Introductory interview
Marching forward: Women, resistance and counter-power
An interview with Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres, Medha Patkar and Nonhle Mbuthuma
As hundreds of thousands of women prepare to join more than 250 marches across the US and the world, three inspiring social movement leaders from Honduras, India and South Africa share their perspectives on how to build durable and effective popular movements.
Essays
‘Beneath the pavements, the beach’ – or the whirlpool? Lessons of 1968
Hilary Wainwright
The revolutions of 1968 have an ambivalent legacy – they both regenerated capitalism but also experimented with forms of participation and transformative power that can and are inspiring today’s social movements.
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Thinking Freedom: achieving the impossible collectively
Interview with Michael Neocosmos
Real emancipation emerges out of the universalist thinking that emerges from collective struggle and must not be conflated with the politics of representation whether by parties or states.
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From protest movements to transformative politics
Luciana Castellina
Movements are not enough to build counter-power. There is a need for a new kind of political party to mediate organized and diverse peoples and to rebuild the connective tissue that binds society and politics.
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Without translation, no hay revolución!
Alice Froidevaux and Eline Müller
Language – and thus translation and interpretation – is about access, about participation, about power. How can we bring about language justice within transnational social movements?
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There is a new feminist militancy on the streets, across the globe and in the air. Social movements should use this moment to overcome the socialization of girls and boys that has been so hard to shift in order to permanently end the bullying and harassment typified in the likes of Trump.
Flowing Movement: Building alternative water governance in Mexico
Gerardo Alatorre Frenk
The Mexican government’s decision to acknowledge access to water as a human right led to a massive civil society response including 99 public forums to define what good water governance looks like. What can we learn from the experience?
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Madrid’s Community Gardens: Where neighbourhood counter-power puts down roots
José Luis Fernández Casadevante Kois, Nerea Morán and Nuria del Viso
What if, rather than the barricade, we were to think of counter-power in terms of a space such as a community garden?
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People in defence of life and territory: Counter-power and self-defence in Latin America
Raúl Zibechi
Against a backdrop of state and corporate violence that threatens the lives of the poorest, many communities in Latin America have created self-defence groups and community police forces. How do these counter-power structures differ from those of the state?
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Making counter-power out of madness
Laura Flanders
How can movements in the US build counter-power out of Trumpian madness? Against the odds, a new vision is emerging that seeks to bring together a systemic critique with an embodied practice based on shared decision-making, solidarity economics and community-based approaches to prosperity and security.
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Fighting for public health: How a Swedish rural community confronted neoliberal cutbacks
Desirée Enlund
The rural communities in the Västernorrland county of Northern Sweden are not used to being in the national spotlight, but in 2017 their struggle to stop cutbacks in maternity and emergency care made national news. What lessons can we learn on how to build counter-power in rural areas of the Global North?
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Design and Illustration
The illustration is by the acclaimed Egyptian artist, Ammar Abo Bakr and the web design by Evan Clayburg
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