Cherished spaces
The student encampments established to demand a cease fire, the end of US military aid to the Israeli government, and divestment of university funds in war making have offered valuable contributions to peace making. These contributions are now part of how we understand our world and will persist long after the encampments have disappeared.
On a conceptual level, the encampments have shattered the decades long effort to repress public conversations about the call by Palestinians to Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) the state of Israel. The efforts to outlaw boycotts, limit the actions of public bodies, and label BDS antisemitic, have crumbled. The term BDS is now widely understood as a critical call for engaging people across the globe in campaigns that can directly influence governmental and corporate support for war making.
In much the same way as the Occupy Wall Street movement expanded our understanding of income inequality and gave us a clear vocabulary to analyze policies, the breakthrough on conversations about the role of the US Government, corporates, universities, and civil organizations in weapons and war is now more widely understood. War and its profits are everywhere. The student encampments helped us challenge our complicity.
Beyond the conceptual contributions, the strategy of taking over space for a sustained period of time to create awareness of injustice is a powerful political move. Bringing people together in this way creates the possibilities of generating new ideas that influence how we think and act. This was the power of the Poor People’s Campaign in the late 1960s where the tent city encampment was envisioned as a base for direct actions, disrupting Washington DC on all levels.
That campaign was in part inspired by the Hoovervilles of the 1930s, and the Bonus Expeditionary Force that brought more than 40,000 people together to camp in Washington DC. They were demanding payment of war benefits to the soldiers of WWI. That effort resulted in a massive military operation, under the leadership of Douglas MacArthur, that included bringing tanks, cavalry, and tear gas against starving men, women and children from the encampment. At least two people were killed, and hundreds were injured. Public outrage at the use of military force against starving veterans and their families contributed to the subsequent election of Franklin Roosevelt.
As the US expanded its global nuclear presence after WWII, women organized for disarmament. In 1981 a small group of Welsh women organized a protest march against a proposed US cruise missile base in Greenham Common. This became the Greenham Common Peace Camp which lasted for 19 years just outside the fence of the air base. Like the student encampments of today, the Greenham women generated a moral force to question the direction of government policies. They developed a range of tactics from dancing on war heads to suing the US government in a sustained effort to demand alternatives to war making.
Also, in the 1980s the brave, courageous men of ACT UP occupied everything from municipal offices to the National Institute of Health and the Washington Mall. All in a demand for governmental actions to fight HIV, often contrasting the money spent on war rather than on health.
Encampments demanding justice and peace are a part of our history. They have most often been met with intense force attempting to not only disband them but to eradicate their memory. This is because they are generative spaces, outside the norms of usual authority, offering us a window into values and ways of being that are more whole, more just, and more life giving. That is why those in authority cannot tolerate them, and why we must cherish them. They are spaces that give birth to a better future.