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.
Introduction
Since the ‘year of protest’ 2011, social movements worldwide have turned to city centre encampments as a form of protest. Small and large groups have set up tents in public spaces, often for extended periods of time. Among the many examples are worldwide ‘Occupy’ movements, ‘Indignados’, and other anti-austerity movements in Southern Europe, revolutionaries encamping on Tahrir Square and other places in the Middle East, and ‘Nuit Debout’ encampments around French-speaking Europe. While the occupation of public space is not a new phenomenon, the dramatic increase of its use in city centres by a broad range of protest movements is a novel development.
Although these different occupation movements received immense support around the globe for putting major social issues on the political agenda, they have also been the object of much criticism. Often, this criticism has focused not so much on the theme of protest, but on the encampment as a protest form. Relying on data from in-depth fieldwork on two Occupy movements–Occupy Utrecht (OU) in the Netherlands and Occupy Wall Street (OWS) in New York City–we show that it is what many of our respondents call the ‘intimate’ character of these encampment protests that has provoked much controversy and disapproval from outsiders. The occupation is not only a space of public protest and debate, but also one of residence, where the body is nurtured, where food is cooked and eaten, and where intimate relationships are developed. Our analysis of media coverage of these movements and interviews with both protesters and people interacting with them (passers-by, neighbouring shop-owners, police, and people working in adjacent offices) shows that a debate has emerged around the intimate character of these encampment protests, which has led many to considering participants of these movements as ‘not serious’, ‘only there to party’, or ‘using it as a free place to sleep’. Many outsider respondents, who have otherwise been supportive of the need to protest financial crimes and the influence of big corporations in government, were put off by the form the protests took, namely occupying public space.
On the other hand, our interviews with movement participants, and observations of General Assemblies (GA’s), show that many Occupiers understood precisely this intimacy of the encampment as a political act. Occupiers who self-identify as homeless have explained that sleeping in inner-city public spaces is a way for them to reclaim what is supposed to be a public space, but from which they feel increasingly excluded by police that patrol gentrifying city centres. Occupiers who self-identify as being of an ethnic minority or non-Western immigrant origin explained how they see drinking and partying in the city centre as a way to reclaim the space in which they feel discriminated, and from which they feel excluded through processes of displacement towards poorer suburbs. In addition, many Occupiers felt the encampment was important as a pre-figurative space where more sustainable ways of living could be experimented and developed, and protesters of different backgrounds, genders, and ages could learn to cohabitate. Yet many of them were hesitant in framing their protest in terms of this ‘the personal is political’ message to outsiders, afraid that emphasising the ‘intimate’ character of their protest would lead outsiders to take them less seriously.
This article examines activists’ diverse reasons for utilising such encampments, showing a negotiation between participants who consider it primarily as a means towards external political goals–as a visible way to protest the banks, austerity, and/or an authoritarian regime–and those who see it as a way to politicise the right to sleep and enjoy the city centre. Why was the former view easily expressed both within and outside the movement, while the ‘personal is political’ frame has failed to become a protest message widely associated with Occupy?
In this article we analyse the emergence of Occupy protest camps as a moment during which existing understandings of what it means to protest are put up to the test. We propose that this notion of ‘test’ from pragmatic sociology (Barthe et al., 2013; Boltanski & Thévenot, 2009; Lemieux, 2009) as a useful conceptual tool for social movement theory. Work in pragmatic sociology joins social movement scholars working on the emotional and moral dimensions of protest (Goodwin & Jasper, 2004; Goodwin, Jasper, & Polletta, 2001; Jasper, 1997) in showing that such controversies are not only moments of clashing interests, but often also the product of moral convictions as well as personal attachments (Lemieux, 2009; Thévenot, 2006). The controversies surrounding Occupy protest camps thus do not simply constitute a clash between the interests of protesters and outsiders, but also a moment in which new understandings of what it means to protest are developed, putting existing ways of dealing with and thinking about protest up to the test.
Protests as test moments
Social movement research in the constructivist tradition has analysed how collective identities and movement aims develop and change during the mobilisation period (Melucci, 1996), and how social movements allow participants to express moral intuitions and principles (Goodwin et al., 2001; Jasper, 1997). By making substantive ends and collective identities of social movements the objects of investigation, movement aims are taken as the result rather than as the starting point of mobilisation (Della Porta, 2008, 2012; Melucci, 1996). Della Porta steers away from an understanding of protest as a dependent variable explained by organisational resources and political opportunities, towards an analysis of what she calls ‘eventful protest:’ ‘new tactics are experimented with, signals about the possibility of collective action are sent, feelings of solidarity are created, organisational networks are consolidated, and sometimes public outrage at repression is developed’ (Della Porta, 2008, p. 27). From this perspective, action repertoires can easily become ends in themselves, as can often be seen in, for example, LGBTQ demonstrations and gay parades (Hekma & Duyvendak, 2011).
