2011 was supposed to be the year when everything changed. Protests erupted across the planet, largely as a response to the worsening economic situation that followed the 2007– 08 financial crash. These mobilisations, none of which seemed to have any real precedent in the years immediately prior to this post-crash emergence, were focused on challenging the political status quo. In more recent years, the tenets of these protest – rejecting the rule of governing elites, putting the concerns of the people at the forefront of politics and, of course, ‘taking back control’ – have become muddied by the rise of far-right populism. In 2011, however, the political challenge was not from the right but from a resurgent left, a left that had been positioned firmly on the sidelines of politics, at least since the peak of the alterglobalisation movement around the turn of the millennium if not since the fall of the Soviet Union a decade earlier. With respect to the economic realm, these movements brought class back into play, both as a defining feature of people's lives and of their dreams of a better future. ‘We are the 99%’ operated both as a slogan and as a framework that allowed people to express how common economic circumstances, like debt and precarity, impacted on their individual experiences. With respect to the political realm, this was echoed in scepticism, and at times outright rejection, of how societies were governed. In ostensibly democratic countries in North America and Europe, as much as in autocratic dictatorships in North Africa and the Middle East, protestors resented elite forms of governance that at best limited participation to ticking a box once every few years. This lack of accountability, they argued persuasively, was central to the problems that led not only to the financial woes brought on by the crash but also broader political and environmental crises.

The solution to this democratic deficit, and one of the orientations that separates the 2011 movements from the kind of far-right populism exemplified by Trump and Brexit, was to (re)instate democracy where it was lacking even in name and to deepen and expand it where it apparently already existed.