Occupy Movement Research Articles

Toward a Radical Spatiality: Dissident Architectural Practices in Contemporary Occupations

The Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, los Indignados, Gezi Park, the Umbrella Movement, among others, are some of the most representative contemporary social movements that conducted important changes and open debate in fields like politics and economics. However, they are usually not related directly to the transformation of the architectural urban landscape in current cities. During the production of these occupations, dissident practices take place and alter established conditions of urban infrastructures that react as obsolete elements, while collective participation transforms spatial perception, the use and aesthetic of public spaces. This article focuses on the Umbrella Movement, the 2014 Hong Kong occupation, and how protestors modify, on one hand, the architectural urban landscape of the city and generate, on the other, design techniques through the use of quotidian and daily-life objects in dissident means. Pragmatism and immediacy are the main conditions of these occupations for creating spaces that occupiers need, and also for making visible a situation that is implanted deeply in the city: the privatization of public spaces.

Lenin’s Lens: The Occupy Movement, an Infantile Disorder?

This paper offers a theoretical critique of the Occupy movement by drawing on V.I. Lenin’s work, Left-wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder (LWC). This work emphasizes the importance of recognizing political power within institutionalized political systems, for example, trade unions and parliamentary democracy. We bring the ideas contained in this work to bear on the Occupy movement by drawing on 20 activist accounts from two UK Occupy camps to argue that the Occupy movement was an earlier phase of a developing political challenge to neoliberalism. In this respect, Occupy was an immature politics unlikely to lead to social change. However, recent research suggests that the creation of a new wave of ‘movement parties’ (della Porta et al., 2017) are a more organized and politically mature response to neoliberal austerity, which to some extent grew out of the mass movement assemblies like the Occupy movement. By applying Lenin’s ideas to analyse the main political practices of Occupy, this paper argues that a Leninist viewpoint could offer some practical improvements towards the political strategy of new movements by being part of a coalition of activists and trade unionists, with the ultimate aim of working within parliamentary democracy.

Noam Chomsky (1928-), Fierce and Formidable Critic of the Vietnam War.

article discusses Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor of language and linguistics Noam Chomsky, focusing particularly on his criticisms of the Vietnam War and the U.S. government. Topics include his essay The Responsibility of Intellectuals, his 1969 book American Power and the New Mandarins, his political activism, and his fifty years as a dissident with targets including the Cold War, the Iraq War, and the Occupy Movement.

Gezi Assemblages: Embodied Encounters in the Making of an Alternative Space

The article aspires to make a claim for the potential of the Deleuze-Guattarian concept of assemblage (agencement) to account for the Occupy Movements in general and 2013 Turkey Gezi Movement in particular. Throughout the article, it is claimed that the concept of agencement provides us with useful tools to elucidate the constitution of a new dissident community in Gezi Park and the subsequent park assemblies. Special emphasis will be put on the capacity of the concept to account for the embodied and embedded nature of the Gezi Movement, an argument further supported by data coming from participatory observations throughout different phases of the mobilization, 23 in depth interviews with activists from different political backgrounds and minutes of the park assemblies. Although the concept of assemblage has started to be used in the analysis of social movements (Bennett, 2005; Chesters & Welsh, 2006; Lockie 2004; McFarlane, 2009; Rodriguez-Giralt, 2011, 2015; Rodriguez-Giralt & Marrero-Guillamón,2018), not much emphasis is given to the concepts of embodiment and body in assemblages. This article aspires to contribute to the literature by first underlining the importance of embodiment in the Gezi movement and second elucidating it with respect to the concept of body in the original use of the term of assemblage by Deleuze and Guattari (1980).

