Given their rejection of nation-states, frequent movement across borders, and organization of subversive global networks, anarchists are ideal subjects of transnational history. This roundtable investigates transnational anarchism as both a subject of historical inquiry and a methodological intervention in global history which decenters nation-states and enables a history from below at multiple scales of analysis. Drawing on a range of examples from across the world, participants will address the workings of transnational networks of anarchists that subverted borders and offered new models of global organization.

Kirwin Shaffer will share his new project The World through Anarchist Eyes, which asks what a global history from 1900-1939 would look like from a Latin American anarchist perspective—thus challenging global history perspectives that are (1) “top-down” in perspective and (2) which have put Latin America on the periphery of global history. Nikita Shepard offers a synthetic perspective on Cold War-era anarchist currents that rejected the hegemonic struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, from syndicalist and guerrilla movements to anti-colonial activism to avant-garde art and literature to experiments in sexual liberation. Kevan Antonio Aguilar will address the legacies of Mexican anarchist traditions, including the Mexican diaspora in the United States as crucial interlocutors to global revolutionary and anti-colonial struggles. Spencer Beswick will discuss the formation of international Zapatista solidarity networks in the 1990s, focusing on the development of concrete connections between the Zapatistas and US anarchists as a case study of how transnational networks function.

Rather than a series of standalone papers, this roundtable will promote dialogue around questions connecting transnational anarchism and global history. How did activists forge connections across borders and in spite of state repression? How did anarchists respond to both imperialism and Cold War rivalries, and in doing so propose solutions beyond the nation-state form, whether capitalist or socialist? How did anarchists grapple with questions of race, nationality, class, gender, and sexuality in a divided world? What can we learn today from examples of anarchist solidarity across borders? Ultimately, this roundtable asks what the study of transnational anarchism offers to global history—and to global futures.