Introduction
Protest camps can be a powerful tactic. Many movements have used protest camps at different times to bring pressure on powerholders, escalate campaigns, reclaim space and be an uncompromising presence.
Recent student encampments (in support of a free Palestine and targeting university complicity in genocide) have shone a spotlight on this campaign tactic. There is much to be learnt from past protest camps held around the world.
Here the Commons librarians have gathered links to articles, books and other resources which describe past camps and in some cases share valuable lessons. We also recommend you check out Protest Camps: Tips for Set Up & Strategy.
Case Studies and Examples
Africa
Tahir Square, Cairo
South Africa
- Student movements helped fuel divestment from apartheid South Africa
- Several protest camps were held in other countries to protest apartheid – see ‘shanty towns’ in the North America section
Asia
Hong Kong
India
Australia
Environmental Blockades, Climate Camps and Peace Protests
- Blockades that changed Australia including Jabiluka, the Bentley blockade, S11, Nookanbah and the Knitting Nannas.
- Australian Blockading Handbooks – A collection of handbooks from the 1980s to the present including the Daintree, Franklin River, Jabiluka, etc.
- Environmental Blockading in Australia and Around the World – Timeline 1974-1997
- Frontline Action on Coal FLAC: Ten Years on the Climate Frontline – FLAC have used blockades and non-violent direct action to oppose new fossil fuel projects in Australia.
- Camp Binbee, Stop Adani, Queensland, 2017 – Interviews undertaken with five women who stayed at Camp Binbee for one week in late 2017 to take action against the Carmichael coal mine development.
- Franklin Blockade, Tasmania
- Pine Gap Peace Protests
Aboriginal Rights
- The Aboriginal Tent Embassy
- The battle for Aboriginal heritage on Perth’s foreshore 30 years on – In 1989 Noongar activists set up a protest camp at Gooninup, the site of the derelict Old Swan Brewery on Perth’s foreshore, leading to a 9 month occupation.
- Interview with Kevin Buzzacott includes the South Australia Arabunna Going Home Camp in opposition to Western Mining Corporation’s plans to expand the Olympic Dam uranium mine in 1999
Occupy
- Occupy Reflects: A Collection of Reflections on Occupy Melbourne
- Occupy Melbourne Case Study: A Missed Opportunity
Jabiluka Blockade
- The Jabiluka Blockade – 22 years on – The Jabiluka blockade in 1998 stopped the Ranger Uranium Mine
- Park Life: Living at the Jabiluka Blockade Camp, Creative Resistance, Friends of the Earth Australia – Sarojini Krishnapillai is a FoE member who lived at the Jabiluka camp for four months, see pgs 75 – 77
Europe
Germany
- Republic of Free Wendland, 1980s anti-nuclear protest camp
- An Experience of Direct Action: Opposing the Destruction of Lützerath, 2023 anti-mining protests
Ukraine
- Maidan Square: ‘A rather modest Ukrainian protest turned revolution’
- The Revolution On Granite: Ukraine’s ‘First Maidan’
Spain
North America
Standing Rock, Dakota Pipeline, 2016
- ‘I live with Standing Rock in my heart’: Massive pipeline protest resonates 5 years later, 1/4/2022
- Inside the camp that’s fighting to stop the Dakota Access pipeline, Grist. 16/6/2016
Occupy Wall St, New York, 2011
- Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This is Just Practice
- Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America, Haymarket Books, Chicago IL, 2012 (Book)
Camp Casey, Texas, 2005
Resurrection City, 1968, Washington
- In 1968, a ‘Resurrection City’ of Tents, Erected to Fight Poverty, New York Times, 2017
- Remembering Resurrection City and the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968, Smithsonian Magazine, 2018
- Life at Resurrection City, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Exhibition at Smithsonian
- Resurrection City: An overlooked protest of the 1960s turns 50
The apartheid divestment ‘shanty town’ encampments of the 1980s
- Anti-apartheid ‘Shanty Town’ protest at Cornell and other universities, 1985, Global Nonviolent Action Database
- Campus protests: A retrospective on the unrest during apartheid
- From Sitting In to Camping Out: Student Protest, Shanties, and the Struggle Against Apartheid South Africa
- Shantytowns, Divestment for Humanity: The Anti-Apartheid Movement at the University of Michigan
- The story of the 1980s apartheid ‘non-stop picket line’
UK
Greenham Common Peace Camp
- Greenham Common: Women at the Wire, Barbara Harford, 1984, Women’s Press
- How the Greenham Common Protest Change Lives: ‘We danced on top of the nuclear siloes’ – The Guardian, 21/3/2017
- Women form peace camp to protest housing of cruise missiles at Greenham Common, 1981-1993, Global Nonviolent Action Database
- Greenham Common pictures highlight life in the peace camps, BBC, 7/12/2018
Faslane Peace Camp, Scotland, 1982 – Present
- Faslane Peace Camp – the longest running occupied peace camp in the world
- Faslane Peace Camp Facebook page
Climate and Anti-Fracking Camps
- Climate camps and environmental movements. Impacting the coal industry and practicing ‘system change’, Katja Muller, Globalizations, 2022
- Don’t frack with us: meet the victorious activist ‘Nanas’ of Lancashire, The Guardian, 13/10/2019
- We’re at the Climate Camp in the Rhineland and it’s magical, 24/8/2017
- Ffos-y-fran opencast coal mine, South Wales, United Kingdom
- Protesters blockade and shut down UK’s largest open-cast mine in Merthyr Tydfil: Report on Powerful Campaign Against Open-Pit Coal Mine at Ffos-y-fran in South Wales, 3/5/2016
Books
Protest Camps in International Context: Spaces, Infrastructures and Media of Resistance, 2018, edited by Gavin Brown, Anna Feigenbaum, Fabian Frenzel and Patrick McCurdy
“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 50 different protest camps from around the world over the past 50 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.” – Source
Protest Camps in International Context: Spaces, Infrastructures and Media of Resistance, 2013 by Anna Feigenbaum, Fabian Frenzel and Patrick McCurdy
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.” – Source
- Book Extract (Bloomsbury Publishing)
- Book Extract (The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Issue 9)
- Google Books Preview
- Protest Camps: Experiments in Alternative Worlds
The project blog associated with the book which includes reports, discussions and case studies up until 2018.
