Street Politics in the Age of Austerity From the Indignados to Occupy

The past few years have seen an unexpected resurgence of street-level protest movements around the world, from the uprisings of the Arab Spring to the rise of the anti-austerity Indignados in Spain and Greece to the global spread of the Occupy movement. This collection is designed to offer a comparative analysis of these movements, setting them in international, socio-economic, and cross-cultural perspective in order to help us understand why movements emerge, what they do, how they spread, and how they fit into both local and worldwide historical contexts. As the most significant wave of mass protests in decades continues apace, this book offers an authoritative analysis that could not be more timely.

Marcos Ancelovici is Professor of Sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). He has won the 2008 Georges Lavau Dissertation Award and the 2013 Frank L. Wilson Best Paper Award, both from the American Political Science Association. He works on social movements, labor politics, globalization, and the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, and is currently studying anti-austerity protests in France and Spain.

Pascale Dufour is Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Montreal and Director of the Research Center on Politics and social development (www.cpds.umontreal.ca). She works on social movements and collective action in comparative perspective. Her emerging research examines student 2012 mobilizations in Quebec (Canada).

Héloïse Nez (PhD in Sociology, Université de Paris 8/Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona) is Assistant Professor (Maître de conferences) of Sociology at the Université de Tours (France), Researcher in the UMR CITERES (Cities, Territories, Environment and Societies) and Associate Researcher in the Center for the Study of Social Movements in Paris (CEMS-EHESS). The main topics of her research are social movements, participatory democracy, and citizen competence.