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About d2c


Democracies 2 Come is for anyone interested in understanding worldwide subaltern collective responses to globalization, neoliberal austerity policies, and the War on Terror, and for people who imagine possibilities of an ethico-politics now missing from the world stage. 

There are two world wars going on today, one covered widely by the media, and the other hardly ever mentioned in the U.S. and Europe. One war is known as the War on Terror, a world war without end carried out by rogue nation-states trampling on national sovereignty, the United Nations, and international law with impunity. The first war is constantly in the news, fetishized and glamorized by nation-states and NGOs while fetishized and vilified by human rights lawyers and non-state militants.

The other war is known as the Fourth World War, a World War Without End (W3OE ) carried out by rogue states, unregulated transnational corporations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) trampling on non-capitalist economies, societies, and cultures with impunity (Marcos). This war does not appear to be a war at all. It appears as progress. It appears as development. It appears as freedom, as free trade. It appears as good foreign policy and good business practice. Unless you ask the subaltern, you will never know the second war is a war at all. These two wars are related in multiple ways.

How does the subaltern see this world, a world under war without end? Nation-states, the United Nations, transnational corporations, and the WTO claim they own the world, but the subaltern know differently. When the U.S. and U.K. claim to have pacified the area around Kandahar or Baghdad or Waziristan or Jakarta or Madrid or Los Angeles or London, the subaltern know better. Subaltern autonomies are always already present in the very ways in which the modern constitutes its enemies, its occupations, its many forms of violence, its poor, its women, its queers, its minorities, its indigenous, its Others. 


We have much to learn in the ways that these autonomies intersect with democracy, understood both as the democracy we think we know and may even claim to practice, and modes of democracy at work beyond the limits of our Eurocentric presumptions to know its universal forms. This blog is about such autonomies both when they control territories (as in the Zapatista movement) and when they take place in parallel with Eurocentric nation-state forms of democracy, what we might call para-democracies.

Democracies 2 Come joins many local organizations to document the Other Ways of knowing differently and living differently, the local autonomies and democratic practices that are yet to be recognized as democracies by those who claim to own and rule the globe. Subaltern autonomies and democracies carry out globally networked practices that may result in justice rather than market share, in respectful community rather than warfare, in freedom rather than subjection to commodification, and in dignity rather than death.


Click here to read more about founder and editor d2c and guest authors. Click here to e-mail d2c. You can also contact d2c on Twitter @democracy2come.