’. For hooks, it is a task that is shared, a task of ‘making home a community of resistance’ (hooks 1990: 184). This idea echoes much Marxist feminist work on the reproductive labour of homemaking and bio-politics (Cowan 1983; Federici 2004), while also invoking the structural home itself as something active, affective and vibrant. Zoe Sofia calls structures such as the home ‘container technologies’, arguing that rather than passive and static objects that merely hold and store, they instead actively shape what they contain. The home becomes invested with the labour that goes into its making and remaking, and this affects what is inside (Sofia 2000).

Juris adapts hooks’ idea of the homeplace as a community of (and for) resistance, describing the convergence centre as a ‘small, self-managed city, a “heterotopic space” of exchange and innovation’ (Juris 2008: 129). The creation and operation of the protest camp as a ‘self-managed city’, an eco-village or a revolutionary homeplace involves both labour and leisure. The combination of work and sustenance, as they form part of the home-making process, is well captured in a number of protest campers’ recollections of their experiences at camps. For example, Jill Freedman’s documentary photography book recounts these sentiments in relation to the vision of life at Resurrection City:

No clocks, just time. Nobody better, only equal. Respect for where you’re at, not where you’re from. Work for everyone who wants it. Kids your own age to play with. Making music. Building a home. Calling your neighbour brother. Mornin’ sister. Soul City. Getting it together, making it work, because it’s yours. Feeling it. For the first time. Feeling free. Couldja dig it? (Freedman 1970: 119).

Merrick’s recollection of his experience camping in treetops at the Newbury bypass anti-roads protest sites in 1994 carries a similar affection for the protest camp:

It becomes so much. Your camp is not just a piece of natural heritage that you are defending, it’s your home. You know every bit intimately, you’ve watched it change, you know how it runs day to day … It’s where you live. And it’s your work, you labour hard to make things happen here, that’s what you spend most days doing. You become familiar, attached (Merrick 1996: 90).

These feelings of what it means to take part in a protest camp echo bell hooks’ (1990) description of making a homeplace as a site of resistance and nurturing. They draw attention to ways in which care is bound up in protest campers’ acts of making together, positioning the individual in relation to others and to the environment, and they highlight the ways in which we become entangled in the distinct space–time of camp life. As a place of work and leisure, the protest camp is a space of production and reproduction, where value and values are produced by campers as they go about the day-to-day work of making home while making protest.

Across protest camps, we see practices, objects, structures and operations come together to create this homeplace, a space that seeks to be both a place for ongoing protest and a site of nurturing, a community of resistance. To organise a more in-depth discussion of the ways in which protest campers build these homeplaces and spaces for ongoing protest together, we engage the term ‘infrastructure’. By common definition, infrastructures refer to the organised services and facilities necessary for supporting a society or community. We use the term with this basic meaning in mind to capture how protesters build interrelated, operational structures for daily living. Whether ad hoc or planned out in advance, these infrastructures work together to create miniature societies able to disseminate information, distribute goods and provide services. Thinking about these structures and operations as infrastructures helps us make sense of the ways in which protest campers develop and employ practices that negotiate (and fail to negotiate) ways of living and protesting together around and through the objects, structures and environments available to them.

The facilities offered at the protest camp sometimes also serve to highlight the lack of free, public infrastructures available to people for gathering, eating, discussing, relaxing or playing, something we discuss in more detail in Chapter 5. A large part of the impact made by protest camps on the public comes from their visible disruptions of the normative routines of daily life, which see us move primarily through privatised places and spaces of consumption. Protest camps interrupt the ways in which people move through ‘public’ spaces, how they see a park or forest, a parking lot, public square or government lawn. As convergence spaces, protest camps bring strangers together. This disruption of the status quo is particularly true of protest camps formed of, and focused on, populations already deemed illegitimate and out of place (or of no place), such as refugees, those who are homeless and impoverished, and those divested of their land. In these camps, the homeplace, as a space of bodily vulnerability and scant resources, is often intentionally exposed to the public, mirroring the unjust conditions of the nation state back to itself and its citizens. This is seen, for example, in the American Indian Movement’s communiqué from its encampment Occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco in November 1969:

We feel that this so-called Alcatraz Island is more than suitable for an Indian Reservation, as determined by the white man’s own standards.

