In recent years, following the collapse of the peace process between the Turkish state and the Kurdish freedom movement, the struggle for autonomy in the towns and cities of northern Kurdistan, or Bakur, has undergone a significant shift from a non-violent re-organization of social and...

The J – K Plan in its concrete form is the product of a self-generated organizing challenge that emerged from the 2008 Ideological Conference of MXGM and NAPO. The challenge was to test the strength of our organizing model and work in the South after...

Berlin inhabitants are discussing a series of radical measures to limit private interests and reverse the housing crisis. The struggle, led by citizens and supported by the municipal government, could be on the cusp of a housing revolution. However, this revolution could founder due to...

In an extraordinary move, the Asheville City Council apologized for the North Carolina city’s historic role in slavery, discrimination and denial of basic liberties to Black residents and voted to provide reparations to them and their descendants. This resolution called on the city to create...

Unions controlled by the rank-and-file can serve as a dual power bridgehead towards the democratization of cities, states and capital. Photo: Pixabay

Since the summer of 2019, Commons Network has been working with a team of civil servants and activists, supported by the municipality. The Fearless team uses the name ‘The 99 of Amsterdam’ for this new movement, referring to the 99 neighbourhoods of Amsterdam while also...

How has COVID-19 affected municipalism’s confederal and democratizing mission? In Spain, as elsewhere, the government’s response to the pandemic has implied a centralization of power. At the same time, municipalities are seeing their already limited resources stretched to the limit by the health and economic...

With nationalist parties resurgent throughout Europe, more and more European nationals are vesting their political hopes in national governments. But for those new migrants without increasingly-coveted EU citizenship, the institutions most likely to come to their aid are not nation states, but local and city...

Scholars of participatory democracy have long noted dynamic interactions and transformations within and between political spaces that can foster (de)democratisation. At the heart of this dynamism lie (a) the processes through which top‐down “closed” spaces can create opportunities for rupture and democratic challenges and (b)...

In this podcast there’s a discussion of the work of Murray Bookchin, relating it to the experiences and debates around municipalism and wider left political practices and theory. The guests focus the discussion on the recent edited collection of Bookchin’s work: The Next Revolution: Popular...

For over 50 years, one of the largest open air landfills in Europe has been poisoning the soil and air of Belgrade suburbs. French water and waste management giant Suez has signed a major contract with the leaders of the Serbian capital to build a...

For Mexico, Latin America and the international left, what emerged from the Chiapan mist along with the Zapatistas was the specter of revolution with a capital R—something the Mexican autocracy of the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the PRI, believed it had killed a long time...