University of Leicester
Browse

Exit the system? Anarchist organization in the British climate camps

Download (174.97 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2015-01-14, 09:23 authored by Fabian Frenzel
Protest camps have proliferated in social movement practice globally in recent years. Research has started to address protest camps and this study aims to contribute to the emerging field, focusing in particular on their form of organization. Protest camps appear to resonate with social movement activists because they combine characteristics of networks like fluidity and flexibility with certain elements of organization, in particular the ability to create and pursue an alternative order. They do so, I argue, by pursuing organization in space. In this way protest camps offer practical solutions to the question of how to achieve powerful challenges to the status quo while maintaining a prefigurative politics of social change. In particular elements of organization like hierarchy, membership and rules are significantly altered when organization is pursued in space. I argue that the history of the protest camp as an organisational form is best conceived as a series of experiments with alternative, anarchist organization, where different innovative elements of organisation are invented, modified and adapted to locally specific needs. Two distinct forms of spatial organisation emerge across different camps, the creation of spatial antagonism and decentralisation. Pursing spatial antagonism and decentralisation protest camps enable ‘partial organization’, somewhere between network structures and full organization. Empirically I discuss the camp for climate action (CFCA). From 2006 to 2010 it made headlines news in the UK and beyond. The analysis of the development of CFCA from previous camps indicates the importance of the spatial antagonism to protest camp organization. If it diminishes, elements of organization like hierarchy, rules, bureaucracy became more visible, a factor that can be understood as contributing to the discontinuation of climate camps in the UK in 2011.

History

Citation

Ephemera: theory and politics in organization, 2014 volume 14(4): 901-921

Author affiliation

/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE/School of Management

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Published in

Ephemera: theory and politics in organization

Publisher

University of Leicester, University of Essex

issn

2052-1499

eissn

1473-2866

Copyright date

2014

Available date

2015-01-14

Publisher version

http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/exit-system-anarchist-organisation-british-climate-camps

Language

en

Usage metrics

    University of Leicester Publications

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC