Raúl Zibechi

Zibechi inverted the usual view of the periphery. Where the administration sees a shortfall of services, he describes a society that built itself: the families who occupied the land opened the streets, ran the water, set up the school and the communal kitchen before any official appeared. That self-construction leaves a social structure which does not disappear when the asphalt arrives.

His central concept is territory: not the ground, but the space where a group produces what it needs and decides for itself. From it comes his most debated thesis, dispersing power rather than taking it. Zibechi argues that movements which become parties and reach government tend to dismantle precisely what made them strong, and he prefers forms that resist having a head.

A Uruguayan journalist and popular educator born in 1952, Zibechi has written for three decades from Montevideo for Brecha and La Jornada, and has closely followed the movements of El Alto in Bolivia, Brazil's landless workers, the Zapatista communities and Argentina's villas. Dispersar el poder (2006) studied the Aymara insurrection in El Alto as a political form without leaders.

Territorios en resistencia (2008) is his synthesis: a tour of the continent's urban peripheries showing what Mexico City, Lima, Buenos Aires and Medellín have in common. His critique of social policy is the most uncomfortable part of his work: cash transfer programmes, he says, relieve poverty and at the same time defuse the community organisation that sustained it, because they replace the communal kitchen with an individual subsidy.