ABSTRACT
Mobile people need places to rest and stay, transient “moorings” as Hannam, Sheller, and Urry (2006) have argued. When inquiring into the politics of mobilities, these places are highly signicant as they make it possible to investigate the way in which mobilities are shaped by political regimes, and conversely the way in which counter-regimes of mobilities might be constituted. A paradigmatic “mooring” or resting place for mobile people is the camp. The camp functionally enables mobile living, mobile practices, e.g., the housing of actual nomads, but also of a variety of temporarily mobile groups like soldiers, migrants, refugees, tourists or protesters in need of some sort of shelter while on the road (Loefgren 1999; Hailey 2009). The camp also shapes political regimes and the theoretical interest in the camp as the “nomos of modernity” (Agamben 1998) shows the signicance of this nexus. In this chapter I will rst situate and delineate protest camps in theoretical and historical debates about the camp. While it remains highly questionable to which extent one may compare the radically dierent forms in which camps occur, a historical lineage of the camp shows how the dierent forms of the camps relate to each other. I argue that the camp most basically describes a space that is somewhat separated from its surroundings. In a political reading of the camp, it seems to always form an exceptional space. It is in this respect that this chapter attempts to discuss particular questions regarding the role of camps for the political status quo to which they form an exception. Empirically this work will look at a range of protest camps and the ways in which these camps have attempted to create counter-regimes to the existing political status quo.
