Replacing the state.
I don't think that social movements are going to be effective if we just say, well, what we just need is a return to what we had last year. I think this is an opportunity to think bigger and to think more fundamentally about the things that are wrong with governance.
Laurel Mei-Singh:I wanna wrestle with these contradictions. The state has gotta go, and yet the state also has these important roles.
Khury Petersen-Smith:This approach to changing the world feels really exciting. And also, we're acknowledging that it's kind of messy.
Sasha Davis:My name is Sasha Davis, I'm the author of Replace the How to Change the World When Elections and Protests Fail. And I'm here today to talk a little bit about this new book with Curry Peterson Smith and Laurel May Singh. The book sort of stems from my research on environmental issues, politics, and social movement organizing in colonized places, and essentially takes the view that social movements here in North America could learn a lot from the kinds of techniques and tactics that people have been using in other places. First, just wanted to kind of start off with some introductions.
Khury Petersen-Smith:Hey, my name is Khury Petersen Smith. I work at the Institute for Policy Studies, where I am the co director of the New Internationalism Project and the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow. My job is to be a resource for social movements that are working against US militarism.
Laurel Mei-Singh:Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me here. My name is Laurel Mei-Singh. I'm an assistant professor of geography and Asian American studies at University of Texas at Austin. I am an aspiring documentary filmmaker.
Laurel Mei-Singh:So right now I'm editing a documentary film about Makua in Hawaii, a military base. It's called Life After Empire. And that's also tentatively the title of a book that I'm writing about demilitarization struggles in Hawaii.
Sasha Davis:Thank you, everybody for being you know, taking part in this today. You know, I think we're gonna talk a little bit about some of the things that are in the book. I think also, you know, this is a book that was written almost entirely, before the reelection of Donald Trump that happened last November. And so the political terrain, obviously, in The United States has shifted a bit, but we'll hopefully talk a little bit about the ways it has and the ways it has not. But I think that some of the discussion today, want to talk a little bit about tactics and strategies for building social movements in the current political context.
Sasha Davis:I think that if, you know, had a dime for every time anybody who's a pundit or, you know, a researcher has said, you know, need a social movement. We'd all be rich, but, we need to talk a little bit about, I think, how the how tos, right, of building a social movement. And, so I hope that's some of the stuff that we can get into here today.
Laurel Mei-Singh:Thank you, Sasha, for this absolutely brilliant book. I think it models scholar activism in terms of bringing our scholarly knowledge to bear to help inform, amplify, and uplift social movements, so I really appreciate that. I just want to read a couple of quotes from the introduction. You say, The central problem today is not that it is impossible to solve our most serious crises. It is that we keep expecting existing institutions to solve them, institutions that are neither inclined nor equipped to do so.
Laurel Mei-Singh:And then on page three, you talk about replacing the state is an approach where social movements focus on directly governing a place differently, empowering an alternative decision making structure in a place. That's the end of the quote. You very much in conversation with JK Gibson Graham, who talks about autonomous zones of counter power, which is what I see that your project is trying to analyze and understand. And you talk about the importance of supplanting state authority rather than seizing the power of the state. So I wanted to hear more from you about your understanding of the state and self determination and the work that needs to be done, and in particular, what political tradition do you align yourself with?
Laurel Mei-Singh:Gibson Graham is talking about the Zapatistas, which is often associated with anti authoritarianism. So I wanted to hear more about what traditions of struggle historically do you see yourself part of.
Sasha Davis:Thank you. That's a great question. One of the things that really is at the heart of my approach in the book is I try to take a ground up sort of approach. And so in some respects, think there are theoretical traditions that think about the political theory and then look for examples of application of that theory. Whereas I think I try to flip that on its head a little bit.
Sasha Davis:And, you know, where I come from is a little more, let's see what people are actually doing kind of in real places, the types of activities that they're doing and how they're supplanting power in those places in a very day to day way. And then how that could kind of scale up or how we could use the theory to kind of understand that and to include, of course, you know, theoretical insights from anti authoritarian, you know, perspectives, but also thinking about critiquing a little bit the structurallessness of some of those perspectives. Because when you actually look at what's going on on the ground, these aren't spontaneous protests, right? These are they're thought out, they're planned, there's a whole system of logistics behind them. You have some people with sort of informal levels of, you know, knowledge or authority within these movements.