In this article we suggest that the the notion of ‘test’ (Barthe et al., 2013; De Blic & Lemieux, 2005) from pragmatic sociology is a particularly useful analytical tool for those working within the constructivist tradition in social movement research. ‘A test (épreuve) is a situation during which actors experience the vulnerability of the social order, to an extent that they may even develop doubts as to what is reality’ (Lemieux, 2018, p. 39, authors’ translation). Sometimes such moments lead to a reconfiguration of the status quo–such as a change in policy or jurisdiction–and sometimes to its reinforcement, depending on how successful those contesting the status quo are in making their viewpoints resonate. As for many people the encampment challenges existing ideas about legitimate protest and legitimate use of public space, setting it up can be understood as creating such a ‘test moment’. Research in pragmatic sociology joins the constructivist tradition in the social movement literature, in conceiving such controversies not only as a clash of interests, but also as the product of actors’ feelings of affection and moral principles (Albert & Davidenko, 2018; Boltanski & Thévenot, 2009; Eranti, 2018; Lemieux, 2009; Luhtakallio & Thévenot, 2018; Thévenot, 2006).
Through the analysis of controversies about the ‘public’ character of an act of resistance, this paper pursues a research tradition that studies what allows or prevents a transformation of the personal, and familiar, into the political, and the public. Opposing traditional public/private divides, feminist activists were crucial in maintaining that ‘the personal is political’ (Hanisch, 1970). In the 1970s, feminist consciousness-raising groups saw it as their explicit goal to be a platform for sharing personal stories about responsibilities for the second shift, experiences with harassment, and unsatisfying marriages (Sarachild, 1970). What was previously seen as personal would, through these sessions, be transformed into a political issue: not one of personal responsibility, but a societal problem. Some of the feminist demonstrations of the 1960s and 1970s that accompanied this slogan, such as the half-naked marches of the Dutch ‘Dolle Mina’ movement, were often perceived as confrontational or deviant as well. Over time, public perception has changed and has largely come to recognise these personal-as-political tactics and claims, for example to a right to abortion the ‘boss of your own belly’, as legitimate.
While previous academic work on occupation movements has hinted at the ideological dimensions of the encampment as a protest form (Feigenbaum, Frenzel, & McCurdy, 2013; Frenzel, Feigenbaum, & McCurdy, 2014), few have systematically analysed the conflicting ways in which people evaluate this protest form. Research on everyday tactics and activities at encampment protests (Liboiron, 2012; Piven, 2013; Schein, 2012) mostly does not relate protesters’ understanding of their occupation to the way it is understood by outsiders. While several authors highlight the resistance to Occupy’s protest against financial influence in government decision-making (Appadurai, 2012; Gitlin, 2012; Rushkoff, 2013), these studies do not focus on the controversy regarding occupations as a protest form. Moreover, research that shows that participants understand their occupation as ironic critiques of military occupations, both in the context of Israel's tent protests (Gordon, 2012) and that of OWS (Lubin, 2012) does not analyse in how far these meanings are understood and shared by non-participants. By analysing the controversies between in- and outsiders concerning the encampment as a protest form, not only as a power struggle but also as a moral debate over what is right and wrong (that is to say, right and wrong ways of protesting), we provide a new perspective to research on Occupy and other encampment movements.
Cases and methods
Claims about Occupy movements are often based on their manifestation in metropolitan cities. But different Occupy movements often take distinctive local forms and centre on context-specific issues. To examine how activists articulate means and ends of protest in very different contexts, we compare a movement in a world city (Occupy Wall Street) with one in a middle-sized city (Occupy Utrecht). Beyond obvious differences in context, an important difference between these two encampments is that OWS was illegal, and there was constant struggle with the police over activists’ presence in Zuccotti Park. OU’s encampment, on the other hand, was legal. Protesters even repeatedly asked for more police presence at the encampment to protect protesters from conflicts with outsiders, especially drunken students who would urinate over their tents at night. Yet these differences are not the object of this article. Instead, we focus on the similarities in the dynamics between in- and outsiders at the two encampments. These two cases are interesting, as they allow us to show that, despite crucial differences in the legal status of these encampments, they have provoked a similar controversy around the encampment as a protest form.
Comparative research was conducted by the first author through eight months of ethnographic fieldwork, half of which was spent in each city. The aim was to reconstitute the controversy over the presence of these encampments, and we tried to respect the principle of methodological symmetry (Bloor, 1976) in interviewing both insiders and outsiders, both those that opposed these encampments, and those that supported it.
