Introduction

Feminist scholarship has prompted a rethinking of liberal democracy and its underlying assumptions. Building on this rich tradition, this chapter discusses the insights offered by feminist thought into the democracy of protest camps and its normative underpinnings. It argues that theories of care and social reproduction, and feminist approaches to the notion of the commons, can revitalise our theorising of democracy. This is because they allow for the development of a more critical and all-encompassing understanding of power and equality that goes beyond decision-making practices. They also expand the conception of civic duties and responsibilities by including activities of care and social reproduction. They centre vulnerability and dependence as an integral part of the human condition to which democracies should attend. They further illuminate the effect of property relations on liberal democracy’s understanding of the citizen and pave the way for a notion of citizenship based on interdependence and communal sharing. They thus challenge some of the founding assumptions on which liberal representative democracy is based and present a different set of criteria with which to evaluate the operation of democratic systems.

The theoretical discussion presented in this chapter is grounded in extensive fieldwork in the ‘movements of the squares’ from 2011 onwards, including in-depth interviews with 91 participants in Occupy Wall Street (OWS), Seattle, Boston, Sacramento and London, as well as the Greek Indignant movement and Nuit Debout in France. The movements of the squares emerged with the Arab Spring protests in North Africa that inspired activists in Europe, the United States and elsewhere to occupy squares and parks in city centres, protesting against a political and economic system that did not serve the people’s interests. In Spain, protesters gathered in Puerta del Sol in Madrid on 15 May 2011. Greece soon followed, with participants occupying Syntagma Square in Athens on 25 May 2011. It was a time when the economic crisis had hit the Greek economy hard and the country had been placed under strict measures by the ‘European Troika’: the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.