Sasha Davis:And so while I definitely kind of, I think, you know, theoretically come from the tradition that looks at things from like anarchist theory and other kinds of critical theory, I think that when we look at how things actually operate on the ground, that there's a little bit of a blending of what we might think of as more kind of purely theoretical perspectives, you know, actually going on to get things done, to actually supplant power. And I think that that's the approach I try to take in the book. And so to kind of address one of the other questions too about then how do I see the state, you know, as sort of an entity in all this, I think it's important to recognize obviously it's not a monolithic entity. You know, there's a lot of things that change with changes in administration like we've had here in The United States from 2024 to 2025, but there's a lot of things that have stayed very consistent, right? And one of the things that I try to bring up in this book is the continuities, right?
Sasha Davis:And that, yes, things have gotten much worse for many groups of people, over the past few months. But 2024 was not paradise. Right? There was a lot of things wrong in 02/2024. This whole book was written, like I said before that.
Sasha Davis:And I think that we need to look at those continuities because I don't think that social movements are going to be effective if we just say, well, what we just need is a return to what we had last year. I think this is an opportunity to think bigger and to think more fundamentally about the things that are wrong with governance. And also then, it's also recognizing that, of course, you have different levels of the state. You have municipalities. You have state governments or in some of the examples I used from Japan, prefectural governments that are working against the central government, and how activists and others can use some of these different multifaceted natures of of the states that they're working with to really create governance that follows better ethics than sort of, you know, the capitalist accumulation and the protection of, you know, private property for the wealthy that you kind of get in the when we think about sort of the state in a capital S sort of way?
Khury Petersen-Smith:Yeah. I want to start just by saying that, you know, I really like the book's feature. I think it's really timely. It's really compelling. And it's actually, early in the book, you talk about the experience of being a 19 year old part of a blockade in Nevada to disrupt basically a nuclear test.
Khury Petersen-Smith:You recount that as a kind of very ordinary example of protest actually. And throughout the book, look at these different examples and harvest these lessons. One of the things I was thinking about is how in this time that we're having this conversation, actually that experience feels kind of extraordinary. I wonder how many people are getting to participate in kind of direct action you know, blockades actually. Like I think that there's been a real I we're feel having this conversation at a time where on one hand there's this kind of crisis of confidence in institutions and yet a sort of belief in them, if that makes sense, like a lack of confidence, a sort of belief or a sense that that's all there is.
Khury Petersen-Smith:That leads me to this one quote that I wrote down, which I feel in a lot of ways kind of summarizes the thesis of the book, he said that movements that are seeking to replace the state are not just saying no, they're creating what they want to say yes to. Given, again, at the moment, feels a bit hegemonic, the notion that the only politics we have is electoral politics or kind of saying no to whatever policy or whatever institution. The task of creating something to say yes to, I find really compelling, but I'm wondering how do you square that? Like knowing how hegemonic, how at the moment, how difficult it can be to kind of imagine something beyond the state, making the case that it's possibly creating something we can say yes to. I just wonder how you think about that.
Sasha Davis:Yeah, that's a great question. I wrote the book because I had these experiences where I saw other ways of trying to do social change. You know, like I said, it started for me very early as a teenager at the Nevada nuclear test site, you know, with the nuclear weapons tests, and then kind of was cemented as I saw the way folks were protesting in Jeju Island, in Okinawa, you know, in The Philippines, in Hawaii, you know, in all these different places over and over. And I think it is a little different outside the experience of the way a lot of activism occurs in North America, because I think there is this hegemony that the state, if it's not acting right or if corporations are not acting right, well, you go to the state, right? You go back to them and say, well, you're the proper arbiter of fixing these problems.
Sasha Davis:And so a lot of the examples of places that I look at in this, however, are colonized spaces, like formally colonized spaces or occupied spaces, where there is no illusion that the state is there to help you or help remedy what's going on in this situation. And I think like within The United States and other developed countries, there's the idea that at least, you know, rhetorically or, you know, at least supposedly the state is who you go to for redress and that they'll make it right if you just make a convincing enough argument, if you just kind of pull the right levers. And part of the reason I wrote this book is I kind of thought there was a time coming where it was gonna become more and more obvious that that's not true. And I think that, you know, my experience with, you know, in teaching with younger people is that they get very much into a space of despair when they're like, well, we're supposed to just go elect somebody else or we're supposed to go petition or we're supposed to have signs and wave at a protest. And when that doesn't work, they feel like they're out of ideas or that there's not really another avenue.
Sasha Davis:And I think part of the reason for writing this book is to be like, oh, no, there's other avenues. Are they easy? No. However, they exist and they're effective and the participants in them are, you know, speak very highly of them. They have gotten some things done.
