Abstract

This chapter addresses the relations between anarchism and geography following three main directions. First, I discuss the historical and material links existing between the very foundations of both geographical and anarchist thoughts, through the common work of scholars and activists who are considered as founding figures for both, such as Elisée Reclus, Peter Kropotkin and their collaborators. Importantly, this correspondence was not occasional, as early anarchist geographers elaborated notions that merged their political and scholarly spheres such as their ideas on communalism, federalism and decentralisation, their commonly elaborated notion of mutual aid, their critique of maps as instruments of authoritarian education and political power and their anticolonial understanding of geography as a discipline challenging frontiers, racism and Eurocentrism by fostering worldwide fraternity. Second, I expose the plural waves of rediscovering anarchist geographers and geographies that took place since the 1970s in different countries and linguistic areas, highlighting the links between activism and scholarship that variously characterised these moods, especially the interest in anarchism that has affected international geographical scholarship in the last 15–10 years. Third, I propose further applications of anarchist-inspired geographies and geographical approaches to anarchism in political/societal current debates such as decoloniality, geographies of the pluriverse, intersectionality and spatial/social/environmental justice. I conclude arguing that the connection between anarchism and geography still offers relevant instruments to tackle these challenges. The anarchist tradition brings great insights to potentially enrich all these fields, including coherence between theory and praxis, connection between social and spatial freedom and a voluntarist drive to social transformation countering all their possible authoritarian, academic and liberal distortions.