Why libertarian municipalism is more needed today than ever before
We can understand almost all of today’s crises to be crises of democracy. Representative ‘democracy’ has turned people from empowered citizens to alienated constituents. Libertarian municipalism, which promotes direct democracy, is an essential tool to regain power at the citizen level and provide solutions to…
Governing Kurdistan: Self-Administration in the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq and the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria
The author, Joost Jongerden, dives deep into the the the ideas of the nation-state and a societal self-organization questioning and how these two systems of governance differ and what the societal implications are of these differences, based on two examples. One model is the Kurdistan…
Radicalising democracy: How Hannah Arendt’s legacy endures in Barcelona
Writer Hettie O’Brien analyses Hannah Arendt’s model of council democracy, and how Barcelona en Comú are transforming the way democracy works. According to O’Brien, if Arendt had been alive today, she may have looked to Barcelona’s government and Europe’s fearless cities movement for examples of…
‘A rebirth of municipal socialism’ in Birmingham? The Council’s policy of ‘local wealth building’ through new municipal services and local procurement
With amazing creativity in the toughest of times, in 2018 in the UK, they were seeing the first shoots of the renaissance of local government for the many, not the few—the rebirth of municipal socialisme. With the objective to seize every opportunity to develop and…
New municipalism: A video explainer
Stir to Action has worked in partnership with the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity at De Montfort University in Leicester to produce a new video resource for the municipalist movement. The video was inspired by CURA’s Municipal Socialism in the 21st Century event in…
Scaling out: Translocal solidarity and the new municipalism
The new municipalist agenda is shaping up worldwide. The requirement for successful municipalist experiences to exceed the local level and enter the regional or national agenda might jeopardize their existence, since it challenges the very bases of their conception. The notion of growth by “scaling…
Animal liberation from below: toward a radical interspecies municipalism
The political Left, especially in its anti-authoritarian strains, has a long history of supporting welfare and even rights for nonhuman animals. Anarchists such as Leo Tolstoy and Elisée Reclus were vegetarian and drew explicit links between violence against humans and other species. Similar views were…
Municipalism: The next political revolution?
The way that reality is laid out for us at the moment it might seem a bit defeated and hopeless. Reviewing some of the accomplishments and origins of municipalism shines a light on what according to Murray Bookchin pointed out can be a way to…
How to build a new world in the shell of the old
If we want real change, should we draw up a sketch of a just society and then simply march towards it? We think it’s better to look around and find the seeds of a better future—perhaps dormant—in the present, and nurture them into a viable…