ABSTRACT
How do instances of popular protest spread across borders? 1 This question, which has eluded social scientists for decades, appears to have become more salient than ever in the wake of the mass protests that rocked the world in the wake of the Arab Spring in early 2011. In this chapter, we look at the diffusion of anti-austerity protests from Spain to Greece to the United States, focusing in particular on the claims and organizational forms behind these mobilizations. We note that, despite clear local varieties between them, the 15M movement in Spain, the Movement of the Squares in Greece, and the Occupy movement in the United States have a number of basic elements in common, most notably their critique of representation, their insistence on autonomy from political parties and the state, and their commitment to a prefigurative politics based on horizontality, direct democracy, and self-organization.