Sasha Davis:They're not perfect, and there are challenges, and I try to go into that in the book. But, yeah, there there are other things you can do. And I think the more and more people see some of the ways in which protests and electoral politics haven't been effective, the more hopefully the examples in this book will kind of speak to what is possible. And I think, because it is it's hard, because it's also these techniques may involve direct action, things that people are not personally comfortable with. And also these kinds of struggles can take a long time.
Sasha Davis:Sometimes these are struggles that take years and years and years, or sometimes even generations. But I think that, it's important that we think about them when we're in a space where it really seems like some of the other techniques are not working. And that's one reason why, you know, like the subtitle for the book, you know, it's about, you know, how to change the world when elections and protests fail. It doesn't mean elections and protests will always fail, but when they do, there there there are other possibilities.
Laurel Mei-Singh:I wanted to have a conversation about some of the challenges and contradictions that we face in these spaces. I don't wanna downplay the power of these spaces. Right? I similarly was able to visit Mauna Kea, Pu'u Honua, Oulu, Oulu, Only spent I spent one night there, and then I visited a second time just for, you know, a couple hours. So I didn't have the opportunity to, you know, stay there long term, but it was completely empowering and life changing.
Laurel Mei-Singh:And I saw it as self determination and practice and, you know, people having their own educational institutions that they've built themselves, their own infrastructure for, you know, going to the bathroom and cooking and cleaning and, you know, social reproduction was taken care of and people were having amazing conversations. And so it it really did just like for the small amount of time that I was able to be there, gave me a sense of the possible and, you know, alternative forms of authority that can really grow and become their own forms of governance. Right? I mean, I wanna highlight that as kind of the lived experience of replacing the state and also talk about the contradictions. And one of the places that I've spent a little more time with is the Waianae Boat Harbor on the West Side Of Oahu.
Laurel Mei-Singh:They did have their own forms of authority. They did kind of take care of the community. They had their own rules that people had to adhere to in order to stay there. Something I noticed the more time I spent there was there wasn't, like, a coherent set of politics there. Right?
Laurel Mei-Singh:You know? There were evangelicals. There are people who listen to right wing radio commentators, and there's people who want to replace the state, there's the types of people kind of governing and living in that space who are representative of a larger population. So I just wanna talk about in your really beautiful formulation of connecting, claiming, creating, how do we account for and understand the diverse belief systems and visions for the future and understandings for self determination that we might find in spaces like this?
Sasha Davis:Great question. It reminds me of some of Trask's work on Kaholawe, you know, like in, you know, early on in some of that activism and how problematic some of the gender dynamics can be in some of those spaces. You know, how it's not necessarily, you know, if you're kind of into egalitarian ideas and stuff, it's not necessarily an egalitarian space. Right? And that some of the contradictions and some of the problems that we have in the larger society get recreated in the microcosm of the movements and of the spaces.
Sasha Davis:And so these are all things that, you know, have to be attended to, and it's definitely not these spaces, while powerful, are not necessarily panaceas, and and there can be, you know, problems within them. One of the things that I think structures some of the core elements of some of these protests when I see them, that I think is hopeful is that there tends to be at least a few central ethics around which people can kind of organize themselves and organize not just kind of the life of the encampment or of the space that they've kind of claimed, but that also links them to other struggles in other places. Right. And so I think about this and this kind of comes out of some of my experiences of hopping around a bit, you know, from movement to movement kind of over the course of my career, but seeing some of the commonalities from one place to another. And I think I talk about this briefly in this book and I've talked about it in some of my past work of going to Vieques in Puerto Rico and sitting down and seeing wall hangings from the Marshall Islands where I had just done research and people there saying, hey, you know, yeah, people from the marshals came here to be in solidarity with us around our struggles against the bombing of Vieques and then going to Okinawa.
Sasha Davis:And they're like, oh yeah, some of the people here went to, you know, Vieques and learned a lot from them. And then people in Hawaii being like, oh yeah, you know, I went to Okinawa and I saw these things, right. And seeing the interweaving of both the tactics, but also a few shared ethics. And I think it's actually worth me just sort of saying where I sort of boiled these down to, this is like on my notes here, page 93. This is what I kind of see in all of these spaces as sort of a binding influence or a kind of centralizing influences.
Sasha Davis:So the first is people deserve to be included in the processes of making political decisions about the places where they live. And I don't think that's very controversial. I think most people would be like, okay, yes, that makes sense. And then second, people deserve equal access to economic resources and opportunities. And then third, people deserve to have a say in environmental decisions that affect the health and well-being of their communities.
