Raúl Zibechi: Urban Social Movements and Territories in Resistance

Raúl Zibechi is the Uruguayan journalist and thinker who has spent three decades studying Latin America's urban social movements from within, accompanying Argentine piqueteros, residents of El Alto in Bolivia, Brazil's homeless workers and communities on the peripheries of Lima, Bogotá and Montevideo. His thesis, developed in Dispersing Power (2006) and Territories in Resistance (2008), is that Latin America's popular sectors do not merely protest against neoliberalism but build in their territories forms of life, production and decision-making that work as non-state powers. The city, and especially its self-built periphery, is where that construction takes place.

Dispersing Power: El Alto and the neighbourhood councils

Dispersing Power analyses the uprising of El Alto, the Aymara city that in October 2003 blockaded La Paz and brought down President Sánchez de Lozada. Zibechi shows that this capacity came not from parties or unions but from the neighbourhood councils that govern each district, from rotating systems of office inherited from the Andean ayllu and from a family economy in which home, workshop and shop merge. Those structures, which the city had built in order to survive without the state, became a mobilisation machine when needed. Power was not seized: it was dispersed among thousands of assemblies.

Territories in Resistance and the other societies

In Territories in Resistance Zibechi travels through the peripheries of several capitals and describes what he calls other societies: neighbourhoods where land occupation, self-building, community kitchens, and schools and health centres run by residents themselves create a fabric that neither the market nor the state produces. He argues that territory, understood as space collectively appropriated and organised, is the material base of Latin American urban movements, unlike European ones centred on demands to the state. Without territory of their own, he says, no autonomy is possible.

Spaces of invisibility on the urban periphery

Zibechi insists that much of this action takes place in spaces of invisibility: the communal kitchen, the neighbourhood assembly, the barter network, the community radio. They appear neither in the news nor in statistics, but they sustain daily life and prepare the visible mobilisations. Against a sociology that counts only demonstrations, he proposes looking at the silent practices that reproduce life outside institutions, which in crises such as Argentina's in 2001 or the pandemic of 2020 proved to be the real infrastructure of working-class neighbourhoods.

Autonomy against co-optation by the state

The central principle of his work is autonomy. Zibechi criticises the co-optation of movements by the progressive governments of the 2000s, which in exchange for subsidies and posts defused their capacity for conflict, and argues that a movement dependent on the state ceases to be a movement. In Decolonising Critical Thought and Emancipatory Practices (2015) he extends the critique to academia and NGOs, which translate struggles into categories that do not belong to them. His position has been contested by those who hold that renouncing the state means renouncing a change of scale, but it has influenced a whole generation of urban collectives.

For urban studies, Zibechi offers a reading of the Latin American periphery as a space of political production and not only of deprivation. Its neighbourhoods are not the absence of city but another city built under its own rules. That view converses with Marcelo Lopes de Souza and with the notion of insurgent planning, and forces public policy to ask whether it reaches these territories to recognise and strengthen what already exists, or to replace it with services that dismantle the collective organisation that made survival possible.