ABSTRACT
In the past two centuries, two events in world history stand out as unique beacons of the spontaneous ability of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people to govern themselves: the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Gwangju People’s Uprising of 1980. In both cities, an unarmed citizenry, in opposition to their own governments, effectively gained control of urban space despite the presence of well-armed military forces seeking to reestablish “law and order”; hundreds of thousands of people created popular organs of political power that effectively and efficiently replaced traditional forms of government; crime rates plummeted during the period of liberation; and people felt previously unexperienced forms of kinship with each other.
