Protest, Property and the Commons: Performances of Law and Resistance

Protest, Property and the Commons focuses on the alternative property narratives of ‘social centres’, or political squats, and how the spaces and their communities create their own – resistant – form of law. Drawing on critical legal theory, legal pluralism, legal geography, poststructuralism and new materialism, the book considers how protest movements both use state law and create new, more informal, legalities in order to forge a practice of resistance. Invaluable for anyone working within the area of informal property in land, commons, protest and adverse possession, this book offers a ground-breaking account of the integral role of time, space and performance in the instituting processes of law and resistance.

Lucy Finchett-Maddock is Lecturer at the School of Law, Politics and Sociology, University of Sussex, UK. Her research looks at critical legal, legal geographical and entropic explorations of law, resistance, property, aesthetics, and politics.