When on 25 January 2011 Egyptian revolutionaries occupied Tahrir Square, no one could have predicted that the image of the occupied square would become such an important signifier for protest and contestation in the ensuing years. Throughout the following decade, the example of Tahrir Square would continue to inspire many occupy movements around the world: from the Spanish 15-M movement and the Greek anti-austerity movement to Occupy Wall Street (OWS), and from the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul and the so-called ‘Umbrella Revolution’ in Hong Kong, to Nuit Debout in Paris. Notwithstanding the obvious differences between these movements, they clearly did refer to each other –and to the iconic occupation of Tahrir Square in particular –as an important source of inspiration (Graeber 2013: 237). But obviously, the occupied Tahrir Square not only had an important symbolic value to many protesters around the world; for many Egyptian people, the ‘Republic of Tahrir’ and its temporary inhabitants also embodied the grievances and hopes of a significant part of their country’s population. To them, the people assembled on this square were the true representatives of the popular will (Frank 2021: 70–1). One may argue that even Hosni Mubarak implicitly acknowledged this when he finally gave in to the protesters’ demand and announced his resignation.

But if those assembled on Tahrir Square (or any other occupied square, for that matter) can indeed be understood to have represented the people at large, then what concept of representation was implied here? After all, they clearly did not have a formal mandate to speak or act on behalf of ‘the people’. This is even more complex in the context of recent movements such as OWS and the 15-M movement, which were often very critical of electoral-representative democracy, as it prevents citizens from actively partaking in democratic politics. As argued in the previous chapter, they sought to prefigure a more participatory and decentralised form of democracy. It is sometimes suggested that these movements were thus against political representation tout court (Lorey 2020; Sitrin and Azzellini 2014; Tormey 2015). However, it seems evident that their activist tent camps and prefigurative experiments also implied a strong representative claim in their own right (Saward 2010). These movements arguably did stand for something or for someone else –and arguably even spoke or acted for them. But this suggests that prefigurative democracy requires a very specific, non-mandated form of political representation.