Sasha Davis:And lastly, people deserve to be able to govern their places in a way that maintains healthy long term relationships among humans, other living things and the physical environment. Now people's actions may not necessarily always show fidelity to those particular ethics, but they tend to be sort of agreed upon. And I think in the examples of the, you know, the protests on Mauna Kea, and I talk about this in sort of the introduction, there's a fairly short list of, you know, things that were expected of participants and even visitors, you know, that come to the space to try and keep social harmony, but also to focus. Well, what what's it all about? Right.
Sasha Davis:And I think that one of the points I try to make is that I think those ethics are fairly simple. I think they're fairly shared. Not by everybody. Obviously there's some people who are fascists and things who honestly believe in inequality and don't care about sustainability and absolutely those people are out there, but I think those are outliers really. And the thing that I try to kind of bring up is if the current governments that we live under are really far away from helping us realize those ethics, this is why we have to sort of supplant what they're doing because in the end, the current governments are not, that's not their mission.
Sasha Davis:It's not why they were set up. And it's not to the benefit of the people who are running them now to follow those ethics, even though that's kind of what I think a lot of people really thirst for. And I think that that's important because it can drive both the activism as a kind of counter power against the state, but also as a grounding influence of finding common ground within the spaces and linking them to other struggles and spaces internationally.
Khury Petersen-Smith:Can we stick with that for a bit? The question of ethics in a way, a set of ethics that first of all, you just kind of laid this out, Sasha. The ethics that you offer, it's not like you sat down in a room and sort of contemplated, you know, these would be really great rules to guide our protest. Like these were distilled through your observations. Right?
Khury Petersen-Smith:Like you kind of saw these ways of being and treating each other popping up over and over again in these contexts. And you point out that that wasn't coincidental because people from different contexts would actually meet with each other and then bring ideas back and so on. That's really powerful. And one of the things that feels so important about it is, you know, Laurel just spoke to this. This approach to changing the world, creating alternatives to the state through our own self activity, collective self activity, feels really exciting, think, to us.
Khury Petersen-Smith:Also we're acknowledging that it's kind of messy. You show up to these places and you might be coming together to stop this telescope at Mauna Kea. There might be one thing that brought us out, but that doesn't mean that we agree on everything or see the world the same way or anything like that. And part of what you offer and really, again, what you are distilling through your observation is one of the solutions that people have come up with is, okay, we're coming together for a set of goals. We're coming together through our kind of collectivity and power, and here's a set of rules.
Khury Petersen-Smith:Here's some ways of being that's gonna help us figure this out together. And that feels really important. Like, it feels like this key to navigating this messy situation.
Sasha Davis:Yeah. No. I I agree. I think that a lot of these rules or ethics are things that generate from within the movements themselves. Clearly, they're borrowing on larger shared ethics that people have, but it's not like they're being imposed.
Sasha Davis:There is this sense that, well, okay, people are kind of agreeing to abide by these, you know, in terms of like, it's something that collectively we've all come up with. And if you want to be part of the struggle, this is what's going to happen here in this particular space. It's kind of by mutual agreement, we think this is something that can kind of work for us here, even if it might include prohibitions against things that you personally would rather do. Like I remember some of the things on Mauna Kea around like, okay, no drug use and alcoholism, you know, like alcohol within the space, just because that's something that, we think will potentially disrupt the project we're trying to do here. So it doesn't necessarily mean like, you know, this is what we're going to do for all time and that we're going to become new people.
Sasha Davis:It's done with an idea that, this is going to make the experience better for the people who are in it, but also more effective. And I think that also, I think back to some of like the Occupy Wall Street encampments that also sprung up, you know, beyond Wall Street and other places, most of them came up with some sort of loose rules for lack of a better term. Yeah. They weren't just kind of free for all spaces and and efforts to make them such were usually kind of tamped down and we'll know there's actually kind of a social process here where we are coming to agreements with each other about what kind of what it is we're trying to do and how we're going to treat each other in these spaces. And I think that is really important, also that they're generated out of kind of the context and the activists themselves rather than sort of imposed.
Sasha Davis:And this also goes back to the kind of the more theoretical idea of, you know, prefiguration, right? It's like, okay, we're gonna try and make now what we think society really should be about, you know, kind of, you know, after the revolution. Right? We're gonna we're gonna do it now. And and I think that that's obviously a very strong thread that comes through some of these protest spaces is, you know, trying to prefigure a little bit, like, what are the ways that we actually want to interact with each other?
