ABSTRACT
This chapter contributes to the scholarship of protests and social movements in several ways and it broadly addresses the applicability of social movement theory. The bank crash and the resulting fiscal and diplomatic crisis created economic loss and financial trouble for many, directly making a substantial proportion of the public receptive to protest motivation. Early social movement scholarship emphasized that crises are conducive to mass protest because they create social breakdown, by producing social disintegration and widespread personal strain. The work contributes to this general approach by illustrating how the interpretations and actions of goal-driven agents play a role in translating abrupt change into large-scale protest mobilization. The emerging protest discourse was rooted in discontent with the transformation of democracy in an age of neo-liberal globalization. Although the global financial crisis was incomprehensible to many economists and financial analysts when it struck, it disrupted the public's taken for granted reality, and framing it was thus in demand.
