This chapter maps the history of efforts of Black Consciousness activists to rebuild their shattered armed wing post-1976. It advances the story in exile through a careful look at attempts at Black Consciousness organizing to restart their armed struggle. This tenaciousness, ever-present in the Azanian Black Nationalist Tradition, highlights the continued importance and relevance of Black Consciousness to the eventual fall of apartheid post-1977. They continued to fight up until 1993 despite the ANC actively obstructing and preventing state or NGO support from being given to organizations under the Black Consciousness banner. These newer formations (IRE, SAYRCO and AZANLA) would engage closely with the wider Third World Revolution and find ways to adopt different lessons, tactics, strategies, theories and perspectives into their ever-expanding political praxis. This did not lessen or dilute their Black Consciousness praxis; on the contrary, it complimented its theoretical and organizational capacities. Nevertheless, the lack of state support, unevenness in centring the gender question, the continued strength of the apartheid war machine and serious disagreements among different Black Consciousness factions hurt the movement in exile. Regardless, they continued to fight.

Chapter 2 re-examines a broadly documented history of the formative years of BCM. A whirlwind of activity laid the groundwork for lesser researched aspects of the early BCM years such as the development of Black Consciousness among working people, the creation of literacy projects, community development programs, internal debates on the merits of taking up arms and the central role played by Black women in the growth and development of the movement and its various projects. It was from within these events, agendas and projects that armed struggle was returned to by cadres such as Bokwe Mafuna, Nosipho Matshoba, Welile Nhlapo and Tebogo Mafole. For Black Consciousness, one could not respect picking up arms without also respecting and building from the social conditions and organizational details/skills/labour of their non-violent stage/wing. They mutually reinforced each other. Black Consciousness activists saw picking up arms as adding another layer to a powerful internal social movement against white settler colonialism. After the banning of key leaders in early 1973, by the end of the year, the first wave of activists left for Botswana to begin building this new armed wing of the movement.

Chapter 1 begins by broadly sketching how the movement of the masses of African peoples towards armed struggle can be understood within the framework of Robinson’s Black Radical Tradition. Within this context, the First All-African People’s Conference (AAPC) of 1958 takes centre stage as it brought a number of soon-to-be liberation movement figures together with older veterans of the post-WWII anti-colonial struggle on African soil to deliberate on the direction the decolonization process would take. During the conference, a debate emerged among conference participants on Kwame Nkrumah’s non-violent positive action versus Frantz Fanon’s armed struggle. After exploring how this was resolved, the chapter moves on chronologically to a broad examination of the Azanian Black Nationalist Tradition as it in consistent patterns fuelled non-violent insurgencies, dreams of freedom and decisions to return to armed struggle. The second half of the chapter follows Stokely Carmichael in Tanzania. This section is less about Carmichael or Tanzania, but more about tracking how Black Power ideas, concepts and praxis interacted with and within various liberation movements and continental African peoples. Carmichael saw Black Power as important for emerging states which were majority African/Black but was met with resistance by the ANC.

The message of the Cuban Revolution for a generation of young Latin American leftists was to put aside reformist politics and take up arms. North Korea vowed to support all those who heeded that call. Its intervention came at a time when many young radicals sought a personal transformation, one that would allow them to participate in the crucial historical juncture they believed themselves to be living through. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of Latin American militants sought this transformation in secret training camps in North Korea, with the hope of returning to their home countries new subjects, with the physical and mental attributes necessary to make revolution. Between 1964 and 1970, North Korea provided military training to at least nine revolutionary groups in seven Latin American countries: Venezuela, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Brazil, Guatemala, and Mexico. This chapter provides an in-depth overview and assessment of North Korea’s efforts to support revolutionary struggle in Latin America.

