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There are flickers of antagonism that often precede that combustive moment when a protest march turns into a violent street-protest. This chapter explores some of the more prominent tensions within the anarchist and anti-authoritarian space. It discusses tensions around gender and sexuality politics; tendencies and currents; tactics and media engagement, as well as violence and solidarity. The Athenian anarchist and anti-authoritarian space is rife with tensions and frictions that constitute the practical consequences of this freedom. Significant conflicts are apparent on issues of gender and sexual politics, and on suitable tactics and appropriate forms of direct action. There is no one Athenian anarchism or anti-authoritarian current that can be defined as the Athens's way. In the face of all these tensions, disagreements and catalysts for conflict, it is remarkable that the space is still such a prominent and prolific radical force.
The Athenian anarchist and anti-authoritarian movement has been reinvigorated in recent years. Its public protests and battles against the Greek state, police and other capitalist institutions are prolific and highly visible, replete with rioting, barricades and Molotov cocktails. This book is concerned not so much with anarchist theory, as with examining the forces that give the Athenian anarchist and anti-authoritarian movement its specific shape. The author draws on Alberto Melucci's (1995a) work on collective identity, while offering a first-hand, ethnographic account of Athenian anarchists and anti-authoritarians in action, based on his time there in 2011 and 2013, living, squatting and protesting within this milieu. In the course of the chapters of the book, the author argues that varying shades of anarchic tendencies, and ensuing ideological and practical disagreements, are overcome for the most part in (often violent) street-protests. Athenian anarchists and antiauthoritarians are a pertinent area of research because of both their politics and their geographical location. There is the whole 'rise of anarchism throughout the activist world' phenomenon, visible from Seattle to Genoa, Quebec City to São Paulo. Anarchist and anti-authoritarian social movements are prominent actors in resistance to the current phase of capitalism in multiple, global locations. Throughout Europe, North and Latin America, Asia and the Antipodes, radical resistance to neo-liberalism often has an anarchist and/ or anti-authoritarian cast.
Migration rights activism and other antiracist activism tend often to be analysed and discussed in separate academic settings and fields, which might effect a lack of attention to the ways in which a separation of border struggles and other antiracisms might conceal the mechanisms of bordering and structural racism that connect them. In line with critical traditions of studies of borders and citizenship, the chapter argues that a binary conceptualisation of migrants/citizens is a key analytical problem that produces such a gap. Mainly through a theoretical discussion, but also drawing on some examples, the chapter demonstrates that it is crucial to work with a conceptualisation that enables an analytical understanding of how the structures of power, surveillance, control and categorisation that produce those challenges ultimately stretch across the binary, leaving the categories of migrants and citizens less clear-cut. The concept of methodological de-nationalism is placed at the centre of the discussion, and the chapter argues that the analytical approaches of methodological de-nationalism could be translated to strategic tools and articulations of social movements, political claims and struggles around migration rights and antiracism. Ultimately, it puts forward the suggestion that it might be productive to think about activist strategies and articulations along the lines of methodological nationalism and de-nationalism. I consider the ways in which organising based on place and on labour, rather than on categories of identity or migration status, have a potential to bridge categorical boundaries, but also to foreground the instability inherent in the categories themselves. We could call this a potential (not always realised) for a ‘methodologically de-nationalist’ approach to migration rights and antiracist struggles.
As for the anarchists and the anti-authoritarians, the focus of direct action has momentarily shifted. Assistance to refugee communities and local victims of austerity measures is a continual concern for the Athenian anarchist and anti-authoritarian space. Such manifestations of human misery, combined with Greece's history of radical politics and regime change, has inspired both resistance and a belief in the real possibility of alternative political realities. The Athenian anarchist and anti-authoritarian movement has been at the forefront in imagining and fighting for these alternative realities. This chapter revisits and summarises what the author had learnt about the movement, its internal constitution, dynamics and identity. Historically, a show of force and a unified front against external forces renews and rejuvenates the strength of the anarchist and anti-authoritarian space against hostilities. There is immense personal satisfaction and motivation that is gained from this collective action, forging bonds of solidarity, unity and affinity.
Much like Helena's call to 'Fuck May 68', contemporary activists feel no obligation to emulate historical repertoires. This chapter bursts with examples of anarchists and anti-authoritarians frequently producing novel forms of direct action. It presents two prevailing themes stemming from the author's oral history discussions on more recent anarchist and anti-authoritarian history. Athenian activists are well aware of contemporary Greek anarchist and anti-authoritarian history, unlike the more limited knowledge of early anarchist history. As much as a plethora of political actions and events inform these contemporary historical reflections, militant, often-violent direct actions dominate the narrative presented in the chapter. The author suggests that Athenian anarchists and anti-authoritarians are not restricted or limited by historical examples of praxis. While there is a clear pattern of violent direct actions, protests, riots and property damage, anarchist and anti-authoritarian practices are simultaneously refreshed with diverse and novel forms of direct actions.
