WHAT IS THE PROBLEM? BACKDROP When I started writing this essay, Athens was burning again. Muammar Gaddafi had been killed the day before. Occupy Wall Street was in its sixth week of protest in downtown Manhattan, its participants growing in number every day such that it has effectively become a curious melange of a functioning shanty town with celebrity endorsement and global media presence, in what is a private space, Zuccotti Park. The Occupy movement had spread worldwide, from small, almost timid protests in my hometown of Helsinki, to violent running battles with police on the streets of Rome. More than 950 cities took part in a coordinated global protest on 15 October 2011 across 82 countries, five months after the first Occupy protest in Spain. Some 500,000 people took part in the 15 October protest in Madrid alone (in Spain, almost half of all youth are unemployed). Unified by the #occupy hashtag and the slogan “We are the 99%”, the movement continues to grow. A few months earlier, from 6 to 10 August 2011, many towns and cities in the UK — mainly in London, Birmingham and Manchester — suffered violent riots of a scale and ferocity that had not been seen for a generation, if ever. While the UK was briefly close to breakdown in the early 1980s, and had witnessed mass protests and unrest many times before, the nature of the rioting, looting and arson attacks in August was essentially unprecedented as their cause was not clear. Whereas the earlier poll tax riots and miners’ strikes, for example, had a clear ideological disagreement at their heart, these riots seemed to be about something else. But what, exactly? After the recriminations and finger pointing, we are no closer to an answer. Explanations offered veer between feckless nihilism, moral breakdown and consumer culture, through to the belief that an entire generation has been systematically disenfranchised and discarded by 30 years of neoliberal social and economic policy. Either way, the cause was so deeply embedded, so fundamental, as to appear beyond the core capacity of government itself. This last year has also seen the Arab Spring unfolding across north Africa, with Tunisia and Egypt undergoing revolutions, Libya in civil war, civil uprisings in Bahrain, Syria and Yemen, and numerous other countries and states witnessing major protests — Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco and Oman among them. In July 2011, the USA was hours away from “shutting down government”, due to its own inability to agree on appropriate