It’s a pleasure and an honor to talk with Manolo Callahan and Annie Paradise about their new book, Community Safety in the Fourth World War: Notes on Insurgent Conviviality. This is a necessary book for everyone interested in avoiding the entrapments of the liberal state and seeking to learn and practice different ways of being in the world today. Manolo and Annie insist on replacing the state’s priority of so-called “security,” which essentially stands for maintaining the order needed to maintain the Capitalist enterprise, with the idea of “safety,” which means more than protecting insurgent and subaltern communities, but also, and critically, helping them thrive, regenerate, and expand.
To quote from Fred Moten and Stephano Harney’s Foreword to “Community Safety”
“[Annie and Manolo] work the field, on and underground, of the damned, where movement for becomes movement with, when expression practices, not knowing ahead of time which studious derailment will be useful, not knowing before we get there how our involvement in struggle will feel, rather than asking ourselves about relationships… let’s wonder what we can do, let’s change the same, let’s surge convivially.”
[During this episode we refer to these authors who have also appeared on Speaking Out of Place—check them out: Nick Mirzoeff and Priscilla Wathington; Silvia Federici; Isabella Fremeaux and Jay Jordan; Ida Susser; and Linda Quiquivix.]
Manuel Callahan is the co-founder of the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy (CCRA), a transterritorial research collective based in the San Francisco Bay Area with connections to struggles across Southern Mexico. Since 2003, he has facilitated the Universidad de la Tierra, Califas. For over three decades, he has been a primary activator of Acción Zapatista, including work with the Zapatista Autonomy Project. He is both a researcher and co-convener of the Counter Counterinsurgency Lab.
Annie Paradise is a member of the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy (CCRA), a transterritorial research collective, and a collaborator with the Universidad de la Tierra, Califas, an autonomous learning initiative, both based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a researcher and co-convener of the Counter Counterinsurgency Lab, and together with Manuel Callahan and others, facilitates Methodologies Against Forgetting and Oblivion (MAFO).
