In this chapter I locate the social and political developments paving the way for the Gezi Episode within a world-historical canvas that frames the material foundations of global movements since the Seattle protests in 1999. In the first part, the emphasis is on the ways in which these movements came to develop direct, horizontal, autonomous, anti-capitalist practices of participation and deliberation as the primary logic of organising against inequality, marginalisation and dispossession deepened under neoliberal urbanisation. I will then use this framework to interpret contentious politics in Turkey during the early 2000s as an integral part of this movement wave. In the last part, I will focus on Istanbul and tell the story of how two decades of brewing discontent under the AKP regime – in the face of environmental degradation, urban gentrification, market reforms and the gradual rise of an authoritarian rule with conservative Islamic undertones – culminated in a political force that paved the way to the Gezi uprising.