Firstly, at each site ten in-depth interviews were held with movement participants. Respondents were selected for taking on different positions in controversies over the protest camp. As we see below, this led us to interview a diversity of participants in terms of current housing situation, gender, class, and race.1 Interviews were held both with people who were frequently at the encampment (and therefore perhaps more inclined to support its continuation), and with those who were not. Another main source of data was ethnography of a total of eighty-six movement meetings (both GA’s and smaller working groups), which allowed observation of processes of negotiation and compromise over the meanings of the encampment for different movement participants, and what these entailed for movement strategy. Much of the data was gathered by the first author attending the movements’ GAs in the capacity of note-taker. Taking on this organisational position arguably made this research participatory in character, but also allowed for some distance as a researcher. The note-taker position allowed attending meetings almost purely as an observer, as it was rarely necessary to join in the conversation. It allowed him to take notes of all proceedings quite naturally, and ask for clarification and background information when needed. Accepting the unpopular task of taking notes created goodwill among activists (for interviews and for providing additional information), and granted the observer insight into the movement’s organisational structure. The first author also attended numerous meetings between movement activists and other players. Activists negotiated the right to stay and specific adaptations to be made to the camp with municipal officials. With police officials they spoke about incidents at the encampment, sometimes leading to protesters being sanctioned, but also (in the case of OU) to request for more police presence, so as to protect protesters from drunken nightlife partiers. Protesters also had regular meetings with neighbouring business-owners, for instance to discuss the right to use their toilets. In court cases the right to camp in public space was negotiated on a juridical level.
Secondly, at each site twelve interviews of around twenty minutes were held with passers-by, neighbourhood residents, nearby shop-owners, and employees of nearby financial institutions (that were frequently targeted by protesters), asking them about their interactions with, and views of, participants of the occupation. Here, again, we aimed for a diversity in respondents. At each site the first author interviewed five members of the city government (including police officers). The first author also conducted an interview with a representative of Brookfield Properties (the owner of Zuccotti Park in New York). Additionally, we analysed 102 min of Occupy GA’s (often taken from the OWS official website, ‘NYCGA’, 2011), media articles, and court documents. All of this data was analysed using Atlas.ti. This corpus differs from existing research on Occupy movements, which tends to limit itself to the protesters itself, and sometimes their interactions with the police. This approach has allowed us to capture disagreements and misunderstandings between in- and outsiders that is rare in existing work on these movements. Although this principle of methodological symmetry was followed in conducting the research, this paper engages in more detail with insiders’, rather than outsiders’, perspectives, as the central aim is to understand how decisions were taken within the movement to frame the protest in a certain way towards outsiders.
A limit of the methodology lies in the fact that many of the OWS interviews were conducted retrospectively, when the encampment no longer existed in a stable form. The first author had started fieldwork on OU during its encampment, and as OWS was taking place at the same time, it was not possible to do intensive fieldwork at both occupations during the same period. Many OWS meetings were attended in the months after the occupation, when there were still daily meetings in Zuccotti Park and multiple efforts to re-occupy the square. An effort was made to compensate for the lack of on the spot observation during the occupation by systematically analysing earlier movement documents, minutes, and video records of GA’s found on the movements website (NYCGA, 2011), as well as media reports, and through interviews with participants.
Introducing the cases
OWS began as a day of action following a call put out through social media by Kalle Lasn and Micah White, of the Canadian anti-consumerist publication ‘Adbusters’. Inspired by encampments of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ and local occupations such as ‘Bloombergville’ (a protest against budget cuts that consisted of an encampment in front of the New York City (NYC) city hall), they campaigned for an occupation of Lower Manhattan on 17 September 2011. Both Bowling Green and Chase Plaza–the intended locations of protest–were fenced off by the police. But the New York Police Department (NYPD) was ironically unable to fence off Zuccotti Park as it is ‘Privately Owned Public Space’ (POPC), owned by Brookfield Properties.
The pitching of tents in the park led to several clashes with the NYPD and subsequent arrests (Schneider, 2011). The two months of encampment were a continual struggle between OWS activists and the city government and police. While several attempts to evict the protestors were thwarted by their numbers, the encampment was eventually evicted on 15 November 2011. While, according to activists and their attorneys, this removal was unlawful, Justice Michael Stallman ruled in favour of the city and Brookfield Properties, arguing that First Amendment rights of protestors cannot come at the expense of others who wish to use the space safely (CNN Wire Staff, 2011). In the following months, there were several failed attempts to re-occupy Zuccotti Park. After the end of the occupation, many of the small community-based groups that had participated in OWS remained highly active, although the end of the occupation has almost entirely removed the occupation from media coverage (Milkman, Luce, & Lewis, 2013).
Following encampments in Amsterdam, The Hague, and other cities around the world, OU’s demonstration began on 16 October 2011 on the Ganzenmarkt next to the city hall in the centre of the city. Unlike New York City, Utrecht does not (yet) have POPCs, which means that the city government ‘owns’ the space. Nonetheless, the privatisation of the city centre is a salient political issue, as buildings housing social and popular cultural institutions are increasingly being replaced by expensive shops and restaurants. For example, controversy has long surrounded the eviction of squatters from their building (Ubica) on the Ganzenmarkt to make space for a trendy bar.
