The 'Arab spring', the Spanish indignados, the Greek aganaktismenoi and the Occupy Wall Street movement all share a number of distinctive traits; they made extensive use of social networking and were committed to the direct democratic participation of all as they co-ordinated and conducted their actions. Leaderless and self-organized, they were socially and ideologically heterogeneous, dismissing fixed agendas or ideologies. Still, the assembled multitudes that animated these mobilizations often claimed to speak in the name of ’the people’, and they aspired to empowered forms of egalitarian self-government in common. Similar features have marked collective resistances from the Zapatistas and the Seattle protests onwards, giving rise to theoretical and practical debates over the importance of these ideological and political forms. By engaging with the controversy between the autonomous, biopolitical ’multitude’ of Hardt and Negri and the arguments in favour of the hegemony of ’the people’ advanced by J. Rancière, E. Laclau, C. Mouffe and S. Zizek the central aim of this book is to discuss these instances of collective mobilization, to probe the innovative practices and ideas they have developed and to debate their potential to reinvigorate democracy whilst seeking something better than ’disaster capitalism’.

Dr Alexandros Kioupkiolis is a lecturer in contemporary political theory at the Faculty of Law, Economics & Political Sciences of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Previously, he has also taught political philosophy at the University of Cyprus. He has studied Political Theory at the Universities of Essex (MA) and Oxford (DPhil). Giorgios Katsambekis studied Political Science at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where he also received his MA degree in Political Analysis in autumn 2009. He is a PhD candidate at the School of Political Sciences of the same university.