ABSTRACT
The opening chapter provides a background into the global economic crisis, the growing crisis of political representation and how broad sectors of the middle class, especially in North America and Europe, have become subject to downward social mobility, proletarianization and mass pauperization. How such citizens should be understood as political agents who have resisted their condition through demand-making and collective protest in several national contexts since the 2008 global crisis is discussed. They do not behave as purely rational economic actors. The economic and political crisis in Argentina in 2001–02 as a paradigmatic case study for analyzing middle-class resistance was introduced, and the study’s methodology was outlined.
