Following the subprime lending crisis and the financial market crash of 2008-9, governments throughout Europe implemented a series of debt reduction measures collectively known as austerity. Across the continent, citizens and social movements mobilized dramatically against these measures, calling strikes, occupying public squares, and developing new forms of political action. These movements challenged the political and economic elite consensus that there was no alternative to cutting spending, and protecting the financial industry at the expense of the public sector; they also challenged the political systems that gave rise to these measures and assumptions, demanding democratic renewal, and imagining new modes of citizenship and political participation. In order to better understand this wave of protest – its common themes, its local contexts, its ideas and its actions – this collection brings together leading scholars in the field to provide a series of theoretically grounded, empirically rich analyses of Europe's anti-austerity mobilizations. This book was originally published as a special issue of Social Movement Studies.

Cristina Flesher Fominaya is an Editor of Social Movement Studies, a Founding Editor of Interface Journal, and author of Social Movements and Globalization (Palgrave). She is Reader in Social Politics and Media at Loughborough University, UK. She publishes widely on European and global social movements, hybrid parties, digital politics and media, collective identity, democracy, autonomy, and political participation.

Graeme Hayes is Reader in Political Sociology at Aston University, UK, and an Editor of Social Movement Studies. His work focuses on the tactics and ideas of social movements, and their inter-relationship with the state. He is the author of two monographs and co-editor of three collections, most recently Occupy! A Global Movement. Hope, Tactics and Challenges (Routledge, 2014).