Laurence is a writer, teacher and activist specialising in social movements. If you went searching for key academics in the field in Europe Laurence’s name would pop up pretty fast. He co-founded the practitioner-oriented social movement journal Interface, co-ran an activist Masters for five years and works with activists doing PhDs on their own  movement’s practice. His books include Why Social Movements Matter; Understanding European Movements; Voices of 1968; Silence would be Treason: Last Writings of Ken Saro-Wiwa; and We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism. He has been involved in many different kinds of movement since the 1980s, including ecological, international solidarity, human rights and organising against repression, antiwar, community activism, radical media, self-organised spaces, alternative education and the alter-globalisation ‘movement of movements’.