Major uprisings and protest events in recent years – from G8 protests to Occupy camps and to the Arab Spring – have been accompanied by growing academic interest in activism and social movements. This work has both continued and renewed the rich tradition of social movement studies. Much of it has carried on a classic focus on questions of protest tactics, interventions into policy processes, strategies for norm change and shaping public debate, media uses, and thus on the visible, interventionist and (sometimes) confrontational activities of protest movements.

However, a lot of social movement dynamics and innovations have taken place outside the spotlight of physical confrontations and media campaigns. When the Global Justice movement in the early 2000s insisted that ‘another world is possible’, that new world was not just fought for on the streets and debated at Social Forums but developed in the everyday practices of the camps where protesters gathered, slept, ate and discussed. The ways in which food was prepared and distributed, camp security was organised, and decision-making structures were established all embodied and practically created the new world that activists were advocating. The next wave of protests, the Occupy movement, connected visible protest activity with daily camp life even more explicitly and thus highlighted the important (and often neglected) role of the everyday organisational and recreational aspects of activism as well as the practices of building alternatives.

The book Protest Camps points our attention to this dimension of social movement studies. Rather than interpreting camp life as mere support mechanism for ‘real’ activism, the three authors understand the centrality of the experimental development of a different society in self-organised temporary encampments. The role of protest camps, according to their research, is ‘not just to provide a base or a symbol for dissent, but to allow for social reproduction and the re-creation of everyday life in ways that contest the status quo’ (p. 10). Camps, in that sense, are ‘laboratories of radical, tangible democracy that can help to imagine and build blueprints for alternative worlds’ (p. 220).

The book is grounded in a rich historical perspective that explores connections with other forms of camps, such as refugee and military camps, and traces contemporary camp practices to the emancipatory movements in the 1960s and 70s and to classic protest camps such as Greenham Commons. Based on this background, the authors address the practices and experiences of recent camps including HoriZone (the anti-G8 camp in Gleneagles, Scotland, 2005), Tahrir Square in Egypt 2011, Occupy London in 2011, as well as climate and NoBorder camps.

The book provides a rigorous analysis of four key dimensions of camp infrastructure: 1. Media and communication, including both interactions with mainstream media and self-organised activist media; 2. action infrastructures and practices which encompass direct action tactics, legal aid and medical support; 3. governance of the social structure of a camp, particularly the development of formal and informal decision-making processes; and 4. re-creational factors such as food supply, shelter, sanitation, entertainment and childcare.

The systematic and analytical character of the book is underlined, furthermore, by a thorough theoretical background that embeds the observation of current activist practices in concepts such as spatiality, temporality, affect, autonomy and network theory. The authors manage to properly unpack the phenomenon of protest camps and understand its multiple facets. For example, they explain decision-making processes and organisational structures on the basis of different conceptualisations of power, they review the ‘organic horizontalism’ of spokescouncil models, and situate new organisational forms such as affinity groups in democratic theory.

The troubles and struggles of protest camps offer, arguably, the richest insights and theoretical contributions. For example, the authors observe a ‘dual adaptation’ (p. 74) regarding the media infrastructure between movement norms, on the one hand, and mainstream media requirements, on the other – between creating self-organised media and responding to mainstream media requests. These conflicts between generating autonomous practices and responding to the context of mainstream society re-appear in the tensions between horizontality and formalised decision-making, between spatial and procedural practices of governance, and between autonomy and social care. The authors explain backgrounds and possible solutions, but they are also interested in how activist knowledge on these issues develops and how it travels across different geographies and protest spaces. If activists encounter similar challenges across different times and spaces, how do they learn from each other and how does their knowledge grow? The authors are able to address questions like these due to thorough research, practical experience, and a rich set of theoretical and historical anchors.

While protest camps are described as a ‘laboratory of prefigurative politics’ (p. 179), it would have been interesting to relate them more closely to the practice of prefigurative action which has become increasingly relevant. As some sections of activism (for example, in media and tech activism) reject the protest label and instead favour a focus on building alternatives, the combination of ‘protest’ and ‘camps’ may imply a tension that would be interesting to unpack further.

Yet Protest Camps is an important contribution to social movement studies and the broader social sciences. Addressing an under-researched field of contentious politics through both academic rigour and fascinating case studies, it helps us understand and appreciate current dynamics of social change. One of its most significant achievements is that it provides insights for both scholars and activists, and its structure, style and focus offer an interesting read for both communities.