Migrant organising and solidarity movements around asylum rights facilitate migrants’ political claims against border regimes and nationalisms, but humanitarian claims also risk victimising migrants and feed into a colonial order. There are parallels to antiracism, which can be both important bottom-up protests by Black and Indigenous People and People of Colour, and movements that reinforce white normativity and innocence. This chapter examines how mobilisation for refugee rights around 2015 sparked new forms of community work in Swedish small towns. This community work brought people together around new notions of what could be collective and common responsibilities. The groups engaged in creating places to meet, using this as a basis for organising around increased local participation. The chapter discusses such community work as a way of engaging with new commons of local societies. Relating the commons to discussions about local cultures that can deal with problems of racism and difference in radical ways, it discusses how the concept of conviviality can offer new ways forward in these dilemmas of solidarity, asylum and antiracism, on the one hand, and the ambush of whiteness and its proclaimed innocence, and Eurocentric ideals, on the other. The so-called refugee crises can be understood as a ‘glitch’, a failure in the normal infrastructures, which opened up new ways of organising the commons. However, the conviviality of the commons, based on migrant influence on the community group, is not a guarantee that the racial status quo and whiteness are not reproduced.
After years of studying the issue of racism, UNESCO in 1960 described racism as the social cancer of our time, which gnaws away slowly and insidiously until it invades the whole organism of society and erupts in violence and death. This cancer was alive before UNESCO diagnosed it and has continued to evolve, corrupting more societies. The changing form of this cancer requires the development of new techniques and new research to combat it. One of the main differences between the society we live in today and that of 1960, when UNESCO published its findings, is the development of and advance in information technology, which has been credited as the most outstanding agent of globalisation. Information technology and the internet have also given room to new forms of racism – one where the perpetrator can afford to be invisible. However, efforts to combat racism have never been as vital as today. As antiracism efforts in and out of school evolve, researchers have argued that combining antiracism with information technology in an antiracism application could produce positive outcomes in the fight against racism. This chapter focuses on how students in one international school critique three racism-reporting mobile phone applications within the context of a wider project of designing and building a new antiracism app using critical discourse analysis and set around the framework of critical race theory. This highlights the complexities around race, racism, antiracism and antiracism mobile phone application discourse, as well as the outcomes of this complex engagement.
This chapter explores knowledge practices and possibilities for disobedient knowledge in the context of administrative border struggles, i.e. actions that negotiate and/or challenge administrative borders. These might include, but are not limited to, efforts to make one’s asylum claim heard, or justifying another legal status and arranging one’s presence without a regularised status. Administrative border struggles often require detailed knowledge of legal norms and their requirements, and the questions that the chapter explores are what does epistemic acceptance of state/borders mean, and what would disobedient knowledge that does not give in to the rational-legal authority of administrative borders mean. Empirically, it draws on empirical research with people who, after a negative asylum decision, seek to regularise their status in Finland. The chapter argues that disobedient knowledge requires acknowledging multiple truth regimes and recognising manifold knowledge.
Greece's fertile anarchist and anti-authoritarian history shares constant contention and metamorphosis in its own evolution, albeit while spurning the clamour for state power. Greece's anarchism has shifted between currents since surfacing as a social movement in the 1860s. This chapter focuses on the period between the 1860s and World War II, which was dominated by social anarchist currents including anarcho-collectivism, anarcho-communism and anarcho-syndicalism. It relies on the works of ethnohistorians to empower the voices of the author's interviewees. The author begins the chapter with some background on Greece's transition into statehood. This is followed by a history of early Greek anarchism that is largely informed by Tina, Yianni and Vasili, the author's three respondents with extensive knowledge of this period, and is primarily supported with clarifying evidence from Paul Pomonis' The Early Days of Greek Anarchism.
The chapter aims to combine together three different aspects concerning and related to migrations to Italy/Europe: land-grabbing in the main countries of migration to Italy/Europe (Romania, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt); border regimes in two different Mediterranean areas, namely Ventimiglia (Italy) and Bihać-Velika Kladuša (Bosnia); and labour of migrant people in Italian agriculture. The three phenomena are analysed and interpreted through the theoretical and methodological framework of the Black Mediterranean. The chapter offers reflections in order to problematise the role of archives, intellectuals and institutions in imposing a hegemonic narrative on migration. At the same, its aim is to focus on various forms of resistance and disobedience in the three contexts taken into account. To reach this goal it introduces the 'backlight approach', namely a way to problematise stories outside history; traces that cannot claim the right to be historical sources; and forms of invisibility and the hypervisualisation of Black racialised bodies.