Introduction: ‘It’s prefigurative, so to speak’

Summary

Tahrir Square lies in the heart of London’s financial district. Or, at least, this is what a faux street sign, attached to one of the office buildings next to the imposing St Paul’s Cathedral, seemed to suggest. It was October 2011, nine months after the people of Egypt had ended Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year dictatorship, and Occupy London Stock Exhange (Occupy LSX) had set up camp on the steps of St Paul’s. For more than four months the occupiers defied the winter cold, only to be evicted by the end of February. In the meantime, their movement would give rise to a lively public debate on austerity politics, democracy, the accessibility of higher education and the private ownership of public space. The London occupiers obviously did not seek to topple a military dictatorship, and no one died defending the encampment. But they nevertheless felt that they had something essential in common with the Egyptian revolutionaries. Arguably, they shared a rudimentary understanding of what it means to seek change and to act democratically.

These London protesters surely were not the only ones who gave expression to this sense of commonality. As a matter of fact, in 2011 and the ensuing years the world witnessed a wave of similar ‘occupy movements’. It is impossible to pinpoint how, where and when exactly this global wave of protest movements has commenced, but clearly the occupied Tahrir Square and the miniature society that emerged on it was one of its most prominent icons (Douzinas 2013: 8; Gerbaudo 2012: 76: 108–9; Harvey 2012: 161–2). The Egyptian revolution, in turn, was but one instance of what was often referred to as an ‘Arab Spring’, which started in December 2010 and stretched well into 2011. Mass mobilisations against autocratic regimes emerged in Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan, Oman, Egypt, Yemen, Sudan, Iraq, Bahrain, Libya, Kuwait, Morocco, Lebanon, Syria, and several other countries in the Middle Eastern and North African region.

Later that spring, similar occupy movements would emerge in various European cities. The 15-M movement or Indignados campaigned against the ongoing austerity measures of the Spanish government. Protesters took possession of the Puerta del Sol in Madrid and the Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona. In Athens, a protest camp was erected on Syntagma Square, right in front of the Greek parliament. Israel also had a short-lived, but strikingly diverse, ‘tent movement’ in the summer of 2011.