Justifying the protest camp: How Occupy movements’ ‘intimate protest’ challenged ideas about legitimate manifestation

ABSTRACT

The occupation of public space has become a key part of the repertoire of contention of contemporary social movements, at the heart of Occupy Wall Street, Indignados, Nuit Debout, and revolutionary movements of the Arab Spring. Despite the enormous resonance that these movements have had, they have also engendered criticism. Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork of two Occupy movements–Occupy Wall Street in New York and Occupy Utrecht in the Netherlands–we show how media and other outsiders accused protesters of being insufficiently politically motivated, and overly concerned with what they considered to be ‘private matters’ such as sleeping and partying. By analysing debates and negotiations between protesters and outsiders over their right to occupy public space, we show how these encampments put received ideas on what constitutes a legitimate ‘political’ act of protest to the test. We propose the notion of ‘test’ from pragmatic sociology as a useful methodological and conceptual tool for social movement studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Occupy
• social movements
• pragmatic sociology
• public/private divide
• encampment protest
• test

Acknowledgements

We are thankful to the many Occupy participants that shared their experiences and involved us in their daily work as activists. An earlier draft of this paper was presented in the Politics and Protest workshop in New York City. We would like to thank the attendees – and especially James Jasper – for the inspiring discussions and many suggestions on how to improve the text. This paper was also presented in two seminars organized as part of the Social Studies of Institutions exchange program between Washington University in St. Louis, the EHESS, and the University of Amsterdam. We are grateful to the participants of this program, and especially to John Bowen and Nicolas Dodier, for their insightful comments. Cyril Lemieux provided feedback on an early version of this text, which helped us to sharpen our arguments. The two anonymous reviewers at EJCPS provided much knowledgeable commentary and critique, which helped to greatly improve the article. Mischa Dekker would like to thank Héloïse Pillayre for her astute feedback and encouragement at multiple stages of this research project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Elements on the social background of respondents are only mentioned insofar as the latter mobilise these themselves, as being relevant for the position they take on in the controversy over the encampment.

2 Frenzel, Feigenbaum and McCurdy similarly highlight how protest camps are often representational spaces, which ‘come to signify a focal point for both external and internal identification’ (2014, p. 461).

3 In terms of the public/private dichotomy, these discussions attest to the fact that an ‘intimate’ space is not necessarily a safe space.

4 This echoes Colin Lebedev’s (2013) findings on how Russian mothers that asked the state for compensation for their children who died in war struggled to convince the public that they were not simply defending a ‘personal’ cause, but that they were talking about something that pertained to the general interest.