The years 2008-12 saw waves of political and social protest take place across the world, from the Occupy Movement, to the Arab Spring, to the London riots. These protests took place in the context of the global economic crash and the immediate political response. This book uses original empirical data gathered among rioters and protesters in the UK, Spain, Greece and Egypt to inform a theoretical critique of contemporary politics and social order; in so doing it examines and makes sense of the fundamental motivations of rioters and political protestors and connects these motivations to an objective social reality of global economic collapse, austerity cuts and mass unemployment.Written by leading criminological theorists and drawing on the work of Lacan, Badiou and Zizek, this book makes a major contribution to contemporary debates on social order, postmodernism and cultural capitalism.