Marxism and Anarchism: Their Contradictions

The defeat of the revolutions of 1848 marked the replacement of radical republicanism with Marxism and anarchism, which became the two great streams of the left. Seemingly, the ensuing titanic struggle between anarchism and socialism had been resolved by the Russian Revolution. Since the early 1990s and the implosion of the Soviet Union, anarchist thought, as exemplified by the Occupy Movement, has regained widespread currency. Anarchism offers no potential of overcoming capitalism. Marxism is essentially incompatible with anarchism, with few possibilities of collaboration. A strategic vision of a renewed left, informed by Marxism, would benefit from incorporating some practices identified with anarchism—such as more systematic democratic processes and the fostering of communities evidencing genuine concern for their members' cultural and material needs. The scarcity of these communitarian practices in Communist countries and Communist parties outside of the socialist bloc contributed to their failure in the 20th century. Read More: https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/siso.2018.82.3.360

Review of Reality Bites: Rhetoric and the Circulation of Truth Claims in U.S. Political Culture by Dana Cloud (Ohio State University Press)

Dana Cloud’s marvelous new book provides just the sort of deep understanding and practical guidance needed for thoughtful and effective political engagement in the Trump era. In three fascinating case studies, Cloud demonstrates the impotence of naked facts and the power of mediation. First, she compares the cases of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, both of whom leaked classified information in acts of patriotic resistance. Second, in a chapter on the 2014 television series <i>Cosmos</i>, Cloud seeks to explain the show’s enormous rhetorical power. Third, Cloud compares the revolutionary rhetoric of Thomas Paine’s <i>Common Sense</i> to that of the Black Lives Matter and Occupy movements. As we live through the devastation wrought by a Trump presidency, as we seek to make sense of it all in our scholarship and our classrooms, as we resist his attempt to reengineer of reality and search for ways to reassert our own reality, the reality of the people, <i>Reality Bites</i> comes not a moment too soon.

Universal Alienation

This article is part of a debate between David Harvey, Michael Hardt and Toni Negri. It takes Marx’s bicentenary as occasion for an update of his concept of alienation. The paper asks: how are we to interpret universal alienation and from whence does it come? Marx radically reformulated the concept of alienation in the Grundrisse. The humanism of the early Marx can be re-rooted and reconceptualised in the scientific mode proposed in the Grundrisse. In the Grundrisse, the universality of alienation is specific to capitalism’s historical evolution. Today, alienation exists almost everywhere. It exists at work in production, at home in consumption, and it dominates much of politics and daily life. Such trends intensify through the application of information technologies and artificial intelligence. Widespread alienation has resulted in Occupy movements as well as right-wing populism and bigoted nationalist and racist movements. Donald Trump is the President of alienation. The circulation of capital as totality consists of the three key moments of production, circulation and distribution. A lot of contemporary economic struggles are now occurring at the point of realisation rather than at the point of production. Protests are therefore today often expressions of broad-based discontent. Our future is dictated by the need to redeem our debts. Under such conditions democracy becomes a sham. The big question is what forms of social movement can help us get out of the state-finance nexus. The theory of objective alienation along with an understanding of its subjective consequences is one vital key to unlock the door of a progressive politics for the future.

Love and the Demos

ABSTRACTSome protest movements around the globe have been deploying a rhetoric of love to make themselves feel less vulnerable to the cynical languages of neoliberal economics and managerial control. Often they involve youthful energies, from the Occupy Movements of 2011, to ‘Feel the Bern’, to the Nuit Debout movement in France. My own research has focused on an anti-gas mining protest in Broome, Western Australia. In the wake of violent confrontations with police, the demonstrators suddenly changed tactics and used the occasion of Mother’s Day 2011 to offer the police flowers, soliciting their protection by including them within a ‘We love Broome’ sphere of influence. Wendy Brown’s recent analysis of how the ‘demos’ is being undone goes some of the ways towards rebooting the vocabulary of social analysis. The ‘society’ that seeks ‘our’ participation in ever narrower ways sees burgeoning underneath it a revolution that refuses the language in which that participation is permitted. Love is one of the words that creates the ‘public feelings’ (Lauren Berlant, Kathleen Stewart) uniting this youthful growing society, with its protective bubble that deflects and disarms the order words of a deflating global modernity.

