From Mexico to the Kurdish Freedom Movement: Redefining Resistance from Below

Across the globe, diverse movements and communities have for decades reconceptualized resistance by turning inward to reimagine other worlds. In Mexico, the Zapatistas are well-known for their amorphous and autonomous politics. Dozens of other communities in Mexico are deepening their own autonomous struggles, including the Purepecha, Ponchos, and the Zapotec. Edith Alvalos’ paper examines the Union of Indigenous Communities of the Northern Zone of the Isthmus or UCIZONI, an organization of over a dozen indigenous communities fighting to oppose extractivism in the Tehuantepec Isthmus in Oaxaca Mexico. Examining resistance beyond the reactionary framework, Avalos employs a feminist lens to examine the infrastructure built on collective decision making, practices of care and the reproduction of life as forms that resist in their construction of alternative worlds against structural violence. Carlos Cruz’s paper presents a historical analysis of the post-revolutionary Mexican state, disentangling the anti-anarchist postures and systems built into the state itself. His comparative study examines how early 20th century anarchist and Indigenous projects for autonomy were governed as incompatible with sovereignty, territorial management, and political order across liberal, revolutionary, and post-revolutionary regimes in Mexico. Beyond Mexico, we find similar projects for autonomy and self-determination, rooted in historical traditions that inform contemporary political imaginations. The Kurdish Freedom movement has been struggling for their own autonomy based on social ecology and women’s liberation. Yeter Tan’s paper examines how Kurdish migrants and refugees in Germany have become active agents of change by transferring, adapting, and expanding the non-state justice practices of the Kurdish Freedom Movement and Kurdish Women’s Movement. Where do these movements fall within the spectrum of critical thought? In an effort to understand these movements, new qualifiers have been placed onto critical traditions, where we find terms such as post-Marxism, open-Marxism and others. Further to the left, the qualifier is dropped altogether, namely in the anarchist tradition which has become the default home for such movements. Disentangling these differences, George Ygarza’s paper juxtaposes the anarchist tradition broadly defined, with what he refers to as place-informed movements to understand the latter on their own terms. Ygarza employs the anarchist black flag and Andean wiphala as symbolic metaphors to understand the different politics of anarchism and place-informed movements respectively. He argues that bringing place-informed movements into the anarchist fold ultimately obfuscates their unique politics of life.