By this we mean that this place resembles most Indian reservations, in that:

• It is isolated from modern facilities, and without adequate means of transportation.

• It has no fresh running water.

• It has inadequate sanitation facilities.

• There are no oil or mineral rights.

• There is no industry so unemployment is great.

• There are no health care facilities.

• The soil is rocky and non-productive; and the land does not support game.

• There are no educational facilities.

• The population has always exceeded the land base.

• The population has always been held as prisoners and kept dependent upon others …

A similar approach of making visible those issues, bodies and communities that politicians often attempt to sweep aside can be found in those protest camps that form around a lack of recognition and resources. Examples include the Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra or MST) encampments on government lawns, the Australian Tent Embassy in Canberra. On 27 January 1972, the day after Australia Day – the country’s national holiday which commemorates the landing of British colonisers on Australian soil – a group of indigenous activists went to Old Parliament House in Canberra, the nation’s capital, to set up an Aboriginal Embassy. The action was a direct response to the then government’s handling of Aboriginal land rights. Pitching a beach umbrella into the lawn (because they couldn’t afford a tent and were instead donated an umbrella), the men announced outside Parliament House that they were a sovereign people. While such an act of protest would normally be cleared quickly by Australian police, the laws of the lawn allowed camping as long as there were fewer than 12 tents. Aboriginal activist Gary Foley, who was involved in the Tent Embassy, recalls how the visibility and exposure of the camp largely led to its success:

The inability for the Government to remove this embarrassing protest from in front of their Parliament House captured the imagination of not just Indigenous Australia. Within days the site had established an office tent and installed a letterbox in front. Tourist bus operators became aware of the new attraction in town and began bringing their busloads of tourists to the ‘Aboriginal Embassy’ before escorting them across the road to Parliament House. The Koori activists would solicit donations and distribute educational literature about their cause. Local residents of Canberra would bring food and blankets and invite Embassy staff into their homes for showers and dinner. Students at the nearby Australian National University opened their union building for support activities and the mass media began to display great interest. The Aboriginal Embassy very quickly became the most successful protest venture yet launched by the Aboriginal political movement (Foley 2001: 17).

As Nick Couldry has argued in relation to Greenham Common, the protest camp moves the normative frame of debate from inside the walls of parliament to the place of the encampment as a site of contestation (Couldry 1999; see also Chapter 2). In the case of protest camps pitched on the lawns of government buildings, political debate is physically moved from the legitimated inside to the heretical outside (Cresswell 1996). Protest camps create alterations in the landscape, building alternative infrastructures for communication, decision-making, dissent and daily care. In doing so, protest camps both expose the failures of the nation to attend to its inhabitants, and simultaneously generate a homeplace carved into the very same land that denies them a place to be at home with others.

Infrastructures

To generate discussions about protest camps that focus on the practices and infrastructures that make protest camps unique as a political form, it is useful to first imagine what an inventory of a protest camp’s objects, technologies and key spaces might look like. From our research and first-hand experience at protest camps, we have found that one could produce similar lists of objects, spaces, structures and operations that apply to a range of different protest encampments, albeit in very different forms and formations. The kinds of items, roles and spaces one might find in a protest camp include, but are not limited to: kitchens; toilets/showers; shelters; donations/supplies; rubbish bins/recycling stations; grey water and waste disposal systems; communal tents; religious/prayer tents; tranquillity spaces; education spaces; libraries; crèche/childcare facilities; a welcome area; security fences; electricity/power generation; police liaison; medical tents; legal tents; storage/tat tents; tools; stationery supplies; art supplies; transportation, from bikes to vans; computers; internet access; mobile phone charging; art, music and performance spaces; media tents; queer/people of colour (POC)/women’s spaces; and announcement boards and schedules.

To make sense of this long list, and indeed a slew of other items, we identified four key sets of objects and operations, or what we refer to as ‘infrastructures’ (Frenzel, Feigenbaum and McCurdy forthcoming). These are:

• medi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Infrastructures and practices of protest camping
• 2 Media and communication infrastructures
• 3 Protest action infrastructures
• 4 Governance infrastructures
• 5 Re-creation infrastructures
• 6 Alternative worlds
• References
• Index