Insurrectionary Uprisings is a compendium of essays that explore what it will take to win a world based on love and justice. From historical writing, including Thoreau, Gandhi and Arendt, to essays that address the multiple crises we face in the 21st century, the volume brings together authors and thinkers from around the globe. With an emphasis on the quotidian violence of racial monopoly capitalism and Western imperialism, Insurrectionary Uprisings insists that the possibility of revolutionary nonviolence rests, in part, on decolonization and decoloniality and a thorough analysis of the deep and violent roots of racial capitalism, settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy. Fannie Lou Hamer’s testimony at the 1964 Democratic Convention underscores the inherent violence that saturates life in the U.S., while Cabral’s “Message to the People of Portugal” challenges the working class of imperial Portugal to recognize their kinship and to form alliances with the people of Guinea-Bissau. The very different strands of activist thinkers who comprise the book centre it on the experience of the global majority. These essays analyze structures of power and violence in the context of half a millennium of bloody Euro-American expansion and imperial rule. While history and empirical evidence have often shown that violence can have short-term efficacy in struggles for liberation, it is not a viable route to a society of solidarity, reciprocity, and cooperation. Violence is the preeminent tool of the master class. The ‘master’s tools,’ Audre Lorde warned, would ‘never dismantle the master’s house.’ Although they might, she argued, ‘temporarily allow us to beat him at his own game,’ they would not lead us to the deep global transformation we must achieve to honor the sanctity of all life on earth.

These prophetic words define the theme of Insurrectionary Uprisings. In choosing the contents of this volume, we asked ourselves how to best embody the concept of Sankofa, an Akan, Twi, and Fante concept that to move forward one must retrieve wisdom and lessons from the past. We feel that we cannot create a world based on solidarity, collectivity, justice, and liberation without remembering the ethical and material basis of the social worlds that were destroyed by the expansion of Euro/America and the white supremacist, capitalist heteropatriarchy whose inevitable implosion threatens the entire globe.

This is a collection of both historical and new writings on the nexus of strategic unarmed resistance, radical ideologies, and the long struggles to build movements for justice and liberation. Beginning with the work of Gandhi, Arendt and Thoreau, the volume grounds the theories which undergird nonviolent resistance to capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy and heteropatriarchy.

The volume includes two sections exploring nonviolence in the long Black freedom struggle in the United States. From Ella Baker to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Fannie Lou Hamer, from Vincent Harding and Grace Lee Boggs to Colin Kaepernick, the two sections on the Black liberation movement highlight the theory of nonviolence in direct and indirect ways and foreground the relevance of these historic texts for the present moment of political uprisings.

Black strategies for survival and power are analyzed in terms of the ongoing US economic and epidemiological crises as well as the global climate crisis and ecological collapse. A section on revolutionary nonviolence in Africa presents a previously unpublished piece on the role of armed struggle by Frantz Fanon, as well as essays by Amilcar Cabral, Barbara Deming, Graca Machel, Kenneth Kaunda, and Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge. This section contextualizes the continent’s anti-colonial struggles with practical thinking about military and unarmed tactics which those movements faced over the course of a half century.

The section on nonviolence and feminist struggle highlights the work of Grace Paley, Audre Lorde, and Arundhati Roy, along with a little-read piece by Johnnie Tilmon, a leader of the 1960s welfare rights movement. The section on resistance against empire tilts toward Latin American scholars/activists with essays by Maria Lugones, Anibla Quijano and Berta Caceres. This section includes pieces that draw from current debates about the role of state power in building towards radical change and the push to build holistic perspectives on what liberation means for all peoples. The final section on social change in the 21st Century reflects on specific aspects of organizing which are facing campaigns and movements of today and tomorrow. Our goal is to provide challenges and insights for building effectively against all forms of oppression.

Though primarily compiling key texts not often seen or contextualized together, the book also provides new strategic commentaries from leaders including Ela Gandhi, Ruby Sales, ecofeminist Ynestra King, Africa World Press’ Kassahun Checole, and Palestinian Quaker Joyce Ajlouney, Hakim Williams, and Mireille Fanon Mèndes-France. With a mix of past and current commentaries, from both academic and activist points of view, we uncover fault lines that have prevented mass, global movements from solidifying over the last fifty years. Through this narrative, the book ends with visions of how best to use all that we know to bring about deeply rooted transformations in ways that will lift up and not traumatize people as they move toward liberation.

Including essays by: Joyce Ajlouny, Kali Akuno, Hannah Arendt, Ella Baker, Sally Bermanzohn, Steve Bloom, Grace Lee Boggs, Rose Brewer, Amilcar Cabral, Berta Cáceres, Aimee Carillo Rowe, Kassahun Checole, James Cone, Cooperation Jackson, Dorothy Day, Dave Dellinger, Barbara Deming, Nick Estes, Frantz Fanon, Mireille Fanon Mendès-France, Leslie Feinberg, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Ela Ghandi, Saki Hall, Fannie Lou Hamer, Vincent Harding, John Holloway, Kenneth Kaunda, Ynestra King, Martin Luther King Jr., Lolita Lebron, Audre Lorde, Maria Lugones, Graça Machel, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, Russell Maroon Shoatz, Wende Marshall, Matt Meyer, Mark Muhannad Ayyash, Mel Paisley, Aislinn Pulley, Pyarelal, Aníbal Quijano, Milan Rai, Beth E. Richie, Arundhati Roy, Ruby Sales, Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, Starhawk, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Bill Sutherland, Henry David Thoreau, Johnnie Tillmon, Haunani-Kay Trask, Nazan Üstündağ, Hakim Mohandas Amani Williams, Robert Franklin Williams, Women’s Pentagon Action