Marina Sitrin – författare

In times of crisis, when institutions of power are laid bare, people turn to one another. Pandemic Solidarity collects firsthand experiences from around the world of people creating their own narratives of solidarity and mutual aid in the time of the global crisis of Covid-19.The world’s media was quick to weave a narrative of selfish individualism, full of empty supermarket shelves and con-men. However, if you scratch the surface, you find a different story of community and self-sacrifice. Looking at eighteen countries and regions, including India, Rojava, Taiwan, South Africa, Iraq and North America, the personal accounts in the book weave together to create a larger picture, revealing a universality of experience - a housewife in Istanbul supports her neighbour in the same way as a teacher in Argentina, a punk in Portland, and a disability activist in South Korea does.Moving beyond the present, these stories reveal what an alternative society could look like, and reflect the skills and relationships we already have to create that society, challenging institutions of power that have already shown their fragility.

In times of crisis, when institutions of power are laid bare, people turn to one another. Pandemic Solidarity collects firsthand experiences from around the world of people creating their own narratives of solidarity and mutual aid in the time of the global crisis of Covid-19.The world’s media was quick to weave a narrative of selfish individualism, full of empty supermarket shelves and con-men. However, if you scratch the surface, you find a different story of community and self-sacrifice. Looking at eighteen countries and regions, including India, Rojava, Taiwan, South Africa, Iraq and North America, the personal accounts in the book weave together to create a larger picture, revealing a universality of experience - a housewife in Istanbul supports her neighbour in the same way as a teacher in Argentina, a punk in Portland, and a disability activist in South Korea does.Moving beyond the present, these stories reveal what an alternative society could look like, and reflect the skills and relationships we already have to create that society, challenging institutions of power that have already shown their fragility.

What if we did abolish police, courts or prisons? Where would we turn for justice? Do we need to have laws? Punishment? These questions are not just the preoccupation of an abolitionist pipedream. Their answers exist already, if only we know where to look.We Make Our Own Justice introduces the reader to communities around the world who are already resolving harms and conflicts themselves, without looking to the state or judiciary. The book explores a number of locations where alternative forms of justice, peace-keeping and adjudication are taking place. With particular focus on indigenous- and women-led movements from across Mexico, Argentina, Rojava and the USA, Marina Sitrin looks at how each came to be, as well as the theoretical and political underpinnings of the process.The book allows the reader to reflect on the ways in which the seeds of these alternative forms of justice and adjudication have been planted and nurtured over time—often over decades—and to consider the possibilities for other communities and regions to produce something similar. We Make Our Own Justice offers an invaluable resource as we seek to transform our neighbourhoods, groups and communities into abolitionist spaces in theory and practice.

Here is one of the first books to assert that mass protest movements in disparate places such as Greece, Argentina, and the United States share an agenda-to raise the question of what democracy should mean. These horizontalist movements, including Occupy, exercise and claim participatory democracy as the ground of revolutionary social change today.Written by two international activist intellectuals and based on extensive interviews with movement participants in Spain, Venezuela, Japan, across the United States, and elsewhere, this book is both one of the most expansive portraits of the assemblies, direct democracy forums, and organizational forms championed by the new movements, and an analytical history of direct and participatory democracy from ancient Athens to Athens today. The new movements put forward the idea that liberal democracy is not democratic, nor was it ever.