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 American, 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 helps us understand the movement. 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 published as a special issue of Social Movement Studies.

The grassroots movement that started Sept. 17, 2011, with a protest in a park near Wall Street has mushroomed into a series of demonstrations in hundreds of cities around the world. In a year of protests from the Middle East to Madison, Wis., the Occupy uprising, a passionate outcry for economic justice, has been defined by its lack of definition. Now from TIME comes an illuminating collection of stories that answers many of the key questions about Occupy: How did it get started? What's behind the anger of the so-called 99% this group claims to represent? Who leads this leaderless movement? What should its agenda be? How can it transcend the occupation of tiny Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan? What Is Occupy? includes chapters from the pages of TIME by columnists Joe Klein and Rana Foroohar, as well as new chapters original to the book, plus the results of exclusive TIME polls.

Large-scale protest movements have recently transformed urban common spaces into sites of resistance. The Arab Spring, the European Summer, the American Fall in 2011, the revolts in India and South Africa and, more recently, in Istanbul, in several cities in Brazil, and in Hong Kong, are part of a common wave of protests which reclaims squares and urban places, monumentally designed as political and economic centres, as places for discussion and decision-making, for increasing participation and intervention in the governance of the community. Through banners and signs, open assemblies, and other communicative practices in the encampments and interconnecting physical and virtual spaces, participants permanently reconfigure their lived spaces discursively. The attempt to account for on-going social phenomena from the moment they first happen, and with an international perspective, undoubtedly represents a theoretical and methodological challenge. This book is a successful and innovative attempt to address this challenge, capturing the complex interplay between social, spatial, and communicative practices, drawing on complementary and alternative methods. Originally published in Journal of Language and Politics issue 13:4 (2014).

Occupy World Street offers a sweeping vision of how to reform our global economic and political structures, break away from empire, and build a world of self-determining sovereign states that respect the need for ecological sustainability and uphold human rights.

With urgency and clarity, Noam Chomsky speaks with the movement as it transitions from occupying tent camps to occupying the national conscience

The grassroots movement that started Sept. 17, 2011, with a protest in a park near Wall Street has mushroomed into a series of demonstrations in hundreds of cities around the world. In a year of protests from the Middle East to Madison, Wis., the Occupy uprising, a passionate outcry for economic justice, has been defined by its lack of definition. Now from TIME comes an illuminating collection of stories that answers many of the key questions about Occupy: How did it get started? What's behind the anger of the so-called 99% this group claims to represent? Who leads this leaderless movement? What should its agenda be? How can it transcend the occupation of tiny Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan? What Is Occupy? includes chapters from the pages of TIME by columnists like Joe Klein and Rana Foroohar, as well as new chapters original to the book, plus the results of exclusive TIME polls.

In the fall of 2011, a small protest camp in downtown Manhattan exploded into a global uprising, sparked in part by the violent overreactions of the police. An unofficial record of this movement, Occupy! combines adrenalin-fueled first-hand accounts of the early days and weeks of Occupy Wall Street with contentious debates and thoughtful reflections, featuring the editors and writers of the celebrated n+1, as well as some of the world’s leading radical thinkers, such as Slavoj Žižek, Angela Davis, and Rebecca Solnit. The book conveys the intense excitement of those present at the birth of a counterculture, while providing the movement with a serious platform for debating goals, demands, and tactics. Articles address the history of the “horizontalist” structure at OWS; how to keep a live-in going when there is a giant mountain of laundry building up; how very rich the very rich have become; the messages and meaning of the “We are the 99%” tumblr website; occupations in Oakland, Boston, Atlanta, and elsewhere; what happens next; and much more.