Friday December 5th, 10am, History Conference Room 529

Janey Fellow Jan  Smolenski will present his most recent work based on the 2014/2015 Janey Summer Fellowship he was awarded. See title and abstract below:

Bordering Autonomy: Mandar Obedeciendo and the Spatial Limits in the Self-government of the Zapatista Communities

On January 1^st 1994 Ejercito Zapatista de la Liberacion Nacional, predominantly indigenous left-wing guerilla, declared the war on the Mexican state. After initial “twelve days of the battle”, the Zapatistas established a federation of the de facto autonomous self-governing communities characterized by the bottom-up structure of power. These communities became new spaces of grass-root political participation and have never been institutionally incorporated into the Mexican sate. In this paper I analyze the relation between the Zapatista structure of self-government and the spatial limits of the Zapatista territories. I argue that the mandar obedeciendo (‘government by obeying’) principle of self-government has important implications for the relationship between the political community and the political organization of the tangible space. Focusing on spatial limits of the autonomous communities and comparing them with the State bordering logic, I argue that the Zapatista case provides us with an example that allows us to imagine more democratic political organization of space.