Constructing and Navigating Autonomous Self-Organization: Notes and Experiences from Community Struggles in Mexico.
Constructing and Navigating Autonomous Self-Organization: Notes and Experiences from Community Struggles in Mexico.
Date
2018-08
Authors
Knight, Ryan A.
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Political Science
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Abstract
This dissertation explores autonomous politics as political resistance, through an engagement
with various processes of communal self-organization being carried out in Mexico. Resisting the
approach to “autonomy” as a static and separate space that is fully self-determined, this
dissertation seeks to explore the complexities and tensions that characterize struggles for
autonomous self-organization through their ongoing construction and navigation of internal and
external forces.
Through a look at the struggle of the community assembly in Eloxochitlán de Flores Magón,
Oaxaca, armed forces of community self-defense and justice in the states of Michoacán and
Guerrero, and the community radio milieu that crisscrosses much of the country, this dissertation
explores the diversity and located-ness of autonomous processes and struggles in the context of
Mexico. It seeks to show how autonomous struggles are located in historical, political, cultural
and social contexts that influence their character, thus making autonomy better understood in the
plural as “autonomies.” Simultaneously, this dissertation investigates the manner in which
autonomous struggles of self-organization are constantly working beyond their material
locations, in processes of cross-communal and cross-struggle organization.
There, between the located-ness and movement of autonomous processes of self-organization,
this dissertation seeks to understand autonomous struggle as ongoing processes of construction
and navigation that both rupture yet reinforce their insides and outsides. Through a focus on
what might be called the borderlands of autonomies, we can begin to understand the multiple
layers of complexity that animate resistance politics and animate autonomous struggles of selforganization
specifically.
Description
This dissertation explores autonomous politics as political resistance, through an engagement
with various processes of communal self-organization being carried out in Mexico. Resisting the
approach to “autonomy” as a static and separate space that is fully self-determined, this
dissertation seeks to explore the complexities and tensions that characterize struggles for
autonomous self-organization through their ongoing construction and navigation of internal and
external forces.
Through a look at the struggle of the community assembly in Eloxochitlán de Flores Magón,
Oaxaca, armed forces of community self-defense and justice in the states of Michoacán and
Guerrero, and the community radio milieu that crisscrosses much of the country, this dissertation
explores the diversity and located-ness of autonomous processes and struggles in the context of
Mexico. It seeks to show how autonomous struggles are located in historical, political, cultural
and social contexts that influence their character, thus making autonomy better understood in the
plural as “autonomies.” Simultaneously, this dissertation investigates the manner in which
autonomous struggles of self-organization are constantly working beyond their material
locations, in processes of cross-communal and cross-struggle organization.
There, between the located-ness and movement of autonomous processes of self-organization,
this dissertation seeks to understand autonomous struggle as ongoing processes of construction
and navigation that both rupture yet reinforce their insides and outsides. Through a focus on
what might be called the borderlands of autonomies, we can begin to understand the multiple
layers of complexity that animate resistance politics and animate autonomous struggles of selforganization
specifically.
Keywords
anarchist,
Indigenous,
autonomous
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