From the outset, there was close consultation between municipal officials and movement participants, in which the main issue was how to allow for the protest while protecting the interests and responding to complaints of other users of the space, such as passers-by, and nearby entrepreneurs and residents. The mayor, Aleid Wolfsen, approved the demonstration on October 19, officially acknowledging the movement participants’ right to spend the night in tents on the square. Negotiations over OU’s removal from the Ganzenmarkt began in March 2012, when the protesters’ relationship with the city government began to sour. After an April 2012 ruling in favour of the movement’s right to encamp on the Ganzenmarkt, the city government appealed with additional allegations centreing on hygiene, safety, and the rights of others to use the space. This led the judge to decide in late August that the movement had to vacate the Ganzenmarkt. By this time, extensive discussions had taken place among OU participants, with many claiming that the encampment was no longer helping the movement. Attendance at meetings had been declining for some time, and there were recurrent difficulties finding enough people who were willing to spend the night at the encampment. Although some movement participants disagreed, it was decided during the GA to adhere to the court ruling. Participants packed the tents into a minivan; police action was unnecessary.
In many American cities, Occupy encampments were evicted after legal rulings (CNN Wire Staff, 2011), and in the Netherlands the spread of Occupy led to a political discussion on whether to change laws on public manifestation, so that occupations lasting more than one day could be prohibited. These legal disputes are not the focus of this article, and would require a separate analysis. However, they show that the legitimacy of occupying public space is not self-evident from a legal point of view. As we will see in the next section, these encampments also provoked controversy beyond the question of their legality.
The protest camp in controversy
In both contexts, the protest camp constituted a ‘test’ (Barthe et al., 2013) for existing understandings of how one can legitimately protest. The interviews that the first author conducted with passers-by, neighbouring shop-owners, and people working in adjacent offices, as well as our analysis of media coverage of the movement, show that the encampment provoked many tensions, both between Occupiers and outsiders, and within the movement. Much of this controversy focused not so much on their protest message, but on the way in which they organised their protest. An interviewee who was sitting on a terrace next to the OU encampment expressed a feeling that was shared by many of our respondents: ‘I agree with the critique of the banks, but not with this form of protest’. Even though many outsiders generally agreed with the critique of financial institutions and the influence of corporate interests on government decision-making, they often expressed that there was something they did not like about the encampment as a way to protest these matters. At some of these occupations there have been fights, disappearances, and even rape, harmful incidents that deservedly led to criticism. But attributing the widespread hostility towards encampment movements only to these incidents does not explain all the criticism that social movements utilising the occupation have received.
Indeed, a more fundamental denunciation of the occupation presents itself in the interviews, and in press coverage of these two protests. A waitress working in a restaurant, who regularly had lunch in Zuccotti Park, said in an interview that ‘it’s great that they are holding the banks responsible, but why do they have to camp here to do that?’. Especially the fact that many people would sleep at the encampment was frequently given as a reason why the discussions held there could not amount to much. Somehow, conflating the space of public discussion and protest with the place of residence and daily nurture seemed to go against widespread ideas about proper conditions for protest and public debate. In the words of a New York University student passing by OWS’ manifestation in Zuccotti Park, ‘They say they are discussing politics. But all they do is using their tents as a place to sleep […] drinking beer and cooking meals all day’. The encampment is intimate in the sense of being very ‘bodily’. Participants often join GA’s in their pajamas, brushing their teeth in the break. Some people can participate in the discussion while sitting in the opening of their tents, as they sleep next to the GA space. Discussions about politics are often followed by making music or by evening-long story-telling around the tents. But this combination of political protest and daily nurture in the same place is not appreciated by many of the outsiders we interviewed. Another passer-by remarked in an interview:
Is this the alternative? Imagine delegates in the parliament lying down to sleep after discussing next year’s budget and starting the next day again by having breakfast and collectively cleaning the congress seats and toilets. They claim they provide an alternative to mainstream politics, but they are only here to party.
Feigenbaum (2008) and Cresswell (1996, 124) similarly highlight how the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp provoked not only a sense of intrigue and compassion among passers-by and residents of the surrounding area, but also feelings of disgust and bewilderment. Such encampments turn inside out mainstream ideas about domestic and non-domestic space, of public and private space (Couldry, 1999, 345). Other forms of protest, like marches, are also frequently criticised in the media for matters that do not directly relate to their protest message. But mostly these disapprovals concern incidents, such as fights with the police, substance abuse, and destruction of private property. The legitimacy of the march as a protest form is generally not questioned in democratic societies. However, in the view of many outsiders, the public encampment is in itself at odds with their own ideas about suitable and legitimate designs of public manifestation and deliberation. This controversy centres not on the content of the protest, but on the fact that occupations turn the square as a public space of manifestation and deliberation, into an intimate space of residence and daily nurture.
