Economic Crisis and Mass Protest

This volume focusses on Iceland's 'Pots and Pans Revolution', a series of large scale antigovernment protests and riots that took place in Iceland in autumn 2008 and January 2009 in the aftermath of a national financial collapse triggered by the global financial crisis - protests that brought down the government. While having almost no tradition of mass protest, Iceland was among the first countries to respond to the global crisis with large-scale protest and the case offers and offers a rare opportunity to study processes that can trigger political protest in an affluent, democratic society. Using qualitative and quantitative data, this volume situates the protest in historical-cultural context and applies social movement theory to explore how the economic crisis ended up triggering the protests, thus providing a step toward understanding why the global financial crisis has triggered public unrest in other countries.