“Three decades after the 1994 Zapatista uprising, their autonomy project continues to inspire grassroots movements around the world. While public attention has waxed and waned, this insightful analysis focuses attention on the innovative underlying elements of the movement, including its demand for a radical political, economic and cultural autonomy; its emancipatory, horizontal and participatory praxis; and its roots in community-based agrarian radicalism at the intersection of peasant class and Indigenous ethnicity. Barbosa and Rosset offer valuable reflections on autonomy as a key mode of resistance against the state and neoliberal capitalism. Their distillation of lessons from the Zapatista experience is essential reading for scholars and activists of transformative social movements.”
— Richard Stahler-Sholk, emeritus professor, Eastern Michigan University

“This book is a must read for social justice activists searching for transformative political roadmaps at the margins of the state. In these pages, Lia Pinheiro Barbosa and Peter Rosset critically reflect on radical autonomy — a powerful contribution of more than three decades of struggle in the Zapatista indigenous Mayan territories of Chiapas — as an alternative pathway for communities of people across diverse geographies with the potential to respond to the social and environmental crises of the world today.”
— Mariana Mora, professor, Centre for Research and Education on Social Anthropology (CIESAS), Mexico

“As states invariably fail our planet and the peoples who fight for her, Lessons from the Zapatistas is an essential primer for a path less traveled. With three decades of resistance, reflection and the construction of their own autonomy, the Zapatista journey continues to illuminate that path in the struggle for life for the coexistence of many worlds.”
— Kate Keller, US Coordinator, Schools for Chiapas

“This book explores the most important elements and contributions of this historic movement, highlighting transformations in its trajectory, the processes it has fostered and the contribution of its thought to critical theory and to the study of social movements. It also examines Zapatista praxis, a real example of building autonomy, which is also present in other social movements.”
— Maíra Araújo Cândida, RURIS journal, Brazil

“This book offers the best synthesis I have seen of the Zapatista process of autonomy in Chiapas. It is a fundamental work for those wish to learn about the extraordinary advances of this movement in the first 30 years since the armed uprising of 1994.”
— Omar Felipe Giraldo, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)

Lia Pinheiro Barbosa (Author)
Lia Pinheiro Barbosa is an activist and professor of sociology at the State University of Ceará (UECE) based in Fortaleza, Brazil. She has written extensively on the Zapatistas in Mexico and the MST (Landless Workers Movement) in Brazil, including her book Educación, resistencia y movimientos sociales: la praxis educativo-política de los Sin Tierra y de los Zapatistas (Education, Resistance, and Social Movements: The Educational-Political Praxis of the MST and the Zapatistas) published in 2015 by the UNAM Press in Mexico.


Peter M. Rosset (Author, Translated by)
Peter M. Rosset is an academic, author and activist who resides in Chiapas, Mexico. He is a university professor at the Ecosur Advanced Studies Institute in Mexico, as well as at universities in Brazil and Thailand, and the author of more than 10 books and more than 100 academic papers. He is a former secretariat staff member of the global peasant movement, La Via Campesina.


Henry Veltmeyer (Translated by)
Dr. Veltmeyer lived and worked for six years in South America before coming to Canada to pursue a doctoral program in political science and subsequently (in 1976) to begin his academic career in the Sociology Department at St. Mary’s University. He participated in the university’s Atlantic Canada Studies program and founded the program in international development in 1985. He served for eight years as coordinator of this program in addition to eight years as chair of the Sociology Department. Currently he has an academic appointment in the PhD program of Development Studies at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, Mexico, and annually engages in an extended program of research and public lectures across Latin America. He is the editor-in-chief of the Canadian Journal of International Development Studies and serves on the editorial board of Studies in Political Economy and a number of international journals in his major field of research — the political economy of international development.

: Introduction to the English Edition
: En Movimiento [In Movement] Series of Small Books from CLACSO
: Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle
: Historical Background of Zapatismo
: From Negotiation with the State to Radical Autonomy
: Zapatista Autonomy
: Without Women There Is No Revolution!
: Autonomy in the Construction of a Different World
: Zapatista Critical Theory
: Radical, Popular, Peoples’, Communitarian and Class Autonomy
: Postscript to the English Language Edition
: Bibliography