Introduction: past tents, present tents: on the importance of studying protest camps

Despite protest camps’ increasing role as an organisational form of protest, little scholarship has considered protest camps as their own domain of enquiry. What protest camp scholarship that does exist has largely been sporadic and often views camps as either merely functional to the specific movements in which they were created, or sees them as ephemeral spaces that leave little legacy. In either case, the protest camp is regarded as just one site amongst many in the context of studying a specific social movement often grouped together with other social movement strategies such as street parties, demonstrations, assemblies and direct actions. In this introduction, the authors point to the importance to detail the unique spaces of protest camps, their sustaining infrastructures and the similarities and differences between protest camps across movements and locations. The authors also consider the lack of theory which conceptually develops the importance of the protest camp as a distinct entity and a lack of succinct empirical work on protest camps.