‘An echo that turns itself into many voices’: Zapatismo and civil society as revolutionary practice

Taking our cue from Chapter 7, we might conclude that, although alternative visions of civil society do continue to be articulated, this is so now only in the realms of theory rather than practice. Yet since the mid-1990s, those in search of political alternatives the world over have been absorbed by events in the isolated interior of impoverished southern Mexico, where, remarkably, claims for civil society as radical democratic practice continue to be advanced. Such claims, moreover, come from the practitioners of this ‘democracy of civil society’ themselves, and not just from academic commentators seeking to ‘capture’ this practice for their own purposes.