Civil disobedience has become an endangered concept. Or at least that was the case until a wave of mass non-violent dissent hit North Africa, parts of South-West Asia, Western Europe and North America during 2011, raising all sorts of issues about how to understand contemporary political unrest as well as bringing the legitimacy of economic and political institutions into question. Even at the time, an obvious case could be made for regarding a large number of the protests as civil disobedience, but some commentators were cautious about doing so. They raised concerns about the relevance of the very idea of “civil disobedience” to something so new and so radical. In the course of this book I will attempt to allay these fears and to show that claims of civil disobedience have a vital, forward-looking role to play. Moreover, they can defensibly be made about a wide range of actions including many of those carried out by participants in the Occupy Movement in America and Western Europe. This opening chapter will be given over to a narrative account of the latter. My undisguised determination to vindicate the relevance of civil disobedience may, however, raise some concerns about the narrative, about the possibility that it could be skewed to support my overall conclusion. Like all such narratives of dissent, it may be challenged in point of detail and interpretation. There is, after all, a gap that invariably opens up between protest on the ground and subsequent reportage. Nonetheless, what follows is an outline of events that should be recognizable to participants and recognizable also to the vastly larger number of sympathetic onlookers whose connection to events was primarily through the popular media. In places, it may also capture a sense of the excitement of the moment.