Reclaiming politics and public space
Are some of these Occupiers then simply looking for a fun place to party or a free place to sleep, devoid of any political orientation? Instead of simply denouncing these acts as if they were behavioural anomalies or collective manifestations of irrationality, a task of sociologists is to positively grasp the logics of denunciation and public provocation from the actors’ point of view (De Blic & Lemieux, 2005, 10). The first author asked participants how they understood the encampment as a protest form, and how this related to their ideas about the Occupy movement’s main protest themes. In presenting our findings, we do not claim to represent all movement participants and their reasons for joining in protest. Our aim instead is to highlight how actors distinguish between different reasons for utilising the encampment, how some are articulated more loudly than others in specific contexts, and how these inform movement strategy.
Two reasons mentioned by our respondents for their participation in this occupation of public space emerge from our data. Some did not attribute much worth to the encampment in itself, and saw it mainly as an effective means to get media attention to achieve political goals, while others considered the encampment to be an end in itself. In debates within these two movements, this distinction is often tied to that between ‘day-timers’ on the one hand, and ‘overnighters’ or ‘hard-grounders’ on the other. Our interviewees often emphasised that the day-timers were mostly students or people with jobs, who came to protest against the banks and did not have the time or motivation to sleep at the encampment. Many overnighters were identified within the movement as not having anywhere else to sleep, while hard-grounders slept at the encampment by choice, even though they had an apartment.
During interviews, respondents in both movements argued that they are ‘reclaiming the public domain for the 99%’, broadly referring to the influence of private interests in public decision-making. For many OWS participants, the colonisation of government decision-making by corporate business’ was embodied in the ‘Citizens United’ Supreme Court decision, which gave private corporations unprecedented legal means to influence government decision-making through financial contributions–‘legal bribes for Senators’, in the words of one OWS respondent. OU has addressed similar issues of influence exercised by companies like Monsanto and Shell on public decision-making. Activists on both sides of the Atlantic saw their occupation as a means to attract media attention to the unaccountability of ‘too big to fail’ financial institutions which, they argue, has allowed financial crimes to go unpunished. The rhetoric of ‘the 99%’ was to reclaim a voice for large segments of society that are excluded from decision-making over policies that impact their daily lives. Many respondents argued that financial regulation, debt, and the housing market, have been insufficiently addressed in public discussion and government regulation.
While Occupy’s broader protest theme of reclaiming politics from the influence of corporate interests has been widely documented, we found that many participants in both movements emphasised the importance of a protest theme that has received much less attention in academic literature and media coverage: reclaiming public space for groups that feel increasingly excluded from them.
In our interviews, many OWS participants traced their difficulties in accessing public space (in part) to the growth of POPC arrangements in many American cities. Since 1961, the NYC Department of City Planning has used zoning laws to allow developers to build extra (higher) residential and office spaces, in exchange for providing plazas, indoor spaces and arcades (NYC Department of City Planning, 2009), as has been the case with Zuccotti Park (Graham, 2012; Schrader & Wachsmuth, 2012). These policies are part of a process of increasing privatisation of public space that has taken off in most American cities since the 1980s (Mitchell, 2016). Respondents at OWS expressed indignation with this policy, stating, ‘They have to build us a park in exchange for stealing our sunlight with the higher skyscraper’. Private enterprises have regularly abused the initiative, with a 2000 study conducted by the Department of City Planning and the Municipal Art Society concluding that ‘roughly half of the buildings surveyed had spaces that were illegally closed or otherwise privatized’ (Kayden, 2011). To counter these abuses, the Department of City Planning encourages the renaming of POPCs after their owners (as was done in Zuccotti Park) and the placing of signs naming the corporation, which ‘can add a sense of identity to a plaza, as well as ensuring that the quality and upkeep of the plaza are tied to the identity of the tenant’ (NYC Department of City Planning, 2009). Besides a handful of rules about their design, and the requirement that spaces be kept open twenty-four hours a day, the Department of City Planning has allowed their owners to impose their own rules, the only requirement being that they be ‘reasonable’, a quality that has remained undefined (Berg, 2011; Kayden, 2011).
For a long time, New York’s Financial District has not only been the home of the world’s financial elite, but the parks and squares in this area are also often used by people without stable places to live. Many homeless Occupiers related experiences of being excluded from public spaces to this policy of privatisation, and explained how they saw the encampment as their way of reclaiming these squares and parks. One self-identified ‘homeless’ OWS participant complained about the park guards hired by private owners of these parks, stating, ‘In some parks the park guards don’t let you sit anywhere at all, in others they remove you when it gets dark. […] With Occupy we reclaim some of the spaces that symbolise this policy’.
