What happens to popular struggle when the rights and state guarantees that earlier victories relied on start to give way?

In the latest session of our After Order Working Paper Series, Gabriel Tupinambá presented his new working paper, Popular Sovereignties Under Peripheral Conditions.

Starting from social movements in Brazil, from MST settlements and quilombola communities to delivery app workers in São Paulo, the paper reads their struggles over land, work and territory alongside Latin American critical theory and the “peripherisation thesis”. That thesis holds that conditions once treated as anomalies of the periphery are now spreading to the centre.

Kanishka Goonewardena, Professor of Geography & Planning at the University of Toronto, responded to the paper. He asked what sovereignty can mean for the left today, and what forms of organisation might carry movements beyond the local. The conversation was chaired by Alameda Associate Fátima el-Samman, a Brazilian-Lebanese writer, translator, and philosophy student at Saint Joseph University of Beirut.

The full recording is now available on our YouTube channel.