Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 241
In the words of Menon and Nigam, "What began with
dissatisfaction over formal institutionalized politics, and the
consequent search for more 'people-oriented' kinds of political
structures and institutions, eventually moved toward a
realization that it was not just the authoritarian-bureaucratic
nature of development that was problematic. There grew a
recognition of the more fundamental problem with the very
ideology of development, centrally tied as it was to the idea
of the nation-state's sovereignty over its domain."46
But again, this is an exploratory observation stemming
from the analytic framework of this book, not an attempt
to attribute this interpretation to anyone else. None of the
movements discussed here is anarchist with a capital A;
that word lacks resonance for them, and indeed conjures up
quite different associations than it does in North America
and Europe. Yet the questions, themes, conflicts, and issues
involved-such as, How do you see the role of the state in
relation to social movements? To global capitalism? To society?
How do you relate to concentrated power ? How do
various forms of social hierarchy relate to class ? What roles
do technology, rationalism, and spirituality play in either
liberation or oppression? What is "progress"? How do you
articulate ecological sustainability with social justice ?-are
analogous to those that have characterized the anarchist
problematic and lowercase a motif
They are not anarchists, but some of them-for example,
Vandana Shiva and Arundhati Roy-are people
whom anarchists appreciate. Their commitments are
intersectional, antiauthoritarian, nonhierarchical, and
framed mainly in connection with a principle of social