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.

Politics and the environment in Eastern Europe

“…Belonging to the broad and diverse tradition of protest camps (Frenzel et al, 2014), climate camps emerged in the UK in 2006 (Bergman, 2014;Russell et al, 2017;Saunders and Price, 2009), and during the last few years have been organised by climate justice movements in other European countries, notably in Germany. In EE, a climate justice movement has emerged only very recently.…”

Undercover policing and the spectre of ‘domestic extremism’: the covert surveillance of environmental activism in Britain

“…As a tactical repertoire, it has played a significant role in the opposition to road-building, genetically modified crops, the aviation and 'fossil fuel' industries amongst others (Wall, 1999;Seel et al, 2000;Plows et al, 2004;Doherty et al, 2007;Russell et al, 2017). While in the most part expressly committed to non-violence, environmental activists have often experimented with innovative disruptive actions -from land occupations and squats to small-scale 'ecotage' and property damage.…”