Constructing Worlds Otherwise

“A survey of sustained autonomous people’s movements in Latin America that helps us rethink survival in the context of the extractivist State. It reimagines change even as it raises the quintessential question of how to move from episodic to radical social transformation.” –Johanna Fernández, historian and author of The Young Lords: A Radical History

“This is a book that follows the lead of Latin America’s societies in movement, from below and to the left. Zibechi takes us to the streets in these pages, helping us think through and work beyond the world’s crises with solutions and theories made by movements themselves. It is essential reading for expanding the radical imagination.” –Benjamin Dangl, author of The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia

“Raul has gifted us with a powerful tool for understanding pueblos/societies in movement–helping us to better understand what they are interrupting historically and breaking from theoretically–all grounded in movement practice-based theories. This is an absolute must read for everyone wanting to understand our world(s) and how they are already being changed, horizontally and affectively.” –Marina Sitrin, author of Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina

“Brilliant activist-scholar Zibechi takes us beyond the dogmatic, state-centric lefts of yesteryear to highlight the wisdom of emancipatory, antipatriarchal, and anticolonial thought and praxis from the global South. He offers insightful portrayals of place-based struggles of ‘peoples in movement, ’ including the Zapatistas, Indigenous peoples of the Colombian Cauca region, Kurdish women of Rojava, and the Brazilian MST. Their radical non-state and non-capitalist practices are constructing other worlds.” –Richard Stahler-Sholk, Professor Emeritus, Eastern Michigan University

Raúl Zibechi is a writer, popular educator, and journalist working with social organizations and processes in Latin America. He has published twenty books on social movements in which he has criticized outmoded, state-centered political culture. The books translated into English include Dispersing Power (2010), Territories in Resistance (2012), and The New Brazil (2014). He also publishes in various media in the region.

George Ygarza Quispe is a popular educator, critical scholar, and organic researcher on resistance and autonomous social and political formations. He has worked in Peru and North America thinking through hemispheric undercurrents. He teaches at Pitzer College.