As the privatisation of public space is thought to cause this exclusion, the occupation of Zuccotti Park is frequently discussed as a material form of resistance. Liberty Park was renamed Zuccotti Park in 2006, after the head of Brookfield Properties, but OWS protesters ironically use its previous name, ‘Liberty Park’, to show their resistance to the privatisation of public space.2 As many Occupiers experience difficulties using public space–both during the day and at night–the encampment is a way for them to reclaim public space, understood in a concrete material sense, for themselves.
The protest theme of reclaiming public space was not restricted to those Occupiers who spent the night at the encampment. Meetings of the Queer Working Group focused on LGBTQ persons’ difficulties in making use of public spaces. The Colored People’s General Assembly expressed similar frustrations. The harassment of homeless people, and sexual and cultural minorities, by the authorities, by guards employed by private owners, and by other civilians, was a frequent point of discussion in the GAs. One respondent stated: ‘By occupying we turn the city centre into a safe space again for us, the excluded’. For the majority of respondents, the encampment was a literal, material, and pre-figurative way of reclaiming public space, echoing research on how the protest form may become an aim in itself (Jasper, 1997; Polletta, 2006).
The ‘privatisation of the city centre’ was a recurring theme in OU GA’s as well. In interviews, many Occupiers on the Ganzenmarkt expressed indignation with the encroaching domination of expensive shops, hotels, and apartments in the city centre, which in their view makes these spaces inaccessible to the less affluent. GA discussions often focused on alternative cultural hubs, like the squatters building Ubica on the Ganzenmarkt disappearing to make way for ‘upper-middle class shops and services’. The criticisms were levelled not only at the lack of affordable shops and services in downtown Utrecht, but also at the exclusionary police practices in the city centre that were perceived to accompany this trend.
As in NYC, it was especially homeless people and ethnic minorities (mostly Dutch-Turkish and Dutch-Moroccan youths) in the movement who complained that the city centre became less and less ‘theirs’. Self-identified homeless Occupiers complained about being removed from squares and benches by the police, and sometimes by drunken students at night, as one Occupier expressed during a GA: ‘They think that we dirty people dońt fit in the neat expensive city centre the city government has in mind’. Ethnic minorities mobilised similar frustrations about not feeling welcome in the city centre as their motivation for joining: ‘We can build a mosque in Kanaleneiland [a less affluent suburb of Utrecht] but in the centre I don’t even feel comfortable talking Arabic when I walk down the street’.
The perception that city centre public spaces have become the exclusive domain of the upper middle-class makes occupying these spaces an intrinsically meaningful act for those who experience difficulties using them. A respondent at OWS echoed a sentiment shared by many movement participants: ‘The struggle over this space is part of the effort to create a safe space for the 99% against the colonisation by the corporatocracy of the 1%’. Participants frequently expressed how the broader political struggle against the privatisation of the public realm found its concrete manifestation in the fight over eviction from the square. While the POPC initiative made this privatisation of public space more literal in NYC than in Utrecht, ‘reclaiming the square’ was a key theme for participants of both movements.
Prefiguration
Whereas outsiders tend to accuse Occupiers of camping for their own self-interest, in the interviews we conducted protesters often presented the ‘intimate’ character of their protest as the product of specific moral convictions. According to a regular participant in the GA’s in Zuccotti Park, ‘Occupy is not just about abstract ideas but really experiments with alternatives on the ground’. An enthusiastic supporter of the movement felt that ‘they are not ‘apartment activists’. They do not just march and talk but really take care of each other’. The fact that these encampments provide a home and food to its participants, in addition to manifesting discontent with states of affairs in society, was mentioned frequently by participants as a positive characteristic: ‘You can’t just talk vaguely about your ideals for society. If some capitalist way of arranging the occupation does not work, it shows immediately, and you have to come back to that in the GA’.
For many, the encampment was not only a way to make things concrete, but also to make certain topics emerge that otherwise would never be talked about in a social movement. Building on Della Porta's work on ‘eventful protest’, Risager (2017) argues that protest camps such as OWS and Tahrir are often ‘eventful places’ where new protest themes emerge, and new collective identities are created. In OWS, there has been much debate about how garbage disposal and cooking should be arranged in an environmentally friendly and recycling-minded manner, transforming this from an organisational into a political question (Liboiron, 2012). As one of our interviewees at OWS explained: ‘It is really because of living together at the encampment that questions like ‘are we only serving vegetarian food?’ and ‘how will we organise recycling?’ become legitimate discussion points of the GA’. Discussions in OU about the cleaning of the camp were inspired by the anti-hierarchical idea that everybody should contribute to the ‘dirtiest part of the protest’, another way in which purportedly ‘private’ issues of daily nurture have attained a political dimension. OWS’ Safe Spaces working group put the way sleeping space in the tents is organised up for debate. They claimed that, even though OWS aspired to be a safe space for people of all different backgrounds to participate in the protest, in practice many women did not feel safe sleeping in the camp at night (Norton, 2012). Several incidents (especially at night) strengthened the idea that Occupy was not always a safe place for women. This problem led to many discussions in the GA about harassment women face in (semi-)public spaces, and when participating in protests,3 The Safer Space tent, where only women were allowed, was one initiative to try to overcome the lack of safety for women in Occupy.
