Zed Books, 260pp, ?16.99?
The growth of protest movements across the world in recent years has produced renewed vigour in the field of social movement scholarship. Amongst the profusion of studies in this field, the best work has attended to the ways in which protest groups practice their activism in diverse ways and attempt to establish spaces from which their activism can operate.
Into this field Feigenbaum, Frenzel and McCurdy's new book makes a significant contribution. With the emergence of the protest camp as a global phenomenon since 2011, the authors' efforts to study the relationship between more recent camps and some of their historical predecessors, such as Greenham Common, provide an excellent overview of the way in which protest camps function. Conceptualising protest camps as 'alternative infrastructures', the authors identify four particular infrastructures that are central to all protest camps: media and communication infrastructures; protest action infrastructures; governance infrastructures; and re-creation infrastructures, understood as the means both to ensure that a particular camp itself can continue to reproduce itself, and also attempt to expand its influence outwards.
Along the way, the authors do not shirk some of the more negative conflicts that have occasionally raised themselves as issues?within some protest camps, and make no attempt to assert that such camps necessarily follow any one form of politics. Instead, they are at pains to emphasise the autonomous nature of such spaces, and the ways in which they create space for the mutual interaction of diverse political ideologies and perspectives. Although this is a scholarly book written in an academic style, it nevertheless should help activists to remain attuned to the importance of extra-parliamentary politics, and to the necessity of seeking to actively build the alternatives that we hope to see in the future through the political practices that we use to oppose the present.