During the 1960s, Cuba attempted to provide leadership to the Latin American Left, and to the region’s numerous Cuban-inspired guerrilla movements in particular. In the process, Cuban leaders departed from Marxist–Leninist orthodoxy, garnering harsh criticism from their Soviet and Chinese allies. Yet Cuba found a steadfast supporter of its controversial positions in North Korea. This support can in large part be explained by the parallels between Cuban and North Korean ideas about revolution in the Third World. Most significantly, both parties embraced a radical reconceptualization of the role of the Marxist–Leninist vanguard party. This new doctrine appealed primarily to younger Latin American militants frustrated with the old communist and social–democratic organizations. It was appealing because it captured the sense of urgency created by the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and provided a path of immediate revolutionary action. The impact of the Cuban/North Korean concept of the party went beyond polemics and theoretical debates. It had a tangible influence on strategies and tactics employed by revolutionary movements in Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Mexico, and Bolivia, as they took up arms in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the final years of Brazil’s military dictatorship, as the nation inched toward democratic transition, a new genre emerged on the literary landscape: autobiographical accounts penned by survivors of the armed struggle waged between 1969 and 1973. The most widely read works of this literature of revolution are memoirs that present strikingly similar portraits of Brazilian revolutionaries as straight, white men, with at least two notable exceptions: Passagem para o próximo sonho (1982) by Herbert Daniel (who recounts what it was like to be a gay militant) and Revolta das vísceras (1982) by Mariluce Moura (who recounts her experience as a Black heterosexual woman in a clandestine revolutionary organization). Both writers blend autobiography and fiction to produce innovative accounts about how sex informed their political trajectories, and how politics shaped them as sexual beings. The two books are among the few revolutionary works that lend themselves to an intersectional analysis of Brazil’s clandestine left. They also stand out as critical interventions in debates over the nation’s protracted transition to civilian democracy.

In the final years of Brazil’s military dictatorship, as the nation inched toward democratic transition, a new genre emerged on the literary landscape: autobiographical accounts penned by survivors of the armed struggle waged between 1969 and 1973. The most widely read works of this literature of revolution are memoirs that present strikingly similar portraits of Brazilian revolutionaries as straight, white men, with at least two notable exceptions: Passagem para o próximo sonho (1982) by Herbert Daniel (who recounts what it was like to be a gay militant) and Revolta das vísceras (1982) by Mariluce Moura (who recounts her experience as a Black heterosexual woman in a clandestine revolutionary organization). Both writers blend autobiography and fiction to produce innovative accounts about how sex informed their political trajectories, and how politics shaped them as sexual beings. The two books are among the few revolutionary works that lend themselves to an intersectional analysis of Brazil’s clandestine left. They also stand out as critical interventions in debates over the nation’s protracted transition to civilian democracy.

This chapter historically contextualises the Kurdish women’s movement and traces the trajectory of its organisational structures and knowledge production from 1978 to the present. It situates the Kurdistan Freedom Movement and its local political and armed branches in the regional and international matrices of domination: Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. It zooms in on the main internal rupture points where the women resisted and fought against their male comrades in order to build their autonomous ranks within the larger liberation movement.

Chapter 2 examines how the claim of difference and sustainability was organised and implemented by the Kurdish women’s movement in the political sphere of Diyarbakir, where the movement has a long-standing history of organising women according to party ideology and structures. I analyse how this struggle for space unfolded once the urban wars started in mid-2015, mapping out the tools and mechanisms of resistance used by the movement as a whole and the women’s structures in particular. This chapter gives space to the critical voices, residents not organised behind party lines, as they were caught in the frontlines between the PKK and the Turkish army.

