State of Power 2018

An annual anthology on global power and resistance.

Popular movements everywhere are on the rise at the same time as we face ever-greater corporate impunity and increasing state violence. In TNI's seventh flagship State of Power report, we examine today's social movements, their potential to build counter-power, and how we can best resist injustice as well as lay grounds for long-term transformation.

Contents

Marching forward: Women, resistance and building counter-power

An interview with Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres, Medha Patkar and Nonhle Mbuthuma

As hundreds of thousands of women prepare to join more than 250 marches across the US and the world, three inspiring social movement leaders from Honduras, India and South Africa share their perspectives on how to build durable and effective popular movements.

‘Beneath the Pavements, the Beach’ – or the Whirlpool? Lessons of 1968 for building counter-power today

Hilary Wainwright

The revolutions of 1968 have an ambivalent legacy - they both regenerated capitalism but also experimented with forms of participation and transformative power that can and are inspiring today's social movements.

Thinking freedom: Achieving the impossible collectively

An interview with Michael Neocosmos

Real emancipation emerges out of the universalist thinking that emerges from collective struggle and must not be conflated with the politics of representation whether by parties or states.

From protest movements to transformative politics

Luciana Castellina 

Movements are not enough to build counter-power. There is a need for a new kind of political party to mediate organized and diverse peoples and to rebuild the connective tissue that binds society and politics.

Making counter-power out of madness

Laura Flanders

How can movements in the US build counter-power out of Trumpian madness? Against the odds, a new vision is emerging that seeks to bring together a systemic critique with an embodied practice based on shared decision-making, solidarity economics and community-based approaches to prosperity and security.

Without translation, no hay revolución! 

Eline Müller and Alice Froidevaux

Language – and thus translation and interpretation – is about access, about participation, about power. How can we bring about language justice within transnational social movements?

Flowing movement:

Building alternative water governance in Mexico

Gerardo Alatorre Frenk

The Mexican government's decision to acknowledge access to water as a human right led to a massive civil society response including 99 public forums to define what good water governance looks like. What can we learn from the experience?

Madrid’s Community Gardens: Where neighbourhood counter-powers put down roots

José Luis Fernández Casadevante Kois, Nerea Morán and Nuria del Viso

What if, rather than the barricade, we were to think of counter-power in terms of a space such as a community garden?

People in defence of life and territory: Counter-power and self-defence in Latin America collectively

Raúl Zibechi

Against a backdrop of state and corporate violence that threatens the lives of the poorest, many communities in Latin America have created self-defence groups and community police forces. How do these counter-power structures differ from those of the state?

Drawing counter-power: Reflections from State of Power illustrator

Ammar Abo Bakr

Acclaimed Egyptian artist, Ammar Abo Bakr provided the illustrations for the essays supported by the graphic designer Adam Shalaan. The web design was by Evan Clayburg. Here Ammar reflects on the process and the importance of the 'glitches' in the illustrations.

All these reports can be downloaded for free on TNI's website.

To support, you can download the report and make a donation instead at https://www.tni.org/en/donate-to-tni