Zapatistas

The Zapatista Army for National Liberation burst onto the world stage on 1 January 1994, the implementation day of the NAFTA free trade zone across North America, when a group of 3000 indigenous guerrillas attacked and occupied several municipalities and townships in the Mexican state of Chiapas. On that day Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatista commander, announced a revolution, and declared war on the Mexican government and global capitalism. Since then, there have been twelve years of war, destruction of indigenous communities by the federal army, and massacres by allied paramilitary groups. But there have also been, amongst the communities under Zapatista control, twelve years of resistance, of direct democracy, of autonomous education, and of intercontinental meetings for humanity and against neoliberalism. The Zaptistas have been an inspiration for thousands of activists across the world. They have also attracted much attention from political theorists and analysts. Despite the amount of attention the Zapatistas have aroused, there is still little consensus about the nature, strategies and efficacy of the movement. "Zapatistas" provides a bold new approach to understanding the Zapatista insurrection. Firstly, Mentinis critically examines the integrity and logic of the Zaptista project with tools from radical political theory. In particular, he draws on concepts of hegemony from Antonio Gramsci and Ernesto Laclau, and of 'the event' from Alain Badiou. He also employs ideas from Situationism, the 'project of autonomy' of Cornelius Castoriadis and the 'constituent power' of Antonio Negri. Secondly, informed by a nine-month visit to the Zapatista autonomous zone in 2001, Mentinis looks to the indigenous political theory emerging within the Zapatista movement itself, and the importance the movement has had for radical politics and radical subjectivities, to deepen and develop the radical political theory of the academy.