Ebook: Occupy! A Global Movement

This book is an urgent and compelling account of the Occupy movements:
from the M15 movement in Spain, to the wave of occupations flooding
across cities in America, Europe and Australia, to the harsh reality of
evictions as corporations and governments attempted to reassert exclusive
control over public space. Across a vast range of international examples,
over twenty authors analyse, explain and help us understand the
movements. These movements were a novel and noisy intervention into the
recent capitalist crisis in developed economies, developing an exceptionally
broad identity through a call to arms addressed to ‘the 99%’, and
emphasizing the importance of public space in the creation and
maintenance of opposition. The novelties of these movements, along with
their radical positioning and the urgency of their claims all demand
analysis. This book investigates the crucial questions of how and why this
form of action spread so rapidly and so widely, how the inclusive discourse
of ‘the 99%’ matched up to the reality of the practice. It is vital to
understand not just the choice of tactics and the vitality of protest camps in
public spaces, but also how the myriad of challenges and problems were
negotiated.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Social Movement
Studies.