Protest Camps is a work-in-progress coming out with Zed Books in 2013. Drawing on current and past encampments, Protest Camps offers an original and timely look at this unique organisational form that transcends the boundaries of any individual movement, country or historical period. Based on interviews with protest campers, participant-observation and archival research, Protest Camps develops a comparative analysis of protest camps’ infrastructures, as well as a critique of how camps’ strategies and tactics shape broader social movements and fuel demands for social change. Drawing on over 50 different camps from around the world over the past 50 years, Protest Camps provides the first detailed investigation into the empirical history of protest camps from a global perspective. Protest Camps discusses a variety of examples and case studies, taking the reader across cultural, political and geographical landscapes to argue for a new understanding of protest camps as emergent, often radically democratic political spaces. By reading the protest camp in this way, we are able to capture and share stories of how movements and protesters learn from each other, of how failures are felt across the globe, and small triumphs can build alternative worlds.
photo by: Jano Charbel