These participants emphasise that, for them, an emancipative aspect of the occupation lies in its emphasis on concrete topics. In mainstream politics, issues such as cooking, sanitation, garbage disposal, and sleeping, are frequently omitted from public discussions because they are deemed ‘unimportant’ or as not ‘public’, but as falling under the responsibility of the ‘private’ individual or family. However, for many of these protesters, being evicted from your house, having to live on the street, the difficulties of doing groceries and buying healthy food with limited financial resources, as well as sharing a room with several people, are key problems in their lives. As the space of public discussion is the same as the place of residence and daily nurture, questions of personal necessity are settled in the same space and discussion as are matters more frequently thought of as ‘public’. In what may seem to contrast with a Habermasian conception of public discussion, the ‘private’ situation of discussants–such as general malnutrition, lack of residence, and exclusion from public spaces–becomes exactly the topic of debate. As explained by a participant of OU,
We could go out and march for better housing policies–and we do that, too. But that wouldn’t help our case as clearly as the encampment does. It helps us to think about our problems in a very concrete way.
Mass debt and its causes – eviction from your house, homelessness, having to live on the street – are just not a priority for our government. […] Both the government and the mainstream media talk about debt and its causes as if it is your own fault. But mostly it really is not. Policies force you into debt, they force you into homelessness. […] With our occupation we say to the government: homelessness exists. The tents are a symbolic way to say: people are living on the street. And our government needs to do something about it.
Yet, as we saw above, these intimate dimensions of the encampment often led to much criticism and disapproval from outsiders, who expressed that using the inner-city square as a place of residence and daily nurture goes against their ideas of how a protest should be organised. Such controversies over the feeling that the intimate character of encampments make them ‘places out of place’ (Cresswell, 1996), which is typical for many protest camps (Feigenbaum, 2008; Frenzel et al., 2014, p. 462). Thus, we see that there is a discrepancy between outsiders’ dismissal of the familiarity of the encampments as self-interested and apolitical, and the understanding that many participants have of the intimate dimension of the encampment as a political act that they engage in for moral reasons.
The personal is political, but don't say it out loud
The negative reactions from outsiders to the intimate character of the encampment have led to a discrepancy in how movement members generally present their protest, both inside and outside of the movement. In internal meetings, expressing personal attachment to the encampment was mostly encouraged, even if it was defended in terms of the personal interests of specific Occupiers. During a GA in Zuccotti Park, a participant who self-identified as homeless explained that ‘we should do anything we can to keep the encampment standing. I mean, it’s also, if the camp goes away … Me and many others, we won’t have a place to sleep anymore’. His comment is met with applause. Another man comments: ‘That’s what this is about, man. We should not just be about abstract solutions. He needs a place to sleep now. If our camp can be that place, that’s great’. A woman participant supports this:
The personal is political. That’s what feminist protest was already about when I was your age (…) So if you don’t have a place to sleep, then that’s what this protest should be about too. Then that’s what we should solve.
I just really like coming here to Occupy to have a drink. The other bars here in the center are so expensive, but here we can just get beers and drink with other Occupiers. And it’s nice to sit here.
However, this internal benevolence contrasts with the discomfort that arises when Occupiers use this ‘intimacy’ frame towards outsiders, as illustrated by an interaction during a GA at OWS. An Occupier who identifies as homeless just explained to journalists of The Wall Street Journal how, for him, Occupy is a great place to sleep in the centre, as it is hard to find a place where you can spend the night without being disturbed by the police. Another participant, Steven, reacts:
Really Ted, why did you go and tell that to the journalists? I mean, I understand that this is important for you, that you can sleep here, and we all recognise that this is also a part of our protest. (…) But it’s already constantly in the media that so many people are here just to party, that we’re not serious about protesting. And then you go saying that you’re here just because it’s a nice place to sleep.
At the GA’s in Utrecht, one of the most debated topics was that not enough people were willing to spend the night at the encampment. Given the outside pressure on the encampment, strength in numbers at night was crucial. ‘Full-time’ Occupiers who spent the night there often criticised those whom they called ‘apartment activists’, for coming to talk during the day but not helping out with the nightly challenges of maintaining an occupation. This tension was expressed by an OU participant identified by others as ‘part-timer’:
The full-timers want the part-timers to be at the occupation more often, especially during difficult times. The part-timers want the full-timers who sleep here to be different, more attractive to outsiders (…) This is a really complicated situation. Cause I mean, you already have all these people saying we’re not serious, and then if the media are there and you start telling them what a great place Occupy is to sleep and party, I don’t know. Maybe we shouldn’t emphasise that when we speak with outsiders.
