Carry on camping? The British Camp for Climate Action as a political refrain

Abstract

The chapter engages with the notion of 'political refrain', adapted from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, to offer some reflections on the strengths and limitations of protest camps in the action repertoire available to social movements. In the present study, 'camping' was a recurring thematic for British environmental protest, especially in the mobilisations of the Camp for Climate Action. Camps played more than a simple organisational role and signified a desire to prefigure alternative social and ecological configurations. The camp-form, however, took on a logic of its own, locking the protest movement into repertoire dependency, which signified the problematic tension between organisational continuity and tactical innovation.Unable to resolve this tension, and with British climate activism so fundamentally tied to the imaginary of the protest camp, the emergence of a new political praxis was prevented.