From Tahrir Square to Occupy, from the Red Shirts in Thailand to the Teachers in Oaxaca, protest camps are a highly visible feature of social movements' activism across the world. They are spaces where people come together to imagine alternative worlds and articulate contentious politics, often in confrontation with the state. Drawing on over fifty different protest camps from around the world over the past fifty years, this book offers a ground-breaking and detailed investigation into protest camps from a global perspective - a story that, until now, has remained untold. Taking the reader on a journey across different cultural, political and geographical landscapes of protest, and drawing on a wealth of original interview material, the authors demonstrate that protest camps are unique spaces in which activists can enact radical and often experiential forms of democratic politics.

In the wake of a global wave of mobilisation, this book offers an unprecedented interrogation of protest camps as sites of gendered politics and feminist activism. Using international case studies, it develops an intersectional analysis of protest camps and tells new and inspiring stories of feminist organising and agency.

This groundbreaking collection interrogates protest camps as sites of gendered politics and feminist activism. Drawing on case studies that range from Cold War women-only peace camps to more recent mixed-gender examples from around the world, diverse contributors reflect on the recurrence of gendered, racialised and heteronormative structures in protest camps, and their potency and politics as feminist spaces. While developing an intersectional analysis of the possibilities and limitations of protest camps, this book also tells new and inspiring stories of feminist organising and agency. It will appeal to feminist theorists and activists, as well as to social movement scholars.

In the wake of a global wave of mobilisation, this book offers an unprecedented interrogation of protest camps as sites of gendered politics and feminist activism. Using international case studies, it develops an intersectional analysis of protest camps and tells new and inspiring stories of feminist organising and agency.

Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its “free market” strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country’s poor, including women’s groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women’s participation in the political and economic restructuring process of the past twenty-five years, showing how in their daily struggle for survival Ecuadorian women have both reinforced and embraced the neoliberal model yet also challenged its exclusionary nature. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork and employing an approach combining political economy and cultural politics, Amy Lind charts the growth of several strands of women’s activism and identifies how they have helped redefine, often in contradictory ways, the real and imagined boundaries of neoliberal development discourse and practice. In her analysis of this ambivalent and “unfinished” cultural project of modernity in the Andes, she examines state policies and their effects on women of various social sectors; women’s community development initiatives and responses to the debt crisis; and the roles played by feminist “issue networks” in reshaping national and international policy agendas in Ecuador and in developing a transnationally influenced, locally based feminist movement.

Till now, Stephanie has done her best to play by the rules--which seem to be stacked against girls like her. It doesn't help that she wants to play football, dress like a boy, and fight apartheid in South Africa--despite living in rural middle England--as she struggles to find her voice in a world where everything is different for girls. Then she hears them on the radio. Greenham women--an irreverent group of lesbians, punk rockers, mothers, and activists who have set up camp outside a US military base to protest nuclear war--are calling for backups in the face of imminent eviction from their muddy tents. She heads there immediately, where a series of adventures--from a break-in to a nuclear research center to a doomed love affair with a punk rock singer in a girl band--changes the course of her life forever. But the sense of community she has found is challenged when she faces tragedy at home.

Based on decades of research, this book explores global social change processes through the concepts of social change organisations (SCOs) and social change makers (SCMs) – the individuals working within and alongside SCOs. The book delves into a vast array of compelling social justice issues, from tackling inequality to championing human rights, bridging the realms of social movement and third sector research. Inspiring and empowering, this is essential reading for scholars, students, NGOs and activists alike.