Sasha Davis:What are the how are the ways that we want to manage this particular place, not just say no to something? And I'll add, this is something I really saw in place after place after place is that people might come together, and the galvanizing influence might be this big no, right? Like, no, we don't want the telescope. No, we don't want the military base. No, we don't want Wall Street to keep ripping everybody off.
Sasha Davis:It doesn't take long before it becomes very much a, okay, and this is what we want. Like, think in Vieckis, they're like, okay, we're gonna make huge plans, you know, documents, long documents about this is what we're gonna do when the bombing stops. So now a lot of those were not implemented, you know, because the federal government didn't listen, but they certainly were like, this is what we want for our island. And that came very, very quickly after just the no. And I think in Okinawa, you know, we have these ideas for alternatives of what we could do with some of these military based sites.
Sasha Davis:And in Hawaii, that's, you know, I think very, very strong too. Like, you know, these places have been managed in different ways for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years before European colonists got here, and we can do this again. This is not utopian in that sense. It's like, no. No.
Sasha Davis:We have ideas and plans, and we've done it before. We can do it again.
Laurel Mei-Singh:I love how Curry started his questions off talking about your protests when you're a Also, circling back to my original question about, like, how did you arrive at these set of politics? Like, what life experiences? I think you mentioned you were kind of part of a punk scene growing up, and then you encountered all these different movements and struggles in The Pacific as well as in Vieques. Could you just take us on a journey of your life travels that brought you to this particular book?
Sasha Davis:I'll keep this brief because I've I had a very kind of weird childhood.
Laurel Mei-Singh:I wanna hear all about it.
Sasha Davis:I think there was a kind of a crystallizing moment when I was 15 or 16 because I remember what high school I went to. I moved around a lot, but mostly within Arizona. But I remember I was walking by McClintock High School where I was at. I can actually remember the moment where I'm like frustrated and I'm just like, why is the world so fucked up? I don't even know what triggered it.
Sasha Davis:And I think it's a moment that many people have, right? Where this is kind of realization like, this is just nuts. You know, sometime in your adolescence. And, you know, thinking about the context, this was the eighties. It was the time when there was this real, very real threat of nuclear war between, you know, the Soviet Union and The United States, and this was Reagan and the evil, you know, the evil empire and winnable nuclear wars and all this.
Sasha Davis:And so this kind of catalyzed this. But before that, I think I'd also had a lot of experiences just seeing how people live differently. I came from a split parent family where my dad was relatively well off, my mom was not. And I kind of toggled back and forth between these worlds. I was actually homeless as a younger teenager when I was, 15 for a little while in Phoenix and just, you know, slept in parks and, you know, whatever for months and months on end and, you know, ran into a lot of different people with like different backgrounds and also, you know, some pretty sketchy situations as of course happens when you're houseless.
Sasha Davis:My mom was also a member of the Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh religious movement or what people would call a cult in Oregon. And I would go up when I was I was about nine or 10 years old, and I would spend my summers up at Rajneesh Puram, this place up in Eastern Oregon, which has been the subject of a good Netflix documentary called Wild Wild Country, if you haven't seen it. And so I think I had this experience of really seeing a lot of ways that you could live differently.
Khury Petersen-Smith:Right?
Sasha Davis:And when I was 16, I started getting involved. I got a job working for American Peace Test, which was the anti nuclear organization. And I started going out to the test site. And this was, again, when I started about 16, so I was relatively young. And I got to see some of the more experienced activists who had been there, you know, for protests through the '60s and '70s and not just at the test site, but also mostly in California or other areas.
Sasha Davis:And, you know, people had been also involved with something like the Redwood Summer type of protests and things the West. So I just kind of tried to absorb a lot of this information like a sponge, like, you know, different tactics, different ways of doing it. And I think, you know, like what Curry was saying that, you know, not a lot of people have that direct action experience, but I was kind of seeing some different ways of the way people approached it. So I kind of was able to also get a critique of, you know, capitalism and inequality and some of those sorts of things that I think really cemented in me pretty young. And then I got involved in the punk scene and, you know, of course, some of the, you know, more anarchist political philosophies that were attached that was really into the band Crass and Subhumans and, you know, California punk bands and things like that.
Sasha Davis:I was in my own punk band for a while as well and toured the country and got to see and meet these people on the scene. And then I remember having this moment in graduate school where I didn't realize I could kind of still look at political things and do graduate school. I had come from a fairly conservative undergrad program and I'm like, wait a minute, you mean I could do this like for a living? No, this is great. And that's where I started looking at nuclear testing out in the Marshall Islands because I had had the experience with nuclear testing and then started looking more at anti militarization movements more generally that were more contemporary, like Vieques, like Guahan, like Okinawa, like Philippines.