“Can I Tell You about It?”: England, Austerity and “Radical Optimism” in the Theatre of Anders Lustgarten

Abstract Over the past decade, the plays of Anders Lustgarten have taken a prominent place in the English theatre repertoire. Performed by companies including Red Ladder, Cardboard Citizens, and the Royal Shakespeare Company, Lustgarten’s dramatic writing places social and political issues centrestage, ranging from the housing crisis and the electoral ascendancy of far-right parties to the alienation of the urban working class and the racist scapegoating of immigrants. This article focuses on Lustgarten’s landmark play inspired by the Occupy movement, If You Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let You Sleep (Royal Court Theatre, 2013). I explore how the play engages with, and reflects on, economic austerity, forms of contemporary mass protest, and, indirectly, evolving conceptions of English nationhood. I also examine Lustgarten’s notion of “Radical Optimism” – a term he identifies with the global anti-austerity protests following the 2007-8 financial crisis – and consider its importance to what he calls “anti-prop” political theatre. The first part of the article probes the relationship between If You Don’t Let Us Dream and the established “tradition” of state-of-the-nation playwriting; the second part identifies the play’s challenge to this “tradition,” which is informed by its proximity to the Occupy protests.

Istanbul sounding like revolution: the role of music in the Gezi Park Occupy movement

AbstractThis article focuses on the role of protest music in the biggest social movement of recent Turkish history. It is the result of three years of fieldwork triangulating musical and cultural analysis with ethnographic methods. Motives of the protest, strategies of the movement, agency of musicians and participatory performances are investigated and contextualised in an analysis of Turkey's cultural changes. The function of music shifted from framing the protest to encouraging political action and fostering a sense of belonging to the collective identity of the Gezi Park movement. Music even became political activism. By underlining different functions played by music in the case of the Gezi Park movement, this article problematises the relevance of music for social movements.

Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction

Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction

Offline: The legacy and lessons of May '68

Doctors have only cared for the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. Imagine you are a distinguished Professor of Medicine, the Rector of one of your country's most garlanded universities. Your students are angry. They have seen fellow students at a nearby university rebel against atrociously poor conditions—overcrowding, incompetent curriculum reforms, and feelings of utter alienation. Tensions are palpable. The air is chilled by the threat of violence. What would you do? Let us not judge. In 1968, at the Sorbonne in Paris, Professor Jean Roche (1901–92), co-discoverer (in 1952) of tri-iodothyronine and one of France's most eminent scientists, made a choice. Was it panic? A miscalculation? The New Yorker called his decision an “unpardonable academic error”. Whatever one's view, the events that followed his decree on May 3 led to the largest conflagration affecting a European nation since World War 2. Roche, a physician and thyroid biochemist, precipitated a national crisis that changed France. His decision to call in riot police to protect the university, its staff and students, was the trigger for unprecedented political upheaval. For 5 weeks, through a combination of street protests and a general strike of about 9 million people, France was paralysed. The consequences, and its meaning 50 years later, deserve reflection. For what happened in May '68 shows how a society reacts when driven to the edge of schismatic social change. “On the night of May 9–10 the Latin Quarter of Paris was a battleground with police releasing tear-gas in an attempt to destroy barricades erected by students…The demonstrating students have widely differing political views; but all insist on the need for university reform.” The Lancet's coverage (May 18, 1968) was sympathetic to the student protests. But in the aftermath of May, progressive voices concluded that the largest mass movement in French history achieved nothing. And so the myths have grown. May '68 was a particularly French expression of the widespread 1960s counterculture. It was a youthful, ultimately playful, revolt. It was spontaneous. It was about free speech. It was poetic (“It is forbidden to forbid”). It was urban. Or, as Raymond Aron put it, May was “the event that turned out to have been a non-event”. It is true that on May 30, 300 000 people marched down the Champs-Elysées to demand order be restored. De Gaulle won. Jails filled. France's Fifth Republic was intact. Students returned to their classrooms. But in more important ways, France—and western Europe—was forever changed. As Daniel Singer wrote in Prelude to Revolution: France in May, 1968 (1970), “the modern state might not be as impregnable as it looks”. May '68 matters not because students failed to seize power. Those few weeks matter because they showed, in Singer's words, “the unsuspected depth of…pent-up discontent”. Medicine played its part too, but, in an echo of Roche's instincts, as a break on the quickening pace of history. Medical students in France in the 1960s came from mostly wealthy families. They were destined for well paid jobs. Although many medical students took part in debates about university reforms in May '68, their discontent was quickly dissipated. As Singer concludes, medical students, “felt no overwhelming professional reasons for reshaping society”. Medicine was the defender of the ancien régime: “many budding doctors…will do no more than grumble”. Despite a victorious conservatism, the legacy of May '68, as Kristin Ross describes in May '68 and its Afterlives (2002), is nevertheless confident, even expectant. Something happened. Students, workers, and farmers refused to be caged in their social categories. Novel and unforeseen alliances among heterogeneous communities were forged. There was a revival of solidarity across classes and ages. A mass movement challenged a fiercely nationalist government. A new era of political engagement was ignited. Resistance to exploitation diffused across an entire nation. From anti-globalisation protests in Seattle to the Occupy movement, from anti-Iraq war campaigns to Arab Uprisings, these are the offspring of May '68. One might judge these mass events to be failures. You would be wrong. Each has shaped the moral conscience of a generation. Each has renewed our sense of social justice. Each has reanimated a dialogue about who we are and what we can be. It all began in Paris in May '68.

