Image by Hassan Kibwana.

My new book is now out. Replace the State: How to Change the World When Elections and Protests Fail is available now direct from the University of Minnesota Press, Bookshop.org, your local bookstore, or anywhere you buy books. The paperback is $20. The book’s official publication date is August 5, but the distributor has it now and folks who pre-ordered already have their hard copies. It’s nice to see it out in the world!

I wrote this book with the hope that it would be useful for confronting the political challenges we’d be facing when it was published. I confess that as I was continually revising this book over the past several years and shopping it around to different publishers, I had a nagging fear that the book would come out ‘too late’ and no longer be relevant to the urgent political tasks confronting us when it was published. I had to tell myself that it was a book worth writing, even if some of the analyses and suggestions didn’t exactly match the moment when it would see the light of day. One thing I can say today for certain, however, is that this I think the book does speak to the current moment – perhaps depressingly so. As I see more people in despair that traditional techniques for social change have been ineffective, I think that this book has come out at exactly the right time.

In the book, I examine different political tactics that folks use in settings where there has never been much hope that elections or protests are going to protect people’s rights or improve their lives. The examples I draw upon come from colonized, occupied,........

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