In February, land defenders, Indigenous communities, and grassroots movements from 20 countries gathered on South Africa’s Wild Coast to discuss radical democracy, self-determination and autonomy. Hosted by the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, the Academy of Democratic Modernity, the Amadiba Crisis Committee, and WoMin, the meeting reaffirmed a shared rejection of development as a tool of alienation and enforced dependency. Over decades, development has escalated from the erosion of subsistence economies to an outright war on subsistence, dismantling struggles for self-determination and the right to shape one’s own way of life. Rather than fostering democracy, it has reinforced inequalities and deepened the dispossession of those resisting capitalist modernity.

Radical democracy directly challenges the failures of liberal democracy, whose crisis is becoming increasingly evident worldwide. As parliamentary and representative systems unravel, organized communities—including urban and peri-urban collectives, Indigenous and peasant movements, and grassroots networks—are reclaiming, defending or creating direct decision-making structures rooted in place-based governance and shared community identity. From bonfires in Cheran, Mexico, to the Indigenous Guard of the Cauca in Colombia, armed forms of resistance, direct decision-making and community organizing are becoming central in redefining autonomy, self-determination and security in the face of an increasingly violent form of capitalism. These movements are not simply resisting authoritarianism but responding to the expanding violence of capitalist modernity, which continues to enclose, extract, and militarize territories. As Gustavo Esteva (2020) argues, democracy was flawed from its inception—patriarchal, exclusionary, and colonial—serving more as a mechanism to prevent real popular governance than to enable it. Rather than a distortion of democracy, the current breakdown of liberal systems is its logical conclusion, as Ashish Kothari rightly points out.

Capitalism’s extractive nature has boosted economic inequality and authoritarianism with states deploying counterinsurgency tactics to suppress resistance. The far right has successfully exploited these crises to push xenophobic and corporate-driven neoliberalism, while left-leaning governments, as seen in Latin America’s Pink Tide, often act as managers of crisis rather than challengers of the system. At the same time, by reducing ‘democracy’ to voting, people are stripped of their right to direct decision-making, instead consolidating elite control, financial influence and competition instead of solidarity. Kothari highlights how neoliberal economics, mass media, and education shape public perception, reinforcing a false sense of choice while sustaining systemic oppression through racism, patriarchy, and corporate dominance.

During five days of dialogue, participants shared experiences of resistance against state-led large-scale infrastructure and ‘development projects’, extractivist industries, and neoliberal policies designed to reinforce market dependency. From Indigenous groups in Latin America resisting mining, megaprojects, and land grabs, to South Asian movements asserting self-determination amid geopolitical reorganizations, to African communities fighting against mining, “green grabs,” and militarized repression, a common theme emerged: the struggle for radical democracy is ultimately a struggle for dignity. Autonomy and self-determination are not merely demands but practices of survival and resistance. They entail a direct confrontation with a system designed to manufacture dependency and sustain the illusion of scarcity. Rather than addressing historical injustices, as many participants agreed, development often deepens them, reinforcing the colonial-era patterns of dispossession and exploitation, but now ‘internally’, through state-institutions and experts. This convergence reaffirmed what many communities have long recognized: real democracy is not granted from above—it is built from below.

The development enterprise, now 76 years old, has been remarkably effective not in solving poverty, but in producing and perpetuating it. As Majid Rahnema argues in The Development Dictionary, the term had multiple meanings before January 20, 1949. Poverty could be a voluntary choice, a form of exclusion from the community, a public humiliation, or a lack of protection. It was only with the expansion of industrial and mercantile economies that poverty became redefined as the complementary opposite of ‘rich’ or a measure of wealth—a condition of material deficiency requiring intervention. The proposed solution, of course, was development—understood as the systematic deployment of industrial production, a wage-based economy, and the positivist advancement of technology and scientific knowledge, all concentrated in the hands of professionals and experts. This logic did not simply enclose the means of production or subsistence, as Marxist thinkers might have predicted; it went further, creating a system of dependencies that rendered people perpetually in need of development itself—an alienating force that reshaped entire ways of being into something incomplete, always lacking, and requiring external intervention.

Over the past 40 years, what began as a slow erosion of subsistence has escalated into a full-scale war against it. Development, far from being a means of upliftment, has proven to be an economic and political project of alienation, dispossession, and enforced dependency—disrupting ways of life, dismantling communal autonomy, and deepening systemic inequalities. This gathering reinforced that resistance is not just about rejecting this imposed model, but about reclaiming the power to define and create our own futures. As Indigenous philosopher Ailton Krenak argues, modern states have become highly proficient in the production of poverty. By alienating people from their land—whether through direct displacement or the slow erosion of their territories—they sever communities from subsistence, forcing them into urban peripheries where no connection to autonomous livelihood remains. Instead, they are locked into systems of modernity that keep them in a state of perpetual precarity. This is the modernization of poverty.