The Geographic Dimension of Citizenship in Digital Activism: Analysis of the Relationships Among Local and Global Citizenship, the Use of Social Networking Sites, and Participation in the Occupy Movement

This case study of the Occupy movement examines how different geographic forms of self-perceived citizenship—local and global citizenship—and the use of social networking sites play key roles in political activism in the digital age. Based on an online survey of U.S. participants in the movement, this study found that local and global citizenship had distinct relationships with participation. This suggests that local citizenship is positively related to local participation, while global citizenship is positively related to global participation. In this vein, the use of social networking sites has a positive indirect relationship with both local and global participation through its relationship with local and global citizenship, respectively. This study contributes to the understanding of how the geographic dimension of citizenship fosters democracy via contemporary digital activism by enabling individuals to take part in local and even global collective actions.

Policing Extreme Political Protest: A Historical Evaluation of Police Prejudice

Abstract The task of policing political activism frequently tests the legitimacy of the police leaving them vulnerable to claims of political prejudice. The principle of police neutrality has been subjected to criticism by MPs, activists and academic scholars since the formation of the modern police force. Members of both far right and far left movements have claimed their liberty to protest has been curtailed at different moments and much academic scholarship has highlighted the pro-fascist nature of policing. This article redresses the balance to provide a deeper understanding of the way political activism was (and continues to be) policed. In recent years, protests involving the English Defence League and the Occupy movement have highlighted the contemporary challenges to public order operations. Both groups have questioned the political impartiality of the police. Yet, these accusations are not new and by offering a historical comparison to the policing of extreme political activism in the interwar years, concerns regarding police culture, discretion, and legitimacy in the contemporary era are addressed. The inconsistent policing of the British Union of Fascists and the Communist Party of Great Britain frustrated both groups, and this article challenges existing research which claims that a pro-fascist motivation in policing accounts for this inconsistency. By exploring other motivations, it argues that we should not see the police as a monolithic institution with a particular view, and although political partiality is still significant, other key factors such as legal ambiguity, police pragmatism and regional variations must also be taken into account.

Information affordances: Studying the information processing activities of the core Occupy actors on Twitter

Emergent social movements benefit from technologies that support the information activities that core actors perform to achieve the goals of the movement. Starting with an information-centric perspective, we use the theoretical lens of information processing, to examine the roles of Twitter affordances during the Occupy movement in solving information problems. Our data is a corpus of tweets from the core actors of the movement, as identified by our extended 1/9/90 rule. Using inferential statistics and network visualization, we show how different Twitter affordances act as mechanisms to resolve information problems in many different ways. Our network visualization shows the ecology of the interactions amongst the core actors, and between the core actors and the public. Our work contributes to the discussion around recent social movements on Twitter and advances the theory of information processing.

A peace of bricks and mortar: thinking ceasefire landscapes with Gramsci

This article addresses the ways in which Nicosia has been affected by division due to the ethno-political conflict and the gentrification efforts that have attended attempts to reunite the city. It examines two spaces of civic action in particular that have involved reconstruction and rehabilitation of two areas in the capital’s UN-controlled Buffer Zone: one by a peace and reconciliation initiative and another by the local variant of the global Occupy movement. In doing so, it addresses the question of how conflict politics becomes imbricated in the politics of urban development. The article examines the role of organic intellectuals in the making of war heritage and the transformation of post-conflict landscapes amid processes of gentrification. In the cases we are examining, we want to trace the processes of creating landscapes that memorialise not only ethnic conflict but the multiple political conflicts that unfold in time and space.

