Raphael Schlembach

Impossible protest: noborders in Calais

Since the closure of the Red Cross refugee reception centre in Sangatte, undocumented migrants in Calais hoping to cross the border to Britain have been forced to take refuge in a number of squatted migrant camps, locally known by all as ‘the jungles.’ Unauthorised shanty-like residences built by the migrants themselves, living conditions in the camps are very poor. In June 2009, European ‘noborder’ activists set up a week-long protest camp in the area with the intention of confronting the authorities over their treatment of undocumented migrants. In this article, we analyse the June 2009 noborder camp as an instance of ‘immigrant protest.’ Drawing on ethnographic materials and Jacques Rancières work on politics and aesthetics, we construct a typology of forms of border control through which to analyse the different ways in which the politics of the noborder camp were staged, performed and policed. Developing a critique of policing practices which threatened to make immigrant protest ‘impossible’, we highlight moments of protest which, through the affirmation of an ‘axiomatic’ equality, disrupted and disarticulated the borders between citizens and non-citizens, the political and non-political.

How do radical climate movements negotiate their environmental and their social agendas? A study of debates within the Camp for Climate Action (UK)

This is a case study of the Camp for Climate Action, which has held several high-profile protest events in the UK since its inception in 2006. It analyses the Camp as a contested space where different emphases on environmental and social priorities have to be negotiated by its activists. The article considers areas of contestation where concerns over climate change meet questions of social justice. These are structured around tangible issues of campaigning, such as opposition to new coal-fired power stations or to the third runway at Heathrow airport, some of which have put the Camp at odds with labour movement and class struggle activists. While some demand a drastic shift away from current levels of consumption, others question the discriminatory effects of self-imposed austerity politics. On a more abstract level, the article considers debates on the need for government solutions to the environmental crisis and their possible impacts on social equality. The article is structured around movement-internal debates and makes use of interviews, extensive fieldwork notes and continuous participant observation over the course of four years.

Science and ethics in the post-political era: strategies within the Camp for Climate Action

Despite a peak in activism against climate change in the UK, new environmental direct action networks have not yet received much academic attention. Taking perhaps the most prominent of such networks – the Camp for Climate Action – which held several high-profile protest events between 2006 and 2011 as a case study, and using a theoretical framework that understands society as being distinctly ‘post-political’ in character, we ask questions about the knowledge claims that form the foundations of radical environmental politics. Drawing on published statements and press releases, as well as from our insights as active participants in the Camp, we analyse the strategy of environmental protest where climate change has become its focus. The Camp for Climate Action was a contested political arena. We argue that the Camps strategy was characterised by ‘scientised’, ‘post-political’ politics which operated within an ethical framework that prescribed individual responsibility as the primary basis for action.

Moments of Excess: Movements, Protest and Everyday Life

was imagined (and reproduced) in art and politicswould have bolstered the authors’ emphasis on Europe’s unique positioning as a sustained site for radical political activity. Nevertheless, Between the Avant-Garde and the Everyday provides readers with insightful analytical methods for understanding trajectories of the New Left and the lasting effects of Cold War politics. By entering essays from both sides of the Iron Curtain, processes of democracy and youthful self-expression emerge as phenomena traveling on currents distinct from political borders and ideological boundaries. Here, the divisions between ‘politics’ and ‘culture’ blur within the expressive potential of the everyday. Lorena Anton’s and Timothy Brown’s volume offers readers a thoughtful and timely analysis ofwhy notions of progressive aesthetics remain closely linked to subversive politics in the twenty-first century.

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

ABSTRACT The spectre of environmental ‘domestic extremism’ has long been postulated by police leaders and security analysts in Britain. It is a narrative that has justified the commitment of enormous amounts of government resources towards police intelligence work directed at non-violent direct action campaigns. Most controversially, this has included the long-term infiltration of environmental (and other) activist groups by undercover police. This article provides a critical analysis of the justifications put forward in support of the covert surveillance of environmental activists in Britain. The paper proceeds by way of a single case study – a high profile, environmental direct action protest in the north of England – in order to reveal the levels of abuse, manipulation and deception at the basis of undercover protest policing. Through their court case, the activists involved with this action were able to obtain rare insights into the police authorisation documents for the undercover operation that had led to their arrests. An analysis of these documents provides us with a glimpse of the contradictory justifications given by senior police officers for infiltration – now under scrutiny by a public inquiry.

Advances in social movement theory since the global financial crisis

The social movement literature in Western Europe and North America has oriented much of its theoretical work towards micro-, meso-, and macro-level examinations of its subject of study but has rarely integrated these levels of analysis. This review article broadly documents the leading theoretical perspectives on social movements, while highlighting the contributions made in recent years with regard to the wave of protests across the globe – typified by the Occupy Movement and the ‘Arab Spring’ – and grievances that are relatively novel in qualitative or quantitative form such as austerity, precarity, and a sense of democratic deficiency. While these novel social processes have invigorated the specialized arena of ‘social movement studies’ and generated a resurgence of work on social movements beyond the field, this article argues for the need to interconnect levels of analysis in order to develop a more insightful account of contemporary contentious politics.

Riots and political protest: Notes from the post-political present

Neoliberal capitalism is presented as the product of a successful social movement from above which has subsequently resorted to mainly repressive state strategies in order to re-establish ‘normalcy’ amidst ‘systemic chaos’. Cox & Nilsen argue that repression is evidence of a loss of popular legitimacy and of elite weakness. Their prognosis is that the eclipse of neoliberal capitalism is possible not through more mobilisation from below, but rather by its qualitative transformation into a social movement: a broad hegemonic alliance with a credible alternative project. The revised role of Marxism is away from providing a Party vanguard which will channel and contain popular mobilisation and towards enabling organic intellectuals to play a part in the knowledge production and collective learning processes required to form an effective social movement project. Cox & Nilsen provide us with a ‘movement-relevant’ Marxism that is a welcome alternative to ‘structuralist’ or ‘autonomist’ accounts of contemporary neoliberal capitalism which either marginalise or celebrate existing social movement mobilisations rather than helping move them forwards. They also make convincing refutations and rejections of Leninist, reformist, and localist projects in favour of what might be described as a ‘movementist’ politics. Their willingness to accept a shorter-term critical engagement with the state whilst maintaining the ultimate goal of its defeat and replacement with alternative institutions suggests that they are attuned to resolving current dilemmas facing movement activists. A discussion of the contribution and limits of the book’s implicit neo-Gramscian approach and its relationship to ‘Open Marxism’ would have been informative as the latter would appear to offer a more constant and pervasive role for social movements (albeit understood as class struggle) than the former.