A Beginner?s Guide to Building Better Worlds: Ideas and Inspiration from the Zapatistas

This ambitious book offers radical alternatives to conventional ways of thinking about the planet’s most pressing challenges, ranging from alienation and exploitation to state violence and environmental injustice.

Bridging real-world examples of resistance and mutual aid in Zapatista territory with big-picture concepts like critical consciousness, social reproduction and decolonisation, the authors encourage readers to view themselves as co-creators of the societies they are a part of – and ‘be Zapatistas wherever they are'.

Written by a diverse team of first-generation authors, this book offers an emancipatory set of anti-colonial ideas related to both refusing liberal bystanding and collectively constructing better worlds and realities.

Levi Gahman is Lecturer at the University of Liverpool and remains a faculty affiliate with the University of the West Indies. He focuses on anticolonial praxis, environmental defence and engaged movement research.

Nasha Farhannah Mohamed is a University of the West Indies graduate and independent researcher from Trinidad and Tobago focusing on foreign languages (Spanish, French, Arabic) and postcolonial literature.

Filiberto Penados is Maya activist-scholar focusing on Indigenous future-making. He is President of the Julian Cho Society and adviser to the Toledo Alcaldes Association and Belize National Indigenous Council.

Johannah-Rae Reyes is political activist and Social Media Manager for WOMANTRA. She is currently working with Amnesty International on the 'Mapping Injustice' project for improved policing in Trinidad and Tobago.

Atiyah Afifah Mohamed is independent researcher, Spanish teacher, Geography tutor and local volunteer in Trinidad and Tobago. Her community service work focuses on homelessness and the underprivileged.