ABSTRACT
The new politics emerging out of the food, fuel and financial crises that started in 2008 was born out of a sense of discontent with the ruling classes. The roots of the protests in country after country, and the responses they evoked can be best viewed, as this book argues, through the lens of a ‘politics of provisions,’ – the way in which “common people interacted with their rulers over subsistence,” and how these interactions were “permitted and shaped by pre-existing social and political networks, both among rioters and between them and their rulers” (Bohstedt 2016: 1036). Riots (or not) and responses (or repression) at moments of crises throw the ongoing politics of provisions into special focus by highlighting the boundaries of what the rulers will accept as a form of protest by the ruled, and what the ruled deem as necessary action.