Sasha Davis:And that's where I really saw these examples of people in places because of the militarization and the colonization didn't have a lot of other options to do effective activism. And then that's kind of what's brought me full circle to kind of this book is I recognize that these are tactics that aren't well known, understood, or appreciated in a lot of North American activism.
Khury Petersen-Smith:A lot of the book is about learning from these different experiences of protests, resistance, of blockades, of of kind of world creation, you know, in these community contexts from around the world. In the interest of full disclosure or whatever, know, like the three of us, we met each other because we each gravitated toward these resistance movements across the Pacific that are resisting US militarism. Write about this in the book. Sasha and Laurel just talked about going to Manukah as well. For me too, like the experience of going to Okinawa, I was like, oh my goodness, I understand the world completely differently now.
Khury Petersen-Smith:Right? So first of all, I just wanna commend and appreciate the internationalism of this book and that you have taken these different experiences and are offering it to an audience who's going be primarily here in North America. That's really powerful. And at the same time, one of the challenges I think I think there's this tendency of a lot of people who are activists here in this place called North America, who have the experience of going elsewhere and seeing seeing a totally you know, a transformative kind of mode of resistance. Like, particularly, I think, when people go to Palestine.
Khury Petersen-Smith:Like, so people, they they take a delegation to Palestine and you're like, oh my gosh. This has changed my life. But then it's like, you know, the only way to translate that is they come back and they're like, you got to come with me to Palestine. Like, like, like, we all we actually we can and, like, all don't have to, like, leave here and go to Okinawa and Palestine. I mean, it's really it's great when we do get to.
Khury Petersen-Smith:And so one of the things that I really appreciate about your book, you invite people in, Sasha. In the same way that you just kind of laid out the journey of your youth, I think some people listening will be like, Oh, okay, like that. I used to, you know I did Food Not Bombs or I did, like, I went to that, you know. And I think that this book also, this is great story where you talk about your kids having a lemonade stand to raise money to pay for postage to send hygiene products and other goods to migrants on The US Mexico border. It just feels really powerful actually, because you don't have to go all the way to Palestine or Okinawa to be familiar with a lemonade stand and think about the potentially powerful content of that experience.
Khury Petersen-Smith:You have kids learning how to raise money to care for people who they don't personally know. And like that's something they like they did that. That that's what I kinda took, and I wonder how you think about how you hope people here can kind of access this stuff. It gets to why institutions as they are now that we can, like, hate and resist but sort of tend to accept. You know what mean?
Khury Petersen-Smith:Like, you can be like, I want to change the world. I'm gonna get a bachelor's in political science. I'm gonna get a master's at the Harvard Kennedy School, and I will learn how this institution works. And we don't necessarily think about like the lemonade stand as like potentially like part of the journey to, I community power. So I wonder if you could talk about that.
Sasha Davis:Yeah, thank you. I think it's a good point that there are multiple ways of entering into effective activism. Continuing with effective activism, and I think that's one of things I kind of talk about in the book is, you know, there are certain time periods when I couldn't do certain types of activism. There's times when I can't, like, you know, not going to bring my, you know, very young child to a road blockade and link arms, right, and wait for us to get the crap beaten out of us, you know. But I will take them to a place where, yes, there may be a threat of, you know, police action things, but like, you know, maybe we're helping in the kitchen, right?
Sasha Davis:Maybe we're bringing supplies in. Maybe we're just being in the space and talking to people and recognizing what's possible, you know, and so that when they also get older, they see what's possible. I think about this in almost every protest I've been at. There's always, you know, people that are doing the work of kind of making the the action happen, right, that aren't necessarily in the action itself. And so in in military studies, you know, I'm thinking of, Rachel Woodward's work on this idea of when we're trying to understand how the military works, that we may focus on the violent acts, we may focus on the attack, we may focus on the missile being shot, but that there's this gigantic pyramid, right, of the military industrial complex and what have you that make that violent moment possible, right?
Sasha Davis:And there's actually much more of that than there is the acting elements, the ones that are enabling that. And I kind of see that in activism as well, where just because you see, you know, 25 people linking arms in a road blockade, there's a bunch of people behind them, right? That are supporting them, that are potentially going to bail them out, that are, you know, videoing it, that are, that have helped them with transportation and food and all of these sorts of things. And so I think that was one of the things I also learned kind of early on in my experiences at the Nevada test site, because I worked for the organization that was helping put them on. I was doing the dialing for dollars and looking at the logistics and all that.