Protest Architecture: Barricades, Camps, Spatial Tactics 1830-2023, 2024
Edited by Oliver Elser, Anna-Maria Mayerhofer, Sebastian Hackenschmidt, Jennifer Dyck, Lilli Hollein, and Peter Cachola Schmal
“An encyclopedia of protest movements of 190 years and their architectural manifestations.Protest movements shape public space not only through their messages but in many cases also through their mostly temporary buildings. Frankfurt’s Deutsches Architekturmuseum DAM and Vienna’s MAK—Museum of Applied Arts explore this thesis in a joint exhibition project. The exhibition and this coinciding book examine the topic further using examples spanning from 1830 to 2022.
Protest Architecture is the first international survey of the architecture of protest and presents it in all its manifold forms and, in some cases, ambivalence.
It is conceived as an encyclopedia with 176 entries, supplemented by 16 expansive case studies. A preceding chronology portrays 68 protest movements and their architectural manifestations through concise texts and one image each, including examples from all over the world.”
Feminism and Protest Camps: Entanglements, Critiques and Re-Imaginings edited by Catherine Eschle and Alison Barlett
“This groundbreaking collection interrogates protest camps as sites of gendered politics and feminist activism. Drawing on case studies that range from Cold War women-only peace camps to more recent mixed-gender examples from around the world, diverse contributors reflect on the recurrence of gendered, racialised and heteronormative structures in protest camps, and their potency and politics as feminist spaces.
While developing an intersectional analysis of the possibilities and limitations of protest camps, this book also tells new and inspiring stories of feminist organising and agency. It will appeal to feminist theorists and activists, as well as to social movement scholars.” – Source
Manufactured vulnerability: Protest camp tactics, 2000, Chapter by Brian Doherty in the book Direct Action in British Environmentalism
“An important factor in the impact of the new environmental protests has been the use of effective and imaginative tactics to prolong the occupation of sites of new developments. By prolonging evictions and creating a confrontation with the authorities, which can last for weeks or even months rather than the few hours duration of most protest actions, eco-activists have captured significant amounts of public attention…” Source
Articles
‘Exit the system’: Crafting the place of protest camps between antagonism and exception by Fabian Frenzel
“Protest camps have been a prominent feature of social movement activity in the last three decades. More than a means to enable protest in remote locations, protest camps have often been constituted as autonomous and alternative worlds, set antagonistically against the status quo. Protest camps however don’t actually leave the legal and political realm of status quo but are arguable play-acting at doing so. This raises the question of the ontological status of the protest camp in relation to the status quo.
Drawing from Agamben’s thesis of the camp as the ‘nomos of modernity’, this article argues that protest camps are in danger of constituting an antagonism that resides on a different ontological plane than the status quo, becoming an exception to it. Rather than contesting the status quo, they might stabilise and strengthen it. Examining data from a series of protest camp, this article analyses how protest campers have been increasingly successful in crafting an antagonism without becoming an exception. It identifies learning processes between different protest camps and shows that new challenges arise in the light of recent successes.” Source
Protest Camps and Repertoires of Contention, 2015 by Anna Feigenbaum, Fabian Frenzel and Patrick McCurdy
“Protest camps have become a prominent feature of the post-2010 cycle of social movements and while they have gripped the public and media’s imagination, the phenomenon of protest camping is not new. The practice and performance of creating protest camps has a rich history, which has evolved through multiple movements, from Anti-Apartheid to Anti-war. However, until recently, the history of the protest camp as part of the repertoire of social movements and as a site for the evolution of a social movement’s repertoire has largely been confined to the histories of individual movements. Consequently, connections between movements, between camps and the significance of the protest camp itself have been overlooked. In this research profile, we argue for the importance of studying protest camps in relation to social movements and the evolution of repertoires noting how protest camps adapt infrastructures and practices from tent cities, festival cultures, squatting communities and land-based autonomous movements. We also acknowledge protest camps as key sites in which a variety of repertoires of contention are developed, tried and tested, diffused or sometimes dismissed.
To facilitate the study protest camps we suggest a theory and practice of ‘infrastructural analysis’ and differentiated between four protest camp infrastructures: (1) media & communication, (2) action, (3) governance and (4) re-creation. We then use the infrastructures of media and communications as a brief example as to how our proposed infrastructural analysis can contribute to the study of repertoires and our understanding of the rich dynamics of a protest camp.” – Source
Explore Further
- Protest Camps: Tips for Set Up & Strategy
- Lessons from the Tents: What Protest Camps Can Teach Our City
- The Long History of Protest Camps
- Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This is Just Practice
- Nonviolent Direct Action (NVDA): Start Here
- For Educators Grappling with Student Protests, Here’s how to Play a Supporting Role
- Inside the Student Movement that Forced Ireland’s Trinity College to Divest from Israel
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