The Occupy movement is an international protest movement against social and economic inequality, its primary goal being to make the economic and political relations in all societies less vertically hierarchical and more flatly distributed. Local groups often have different foci, but among the movement's prime concerns is the belief that large corporations and the global financial system control the world in a way that disproportionately benefits a minority, undermines democracy and is unstable.[8][9][10][11]

The first Occupy protest to receive wide coverage was Occupy Wall Street in New York City's Zuccotti Park, which began on 17 September 2011. By 9 October, Occupy protests had taken place or were ongoing in over 95 cities across 82 countries, and over 600 communities in the United States.[12][13][14][15][16] Although most active in the United States, by October 2012 there had been Occupy protests and occupations in dozens of other countries across every continent except Antarctica. For its first two months, authorities largely adopted a tolerant approach toward the movement,[citation needed] but this began to change in mid-November 2011 when they began forcibly removing protest camps. By the end of 2011 authorities had cleared most of the major camps, with the last remaining high profile sites – in Washington DC and London – evicted by February 2012.[17][18][19][20]

The Occupy movement is partly inspired by the Arab Spring,[21][22] and the Portuguese[23] and Spanish Indignants movement in the Iberian Peninsula,[24] as well as the Tea Party movement.[25][26][27] The movement commonly uses the slogan We are the 99%, the #Occupy hashtag format, and organizes through websites such as Occupy Together.[28] According to The Washington Post, the movement, which has been described as a "democratic awakening" by Cornel West, is difficult to distill to a few