posted on 2019-02-15, 11:25authored byRuth KinnaRuth Kinna, Alex Prichard, Thomas Swann
This paper provides the first comparative reading of the minutes of the General Assemblies of
three iconic Occupy camps: Wall Street, Oakland and London. It challenges detractors who
have labelled the Occupy Wall Street movement a flash-in-the-pan protest, and participantadvocates who characterised the movement anti-constitutional. Developing new research into
anarchist constitutional theory, we construct a typology of anarchist constitutionalising to
argue that the camps prefigured a constitutional order for a post-sovereign anarchist politics.
We show that the constitutional politics of three key Occupy Wall Street camps had four
main aspects: (i) declarative principles, preambles and documents; (ii) complex
institutionalisation; (iii) varied democratic decision-making procedures; and (iv) explicit and
implicit rule making processes, premised on unique foundational norms. Each of these four
was designed primarily to challenge and constrain different forms of global and local power,
but they also provide a template for anarchistic constitutional forms that can be mimicked and
linked up, as opposed to scaled up.
Funding
Research for this paper was undertaken as part of the project ‘Anarchy as a Constitutional
Principle: Constitutionalising in Anarchist Politics’ funded by the ESRC Transformative Research Award
ES/N006860/1.
History
Department
Politics and International Studies
Published in
Global Constitutionalism
Volume
8
Issue
2
Pages
357-390
Citation
KINNA, R., PRICHARD, A. and SWANN, T., 2019. Occupy and the constitution of anarchy. Global Constitutionalism, 8 (2), pp.357-390.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/