Sasha Davis:I knew that, you know, the second you had the big yearly protest, it was time to start planning for the next yearly protest, right? That there were people that were getting ready for that. And I think it's important for folks to know that they can engage in kind of effective, even fairly radical, you know, kind of counter power, types of, movements. And you don't have to be like an adrenaline junkie. You don't have to be, you know, willing to face a lot of violence.
Sasha Davis:You do have to have a willingness to see that you have to look for alternatives beyond the state. And that can feel scary even if, because you're not necessarily feel like it's assured of success and you don't necessarily have a lot of roadmaps. You may not have a lot of roadmaps in your life of seeing how people have done that process. And again, that's one reason for the book, you know, to be like, oh no, you can look into these different examples in these organizations and you can do this in your town, right? But it's not easy, but you have to start with the kind of making that decision that in addition to kind of sign waving protests and electoral politics, I also have to kind of do something else that is perhaps feels a little risky, but also is going to take some work and perhaps some time.
Sasha Davis:And I think that there are some organizations here on the continent that I think kind of have that vibe or have that approach. I've been pretty into some of the stuff that Cooperation Jackson has been doing. This whole build and fight program. It's like a 15 episode over like a whole year kind of discussion of like, hey, this is how we build power. This is how we, you know, it's a very slow, methodical.
Sasha Davis:And I think people need to see those kinds of examples while they're also doing sign waving protests and thinking about them and voting. Let's face it. That's one thing you're gonna do one day in a year and a half. Lots of time to do all sorts of other things, and you have to.
Laurel Mei-Singh:I wanna return to our discussion about the state and how we're defining the state. The state that you're talking about here is kind of
Sasha Davis:a
Laurel Mei-Singh:repressive, oppressive, capitalist state. A question that I've been wrestling with, My politics have kind of moved around from anti authoritarianism to socialist communism. What exactly is a state? We could argue that at Pu'u Honua, Pu'uhulu, you know, houseless encampments or communities like the Waianae Boat Harbour, that they are exercising a lot of the features of a state, right? They have organized political bodies, they're exercising control over a territory, They're a set of actors with authority over larger groups of people.
Laurel Mei-Singh:They have their own systems of provisioning for people's needs and protecting people from disasters. Right? So they do not necessarily hold a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. However, they do have some sort of authority that's competing with these institutions that hold the monopoly over the legitimate use of force. So could we say that these, you know, exercises of replacing the state and supplanting state authority are creating their own states in the process?
Laurel Mei-Singh:Or are we saying the state is, you know, always an inherently repressive body?
Sasha Davis:That's a great question. And I coming from geography, we do, and, you know, I know that, like, if if I had gone through graduate school in political science, I'd probably have a little more background on, definitions of the state and what counts as a state, what doesn't count as a state. And the way in which that's been sort of implemented more in sort of geographic, you know, thought, of course, you know, a function of really focusing on territoriality and those sorts of things. But I think it in a sense, the rhetorical kind of definition of whether something is a state or not a state, I think it's sort of important because it can lead us to some different answers in terms of how we then try to organize social life. Because I think that in a lot of the stuff that I grew up with, which was more of an anarchist, you know, kind of oriented philosophy was that the state is there, it's bad, it's repressive, and you just get rid of it and you replace it with nothing.
Sasha Davis:Right? And just have a, and I talk about this in the book, right? It's like larger and larger fields of free action, right? But one of the things that through my experiences I sort of kind of came to sort of critique that view is that there's always, if we think of governance, right, some way in which we agree to interact with each other on any kind of stable long term sort of way that never goes away, right? It can change, it can shift, but it just never disappears as long as you're still being social with other people.
Sasha Davis:There's some kind of fabric that is mediating those interactions. Now it doesn't have to be capitalist. It doesn't have to be hierarchical. It doesn't have to have all these things that we sometimes think about as the state. And so, you know, I definitely wrestled with that in terms of just terminology, like, am I advocating you just get rid of the state or am I saying you're replacing it with something else that is state like, but not hierarchical?
Sasha Davis:Then somebody may say, well, if it's not hierarchical, it's not a state. Right. So, and I tried to, in the book describe very carefully then, well, this is the types of governance arrangements I'm talking about here or that these activists are talking about creating. And, you know, I think that where I sort of come down on that is that what is being created in these spaces is definitely state like in that it is an effort to come up with an agreement around how we're going to interact with each other, a set of rules, a set of kind of expectations that people have of each other. However, is non hierarchical is supposed to be non exploitive.
