Protest Camps in International Context: Spaces, Infrastructures and Media of Resistance

From the squares of Spain to indigenous land in Canada, protest camps are a tactic used around the world. Since 2011 they have gained prominence in recent waves of contentious politics, deployed by movements with wide-ranging demands for social change. Through a series of international and interdisciplinary case studies from five continents, this topical collection is the first to focus 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 spaces where people come together to imagine alternative worlds and articulate contentious politics, often in confrontation with the state.

Written by a wide range of experts in the field the book offers a critical understanding of current protest events and will help better understanding of new global forms of democracy in action.

Bertie Russell is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA), Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona. His work focuses on ecosocial transition, alternative organisation and the politics of the common. He is co-director of Abundance, promoting public-common strategies to democratise the economy and support a just ecological transition.

Gavin Brown is Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Leicester. He is a cultural, historical and political geographer with wide-ranging research interests. His recent research has recorded the history of a four-year long anti-apartheid ‘protest camp’ in London in the 1980s. He tweets as @lestageog.

Anna Feigenbaum is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Storytelling at Bournemouth University. Her work focuses on communication and social justice. She is a co-author of Protest Camps (Zed 2013) with Fabian Frenzel and Patrick McCurdy and the author of Tear Gas (Verso 2017). She tweets as @drfigtree.

Fabian Frenzel is a Lecturer in Organisation Studies at the University of Leicester. His research interest concerns the intersections of mobility, politics and organisation. His recent work focused on how urban poverty and informal housing in the global south become tourist attractions. He tweets as @fabnomad.

Patrick McCurdy (PhD, LSE) is an Associate Professor in the Department Communication, University of Ottawa, Canada. His research draws from media and communication, journalism as well as social movement studies to study media as a site and source of social struggle and contestation. Most recently, Patrick has been studying the evolution of campaigning around the Canadian oil/tar sands. He tweets as @pmmcc.