What are Liberated Zones?
Activists carve out liberated zones of resistance, refuge and experimentation, to survive within the belly of the beast, struggle against it, and forge alternatives to it.
Participants in all kinds of freedom movements, insurgencies, resistances, and fights for national liberation, around the world and throughout history have created these liberated spaces to anchor their struggles.
Participants in such struggles set up encampments to live, rest, refuel , and organize daily life in the struggle; to gather, store, cook, distribute food, and even–in well developed, long term liberated zones– grow and trade food, and other resources. They organize literacy campaigns, assemblies, trainings, discussions, cultural manifestations, rituals, and speakouts. They develop ways of making decisions, handling conflicts, security and levels of participation in the struggle. And more.
And, whether or not this is an explicit goal, they strive to do these things in keeping with the principles they are fighting to establish in the wider world, equality, justice, collective decision-making. Aspects of life on the ground is in conflict with these principles cause conflicts; how they are dealt with is a key aspect of life in liberated zones.
These physical, social, and metaphysical spaces enable us to retreat from the fray when needed, recover from our exertions, take care of our needs (as much as possible in keeping with our values), and to imagine, discuss and carry out trial runs of the new society we hope eventually to bring forth out of the old.
Rebel radio stations broadcast from these areas; revolutionary murals and poetry are created, cooperatives, schools and other collectives are founded. New social relations are forged, leadership is shared and social experiments undertaken, in order to live the values being fought for, and because the struggle itself demands new ways of doing things.
A new culture emerges as participants strive to implement the new and struggle with the old that presses in on all sides, including from within the participants.
These embattled spaces, within ourselves, our families and neighborhoods; in our movements and organizations, co-ops and communes; at Zucotti Park, NYC; Oventic, Chiapas; Tahrir Square, Cairo; or Standing Rock North Dakota, are where we practice what we propose and confront the contradictions of living and acting on a daily basis within the boxes we’re trying to dismantle.
The metaphor of activists carving out liberated zones applies to a wide range of social movement building, including smaller scale and individual spaces where we work to open spaces to live according the principles we want to see in the world, as we live and work in the belly of the beast.
