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 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).

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.

Concerns about environmental risks have focused the minds of a generation. New movements are emerging to challenge those who would put profits before the planet. This volume represents the cutting edge of international research on global environmental movements and contributes to the on-going debates which may shape our future.

The fight for a $15 minimum wage. Nationwide teacher strikes. Bernie Sanders’s political revolution and the rise of AOC. Black Lives Matter. #MeToo. Read how the Occupy movement helped reshape American politics, culture and the groundbreaking movements to follow. "Fluidly written . . . Levitin’s enthusiasm is infectious . . . It is no exaggeration to say that Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots changed a good deal more of the landscape than Zuccotti Park’s three-quarters of an acre in New York’s financial district." —Tod Gitlin, The New York Times Book Review On the ten-year anniversary of the Occupy movement, Generation Occupy sets the historical record straight about the movement’s lasting impacts. Far from a passing phenomenon, Occupy Wall Street marked a new era of social and political transformation, reigniting the labor movement, remaking the Democratic Party and reviving a culture of protest that has put the fight for social, economic, environmental and racial justice at the forefront of a generation. The movement changed the way Americans see themselves and their role in the economy through the language of the 99 versus the 1 percent. But beyond that, in its demands for fairness and equality, Occupy reinvigorated grassroots activism, inaugurating a decade of youth-led resistance movements that have altered the social fabric, from Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock to March for Our Lives, the Global Climate Strikes and #MeToo. Bookended by the 2008 financial crisis and the coronavirus pandemic, Generation Occupy attempts to help us understand how we got to where we are today and how to draw on lessons from Occupy in the future.

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

Occupying Political Science is a collection of critical essays by New York based scholars, researchers, and activists, which takes an unconventional look at the Occupy Wall Street movement through concepts found in the field of political science. Both normative and descriptive in its approach, Occupying Political Science seeks to understand not only the origins, logic, and prospects of the OWS movement, but also its effect on political institutions, activism, and the very way we analyze power. It does so by asking questions such as: How does OWS make us rethink the discipline of political science, and how might the political science discipline offer ways to understand and illuminate aspects of OWS? How does social location influence OWS, our efforts to understand it, and the social science that we do? Through addressing topics including social movements and non-violent resistance, surveillance and means of social control, electoral arrangements, new social media and technology, and global connections, the authors offer a unique approach that takes seriously the implications of their physical, social and disciplinary location, in New York, both in relation to Occupy Wall Street, and in their role as scholars in political science.