Immediately after the partial withdrawal of the Syrian army from several towns in the north and north-east of the country in July 2012, Kurds seemed to emerge ‘out of nowhere’. More significantly, after more than forty years of dictatorship and political marginalization, Syrian Kurds appeared to become masters of their own destiny. For one, both the Democratic Union Party (PYD) - a Syrian offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) which has been fighting the Turkish state since the 1980s – and its military force, the People’s Defense Units (YPG), have been exercising state-like power in the Kurdish regions of Syria. However, in parallel, reports from the region have revealed a murkier picture: Syrian Kurdish parties appeared highly divided, and the PYD ascent brought about significant consequences in the Kurdish enclaves among growing Turkish intervention in northern Syria. This chapter argues that both continuities between 1946 and 2019 (e.g. division of the Kurdish political field, its openness to external influences and ambiguities with regard to the Syrian regime) and changes (e.g. Syrian war context, adoption of armed struggle strategies by Kurdish political parties and ideological transformations) may help us to better grasp current dynamics in northern Syria.

This chapter historically contextualizes the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement and analyses the trajectory of its organizational structures from 1987 to the present. It traces how the women’s movement managed to establish its own army (1995) and party (1999) within the PKK, while also establishing the co-chair system and the women’s quota in the political sphere in the early 2000s. The chapter zooms into one crucial moment of contestation between the women and men of the movement: the formation of the Kurdistan Women’s Worker’s Party (Partiya Jinên Karkerên Kurdistanê, PJKK) in 1999. It asks to what extent this and similar internal struggles can help us to gain a more nuanced understand of how the women managed to carve out the spaces for autonomous organizing within the wider movement, how the liberation of women came to feature so prominently in the movement’s ideology and how this speaks to ongoing debates around nationalism and feminism. The chapter also highlights some of the tensions and contradictions that emerge between the claim to liberation and the clear framework around the ‘free woman’.

“The Search for Social Power” considers the development of radical movements after the crisis year of 1968, showing how revolutionary tactics were adjusted even as new concerns and actors came to the fore. Exploring how activists responded to the danger of “recuperation”—the act by which consumer capitalism packaged rebellion and sold it back to its constituents—the chapter examines the rise of political undergrounds determined to live authentically even while searching for new avenues in the political struggle. While numerous small new communist parties emerged demanding a return to Marxist-Leninist basics alongside small cells dedicated to armed struggle, new movements such as second wave feminism emerged to challenge the usually male-dominated politics of militant struggle in favor of attempts to reshape the experience of daily life. In every case, the post-1968 moment was shaped by the attempt to achieve “social power,” that is, to find workable strategies for producing real change in the world.

If war seems fantastic, does this remove all forms of violent resistance? This chapter argues that it does not. It examines the case for armed struggle against global poverty in the form of terrorism and sabotage. It recognises the intuitive repugnance of terrorism, but argues that we cannotbegin from definitions of political violence that are already moralised. If terrorism and sabotage are directed at agents that are not ordinarily legitimate targets, there needs to be a strong justification as to why they are liable to violence. It is argued that there whether one thinks the average citizen in the Global North is responsible, vicariously liable, or innocent there is not a case for subjecting them to terroristic violence. However, when it comes to sabotage, the arguments against a full prohibition do not work. Violent disruption of the transnational system may be permitted if it does not target the lives of innocent people. This does not amount to a blank cheque as there will usually be strong pragmatic reasons to abstain from violence, such as the necessary cooperation to build human rights respecting institutions.

This study examines how Salvadoran women shaped revolutionary praxis, thus challenging prior academic accounts that have situated armed struggle and socialism in opposition to feminism. The Association of Salvadoran Women (AMES), an organization composed of combatants, peasants, and exiles, redefined revolution to mean the overthrow of both capitalism and patriarchy. The sites of feminist praxis included guerrilla territories in El Salvador, refugee camps in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and solidarity networks in Mexico, Nicaragua, and the United States. Within the guerrilla territories, AMES members actively participated in community councils, an experiment in popular democracy, and generated a feminist praxis that linked the exigencies of wartime survival to the long-term liberation of women. At the international level, Salvadoran women collaborated with other radical women from Latin America and the United States in order to push their organizations in more feminist directions. This study is the first detailed analysis of AMES and offers a novel interpretation of the rise of Salvadoran feminism.