The Nomos of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement

Abstract

This chapter focuses on how the Umbrella Movement's intervention in the city's nomos (re)attunes the senses to the normative force of the city's extant normative order. It explores the spatial and material intervention that the movement made. Undeniably, the Umbrella Movement had a perspicuously legalistic tone and orientation. The rule of law – guaranteed by the Basic Law and the 'one country, two systems' model – has played a decisive role in developing a sense of Hong Kong's exceptionalism with respect to the rest of China. Nomos denotes a background ordering of social life, made possible by the appropriation and division of material space and the mobilisation of conceptual and ideational demarcations and divisions. The hope must remain that the nomos of the Umbrella Movement will fulfil precisely the paideic function, inculcating democratic values within a new generation of activists.