After the #Keyword: Eliciting, Sustaining, and Coordinating Participation Across the Occupy Movement

Networked social movements (NSMs) are hybrid forms of social organization that rely on the platforms of the Internet to connect multiple individuals and groups to address a social justice issue. I mapped the communication infrastructure of the Occupy Movement from July 2011 to June 2013 to demonstrate how changes in protesters’ forms of communication reflected transformations in the organization of the movement and its capacity to mobilize participants. Through ethnography, I show how internal and external pressures—the high density of connections through social media, a desire to coordinate across locations, and police raids on encampments—led to the development of a virtual organization, called InterOccupy. InterOccupy is a communication platform owned and operated by participants in the Occupy Movement. InterOccupy took infrastructure building as a political strategy to ensure the movement endured beyond the police raids on the encampments. I conclude that NSMs create virtual organizations when there are routine and insurmountable failures in the communication milieu, where the future of the movement is at stake. My research follows the Occupy Movement ethnographically to understand what happens after the keyword.

Staging Protest as Art and Pedagogy

Staging Protest as Art and Pedagogy Dipti Desai (bio) It was a sunny autumn day on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. A small group of residents marched on the sidewalks, holding signs about climate justice, carrying brooms, and chanting catchy slogans. With them in solidarity were members of an activist organization Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES) and students from New York University. Through an interdisciplinary studio class based on a partnership with GOLES, the students had designed this artistic intervention to inform and motivate people in the community about the upcoming citywide People's Climate March, in September 2014. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Street performance by NYU students in connection to the Mini Climate March, Lower East Side New York (2004). Photograph by Maria Leon. [End Page 423] The mini-protest they had envisioned and designed would end with a street performance about global warming and climate change, followed by marchers distributing flyers to passersby. The protest had a specific political and pedagogical mission. According to the GOLES activist working in their community, the Lower East Side residents who lived in low-income housing (predominantly people of color) did not understand how the People's Climate March connected to their lives, even though their homes and neighborhood had been devastated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. This dress rehearsal for the People's Climate March, then, became embodied popular education: a lesson on the power of collective voice, on the disproportional impact of climate change on people of color in the United States, and on working together to initiate change. This activist art pedagogy had been organized across networks of solidarity with the long-term goal of building a sustainable movement. As Mariam Ghani has noted, "for art to be an important form of protest, artists have to consider what it might mean to be artists working within movements—to make and circulate work not from positions of autonomy, but from a network of positions in solidarity."1 Pedagogy is central to creating networks of solidarity as it involves learning to work across social differences, and to engage with contradictory ideas, beliefs, and values that rub against each other. For disenfranchised people of color on the Lower East Side, to be present at the mini-march and the mass climate change demonstration with GOLES was in itself a "creative act."2 It was an expression of a "liberated voice" as the community moved from silence to speech.3 As Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us, to speak as marginalized people is an act of resistance: "by sending our voices, visuals, and visions outward into the world, we alter the walls and make them a framework [End Page 424] for new windows and doors."4 By being physically present, the Lower East Side residents produced a "space of appearance," to use Judith Butler's words, that "seize[d] upon an already established space permeated by existing power, seeking to sever the relation between the public space, the public square, and the existing regime."5 Joining thousands of marchers from different organizations who were demanding that those making decisions in regimes of power listen to the ways climate change was affecting their communities was in itself a lesson on democratic participation and resistance. Most importantly, it empowered the Lower East Side residents to work with GOLES to demand that the local government agencies address their unhealthy living conditions resulting from Hurricane Sandy. Artists can play a critical role in amplifying local stories and making visible the histories and current living conditions of disenfranchised communities, both to local communities as well as to the general public, through forms of resistance and protest within art institutions and in public spaces. Artists such as Catherine Opie in In Protest to Sex Offenders (2005) have documented past and current protests, while others—such as Sharon Hayes in her work, In a Different Time (2015), and Mark Tribe in Port Huron Project (2006–2008)—have staged reenactments of past protests by holding up protest signs or reenacting protest speeches from a different era. Such artists keep history alive and show its power as resistance. Since the Occupy Movement in 2011, artists are...