Whether Occupy movements have become too attached to maintaining their encampments was a frequent point of debate among participants. Journalists, academics, and some movement participants, have argued that occupations often distracted the public as well as the movement from its ‘real’ priorities, namely corporate influence over government and financial institutions’ lack of accountability. Discussions about whether Occupy movements were ‘fetishising space’ were common both within Occupy assemblies and in the media (Kall, 2011). Marcuse, for example, has argued that ‘the concern with occupied public space is a means to an end, and only one means among others, not the end in itself’ (2011; see also: 2012). This has led him and other critics to view the importance many Occupiers attach to defending the encampment as a distortion of movement priorities.
The airing of these criticisms in internal GA’s led to sustained discussions about the meanings and consequences of the encampment as a protest form. Some activists saw it simply as a means to draw attention or build movement infrastructure, and argued that it should be abandoned if it no longer served these purposes. A participant in an OU GA expressed this view:
The aim of Occupy is to make people aware of the crimes of the banks. But staying here with our camp does not help with that, people just get annoyed with us. […] At the same time, we keep spending all our time cleaning and repairing the tents, while we should be out there shouting our message.
Conclusion
Despite important differences in the contexts in which these encampments emerged, we found similar controversies over the protest form. The legality of the encampment in the Netherlands did not prevent persons to question its legitimacy. While outsiders’ critical sentiment of ‘I agree with your message but not with the way you express it’ might be a common critique of extra-parliamentary politics, it was strengthened by the intimate and social-reproductive dimension of these occupations. The justification of Occupy encampments was not just a struggle between actors with diverging interests, but put certain moral understandings of what legitimate protest is to the test (Barthe et al., 2013). The encampment questioned established understandings of legitimate protest as taking distance from personal intimacy. This led many outsiders to accuse Occupiers of encamping for personal gain (for example, to sleep, and to party), and not being serious about their protest. Within the movement, some criticised the preoccupation with maintaining the encampment as coming at the expense of protest against ‘real’ political topics (Kall, 2011; Marcuse, 2011).
However, as we have shown, these criticisms miss a point: for many participants, preserving the encampment was not (only) a self-interested, but an intrinsically moral and political, act. From their perspective, distancing yourself from your private situation is not always a desirable way of participating in deliberation. When ‘private’ issues, such as homelessness, and exclusion from public space, are neglected in public debate, telling personal and emotionally-charged stories about them is not a distraction, but a political act that can be experienced as liberating (Gould, 2009; Jasper, 2011; Polletta, 2006). In a vein similar to the feminist politicisation of ‘personal’ issues, such as pregnancy, and domestic work, many Occupiers try to politicise issues that are–perhaps increasingly–perceived as private. The design of the encampment was, according to many of our respondents, a prerequisite for such stories to emerge. Materially reclaiming public spaces was an intrinsically moral and political act.
Yet, as the cases of OWS and OU show, transforming ‘private’ into ‘public’ issues is not always easy.4 Whereas Occupy’s message of protest against the banks was widely taken up–changing public discussions and popularising the vocabulary of ‘the 99%’ and ‘the 1%’–protesters’ ideas about the intimateness of the encampment as an inherently political act were rarely taken up. Finally, protesters did not entirely succeed in conveying the idea to outsiders that the intimate and ‘home-like’ character of the occupation allowed specific marginalised populations to formulate and publicise what were previously thought of as ‘personal’ problems. While many Occupiers felt they were reclaiming space for the public, and especially for populations that felt excluded from it, many outsiders suggested that they are turning it into private space again by sleeping, eating, and partying. This, according to outsiders, made it so that their protest was not public enough in the other sense of the word, namely that it was not sufficiently oriented towards political debate.
Outsiders’ moral reservations about the legitimacy of the encampment as a protest form were not countered with activists’ moral arguments about its intrinsic political character, leaving unchallenged outsiders’ accusations that it was mostly out of self-interest that many protesters attached to the encampment. This goes to show just how important it is for protesters that politicise things that are seen by many as private to take care in clearly explicating the political dimension of their actions, beyond the defense of personal interests (Lemieux, 2009). Because of a failure to systematically emphasise (in a ‘public’ grammar) the political character of the concrete act of encamping in public space, existing convictions that political protest should be separated from the intimate activities of daily reproduction were not really transformed or challenged by this ‘test’, but rather reaffirmed.
Notes
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.
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).
In terms of the public/private dichotomy, these discussions attest to the fact that an ‘intimate’ space is not necessarily a safe space.
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.
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).