Green Anarchy & Red Praxis: An Anarcho-Indigenous Dialogue Towards a Democracy of Species
Anarchist Studies - Print ISSN 0967-3393 - Online ISSN 2633-8270
Volume 33 Number 2 (2025)
Green Anarchy & Red Praxis: An Anarcho-Indigenous Dialogue Towards a Democracy of Species
Robert T.F. Downes pages 6‑49
DOI: 10.3898/AS.33.2.01
Abstract
This essay places Murray Bookchin’s eco-anarchist philosophy of social ecology in conversation with Indigenous environmental knowledge and political thought, drawing out their complementarities in an anarcho-Indigenous critique of hierarchical and anti-ecological epistemologies of rule. A sociolegal and eco-critical analysis of the 2021 Standing Rock ruling links these frameworks, situating eco-anarchy’s anticapitalist, anticolonial, and anti-statist principles and forms of social organisation (e.g., decentralisation, degrowth, and post-scarcity) in dialogue with Indigenous ecologies grounded in place-based relations of reciprocity, gift economy, ecological civic responsibility, and interspecies democracy. The exchange unsettles and enriches radical ecologies, synthesising a critique of settler-colonial capitalist domination and, in turn, precipitating principles and forms of an emancipatory and multispecies justice. Standing Rock serves as a paradigmatic example of legal contests between coloniser and colonised – episodes through which the social relations of domination crystallise into juridical orders that uphold systems of colonial theft and dispossession, concomitantly eroding Indigenous sovereignty and degrading the environment. To counter the settler-colonial capitalist legal order that valorises precedent, property, and procedure over human liberty and non-human dignity, this essay proposes a social transformation towards an ecological and just society constituted through stateless forms of justice and shaped by green anarchy and red praxis.
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To cite this article
Robert T.F. Downes (2025) Green Anarchy & Red Praxis: An Anarcho-Indigenous Dialogue Towards a Democracy of Species, Anarchist Studies, 33(2), 6-49 . https://doi.org/10.3898/AS.33.2.01