Side by Side: Alice and Staughton Lynd, the Ohio Years by Mark W. Weber and Stephen H. Paschen

Reviewed by: Side by Side: Alice and Staughton Lynd, the Ohio Years by Mark W. Weber and Stephen H. Paschen David Brown Mark W. Weber and Stephen H. Paschen, Side by Side: Alice and Staughton Lynd, the Ohio Years. Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2014. 144 pp. $29.95+. This is a multifaceted work of history, biography and politics written by two scholars—Mark Weber, a retired dean of libraries at Kent State University and Stephen Paschen, a retired archivist at Kent State University Libraries—who have long admired the activism of Alice and Staughton Lynd. Their [End Page 53] book is an engaging complement to Carl Mirra's 2010 study, The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945–1970, and picks up chronologically where Mirra's book ended, with the conclusion of the 1960s and the realization that Staughton, denied tenure at Yale and black-listed from a number of Chicago universities for his criticism of American foreign policy in Vietnam, would never find another teaching position in the academy. Looking at the fullness of the Lynds's life together, one might say that they were better off outside the Ivory Tower. As post 1960s colleges and universities became more conservative, the Lynds never backed away from their activism—for the rights of workers, prisoners, and the elderly. They remain today symbols of social justice and worthy of biographical treatment. In many respects, this is a book that traces the human impact of deindustrialization in Ohio's Mahoning Valley. After leaving Chicago in 1976, Alice and Staughton moved to Youngstown, Ohio to practice labor law. By this time the sixties had definitively ended. SDS and SNCC were gone, the Vietnam War was over and the Lynds found themselves at a crossroads. Staughton had taken a law degree at the University of Chicago in 1973 and Alice enrolled in a paralegal program at Roosevelt University in 1974. Together they sought to continue their engagement in participatory democracy and nonviolence through the legal profession. But this meant more than defending trade unions. In Chicago they had both grown skeptical of large union bureaucracies, questioning their interest in affecting meaningful and positive change for the rights of their members. This kind "business unionism," they insisted, promoted hierarchical top-down relationships that distanced powerful organizations from those they ostensibly served. In Youngstown, a strong union tradition was being overturned by the neoliberalism of the 1980s. Faced, as he thought, with a decision to either represent the unions or represent the workers, Staughton left his job at a Youngstown law firm in 1978 and he and Alice (having taken a law degree at the University of Pittsburg) began working at the Northeast Ohio Legal Services until they retired in the 1990s. Weber and Paschen offer within this narrative a useful history of Youngstown's economic struggles, legal fights over the same, and the impact of plant closings on workers that demonstrate their fluency with the recent history of the region—a history that, as residents and academics at neighboring Kent State University, they are in an ideal position to relate. [End Page 54] One of the Lynds' major campaigns was over the question of community rights to shuttered industrial property. They lobbied, petitioned, organized, and occupied buildings in an effort to produce a legal decision that would recognize worker owned mills. Unsurprisingly the American property rights tradition proved too strong, and the Lynds lost this legal fight. It demonstrated, however, the eagerness of workers in the region to challenge corporate power and their willingness to remain committed to another hallowed American tradition—grassroots social democracy. For the Lynds the fight for community rights continued and in more recent years they became involved in prison reform and the Occupy Movement. More broadly, their opposition to the Gulf Wars, US foreign policy in Central America, and Israeli occupation of the West Bank and ongoing settlement building has often taken their reform efforts out of the Ohio context. Among the real virtues of this book are the many interviews that flesh out the Lynds' lives and work in Ohio. Alice and Staughton participated in these discussions but so also did, to name but...

“Where Is My Tribe”? Queer Activism in the Occupy Movements

From the Arab Spring to the Umbrella Revolution, the last cycle of citizen protests has widely shared the strategy of occupying public spaces through the settlement of protest camps. Although one might imagine a homogeneous unity amongst the protesters, these encampments have been the scenario of multiple inner conflicts in relation with different vectors of oppression. This article discusses the conflicts faced and the coalition-building developed by queer activists in different encampments, with a focus on the relation between the occupation of queer spaces and the space of the protest as a whole. The Foucauldian concept of heterotopia is used here as a guide in order to understand the ambivalences and inner tensions of the space of the protest without losing, nor idealizing, the utopian impulse of these movements.