The Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (1981–2000): Contesting Enclosure and Creating a Feminist and Ecofeminist Commons

This thesis reinterprets the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (1981–2000) in the United Kingdom through ecofeminist perspectives and feminist geographies to examine the extent to which the camp contested commons enclosure and created a form of feminist and ecofeminist commons. While Greenham has often been studied as a peace movement or a landmark feminist protest, this research foregrounds the material, spatial, and reproductive dimensions of the camp, contributing to a broader understanding of commons as lived social and economic practices. Drawing on seventy-one oral testimonies from the Greenham Women Everywhere archives, the study conducts a secondary qualitative analysis to illuminate how narratives reveal the everyday labour that sustained collective life. This research advances two main findings. On one hand, the occupation of a militarised and enclosed environment, together with the decision to organise daily life within a women-only community and to depend on cooperative, non-market forms of care, gave rise to a concrete experiment in social reproduction that reflects key insights from materialist ecofeminism and commons-based approaches. On the other hand, the protest reshaped how the site itself could be understood. By mobilising songs, humour, collective storytelling, ritual practices, and inventive modes of non-violent protest, participants unsettled dominant ways of speaking about militarism, gender relations, and the relationship between humans and nature. In doing so, they destabilised patriarchal meanings attached to space and opened an imaginative terrain where alternative ways of inhabiting the world could be envisioned. By conceptualising Greenham Common as a feminist and ecofeminist commons, this thesis aims to contribute to ecofeminist theory, feminist geography, and international economic and social history. It underscores the significance of women’s oral testimonies as sources often absent from official archives and highlights the continued relevance of ecofeminist practices for contemporary movements seeking to build alternatives to commons enclosure.