Even institutions like the World Bank have acknowledged this trend, which is particularly visible in countries like Mexico, where nearly two-thirds of those classified as poor under modern definitions live near or in cities. The state, in its contemporary form, does not function as a protector but as a facilitator of dispossession, offering ‘solutions’ that ultimately serve corporate and elite interests at the expense of communities. As many at the meeting emphasized, development is nothing more than the modernization of poverty—a process that alienates people from their ability to self-govern and meet their needs autonomously. Thinkers like Gustavo Esteva, Jean Robert, and Ivan Illich have long argued that development manufactures scarcity, transforming once self-sufficient communities into sites of deprivation under the guise of progress. Within this logic, poverty is not an inherent condition but a constructed one; people are not poor—they are made poor. They are dispossessed, forced into dependency, and subjected to an economic system in which individualization replaces communal existence as the default social condition.

While the term radical democracy is not a grounded term—one that communities use to describe their own decision-making processes—the meeting in South Africa emphasized that autonomy and self-determination are not about seeking state recognition but about reclaiming the power to govern and sustain life on one’s own terms. The ‘radical’ in the term points towards the multiple struggles at the grassroots where alternatives are actively breaking away from institutions that manufacture dependence, rejecting formal education, healthcare, housing, transport and other expert-led systems that produce “needy” individuals. Instead, they are building self-sufficient networks of mutual aid, reclaiming food sovereignty, energy autonomy, traditional healing, and collective habitation among many other direct challenges to capitalism’s monopolization of basic needs.

One of the most powerful moments during the gathering came in a discussion where a participant stated, “Collective and Indigenous peoples' rights cannot be limited to human rights. These rights are based on the rights of nature, on our relationships with territory and place, and on our capacity to determine how we relate to and in these places.” This affirmation not only challenged the liberal frameworks of development but also embodied a deeply relational understanding of life and governance that resonated throughout the meeting. In response, another participant added, “We should no longer seek recognition from the state, but from each other”—a sentence that crystallized the spirit of the gathering. Over the course of those days, I was deeply moved by how a vision of autonomy grounded in global solidarity began to take shape—one that does not seek reform, but actively constructs new horizons of possibility beyond the state, the market, and formal democracy. In listening, I came to see radical democracy as both a refusal and an opening. A refusal to be governed, to be developed, to be contained, and an opening to reclaim the capacity to live with dignity and embrace a radical pluralism.

Radical democracy does reflect diverse practices of reclaiming autonomy and dignity across the world. Democratic Modernity, as conceptualized by Abdullah Öcalan and the Kurdish movement, envisions an alternative to capitalist modernity, rejecting nation-state sovereignty in favor of democratic confederalism, ecological sustainability, and women's liberation through decentralized self-governance. Similarly, the Zapatistas define autonomy as a collective process rejecting the centrality of the state, promoting self-governance under the principle of “leading by obeying”, where assemblies and rotating authorities prevent political specialization and the separation between rulers and the ruled. As Jérôme Baschet argues, Zapatista autonomy extends beyond political organization to include learning, healing, collective production, and grounded systems of justice to build self-determined ways of life outside the logic of capitalist modernity. Furthermore, as the meeting clearly emphasised, these struggles are not isolated; they are part of a global movement for radical democracy, one that rejects state recognition in favor of mutual recognition and aid. An increasingly global process forging alliances within broader resistance movements from ‘the many belows’.

Indigenous and grassroots movements have long recognized that mainstream development, including its more recent iterations in ‘sustainable development’, climate change mitigation and energy transition frameworks do not seek to address systemic inequalities but rather deepen them, using legal frameworks to privatize collective rights, facilitate extraction and further dismantle forms of communal organization and resistance. Yet, as the meeting clearly demonstrated, the struggles for autonomy from the grassroots movements are more often than not stifled by the ‘best initiations’ of government bureaucrats, academics, NGOs, and civil society organizations –not to mention some delusional private sector ‘entrepreneurs’–. Too often, they function as agents of the extraction-assimilation system, either discounting the legitimacy of grassroots movements or treating them as mere sources of information rather than political forces and knowledge producers, actively shaping new realities and alternatives. Radical democracy is not an abstract ideal; it is a lived experience. It emerges wherever communities reclaim, as Gustavo Esteva would have said: “their own path”, by refusing the imposition of scarcity by state institutions, corporations, or so-called “experts.” The task ahead should be focused on building this critical internationalism from the ‘many belows’. Building networks of resistance and solidarity, not in pursuit of reform, but in the ongoing construction of self-managed, autonomous worlds.