Sasha Davis:And that, those are the goals of that particular system of governance. Now, whether one wants to call that state like or not is a little bit up to how people might define it. But I think that one of the key things that really inspired this research and the kind of approach to it is the idea that what I argue pretty forcefully is that social movements are not just protesting and asking. Social movements are creating governance. Like whether we want to call that state like or not, I kind of say it is, but social movements are in the business of trying to supplant governance, not all of them, but many of them.
Sasha Davis:They really do want to say, hey, you know what? We can run this better. And of course, they're usually right. They can if, you know, in the absence of being completely repressed and attacked. And so that's one of the things that I really try to I think is a real core of this book is this idea that social movements are in a sense maybe proto states.
Sasha Davis:They are trying to implement governance and supplant. And I think that we have to recognize that because if we don't, we're not recognizing some of the real power that social movements can have. And I think that one of the examples that I talk about too, especially looking at all these different contexts where places are occupied or colonized, is that how did governance change to the colonial state in the first place was not because they came and asked the old governance, Hey, can you do this differently? They moved in, they supplanted, they took over territory. And I think that's what social movements are kind of trying to do now is trying to be like, yeah.
Sasha Davis:So in a sense that I talk about this, I think I use the term like we don't need decolonization. What we need is a different form of that. If general colonization is a great word where you have a different apparatus of governance pushing out another one. But the new governance is more ethical, more egalitarian, less exploitive and all of that. And so, and also, and I also talked about this too.
Sasha Davis:It's about reinstating oftentimes an indigenous system of governance into those spaces where a colonized one has been sort of laid on top of it, right? And it's kind of having that reemerge. And so that is a real key. But again, whether we call it a state or not, I think it could get into some semantic. Some people would probably say yes and some no.
Khury Petersen-Smith:So one, just quickly, I do think that like this moment that we're in right now, where we're having this conversation is, I think that the people currently at the helm of The US state are making an argument that's like, this is what the state is. They're like, USAID, giving aid around the world and having a Department of Education, all of that is superfluous. The purpose of the state is coercion. That's it, you know? And there has been some scholarship on the notion, which I agree with, that the notion of government and of the state that those of us who were born in the twentieth century and even early twenty first up until now, that we kind of inherited, the notion that a government has, that it builds schools and libraries and has welfare programs and jobs programs, that that was that is that is not actually the nature of the state.
Khury Petersen-Smith:That is a feature of the direction that governance took in certain parts of the world in the early twentieth century, and at the moment, there's a section of the elite that's like, that that whole era is over. We're gonna return actually to what the state looked like before the nineteen thirties. So it's just interesting to kind of think about the state in this particular moment because I think there's a big there's this kind of fight, I think, in the elite about what the state even it's for. But I don't know. I tend to I don't know if I'd say agree with the Pete Hagsets and the Marco Rubios of the world, but I think that there's something honest about what they're like, this wasn't the way the state was created.
Khury Petersen-Smith:Created for USAID. It wasn't created with the Department of Education. That's recent. You know, that's extra, and it's time to strip it back to the to the essential purpose of the state. So with that, you know, one of the things that you I thought was super interesting about the book, you engage with this, this is what you were just talking about, this question of like power, you know, which I think in anarchists and anti authoritarian circles, you know, there's been a tendency that I'm very sympathetic with to be so freaked out by anybody having power, that it's like this thing, it's what you said, like, can we get rid of the state and then just replace it with, and not replace it at all, you know, just like sort of obliterate power.
Khury Petersen-Smith:And there's this I wanna get this quote right, this part of the book where you say, if power is simply the ability to make decisions and implement them, then power is not something that can be destroyed, can only be transferred. Which I really a, I think you kind of demystify power, make it a little less scary. You're like, look, it's just it's just making decisions and then making them count. You know? And if that's gonna happen, you can't I mean, that that that's just that's just part of the deal of social life.
Khury Petersen-Smith:Am I am I right? Like, that is that kind of the point? And therefore, it's like, so then how does that power operate? Like, that is that is that am I understanding that right?
Sasha Davis:Yeah. So yeah. I think that's great. A couple of things to say. I'm gonna start it off.
Sasha Davis:I think the current political context in The United States favors fundamental change. I'm going to start there. And I think part of it is like you're saying, the other functions of the state are being sort of stripped away other than coercion, protecting property and enabling capital accumulation. And you could definitely go back historically and say, this is why the state, for at least in The United States, this is what it was made for. This is who it was made by, and it was for their benefit.
Sasha Davis:And then some of these other kinds of like welfare state type of programs have been really about them just being able to, you know, there are time periods where they kind of have to throw some crumbs out, right. To kind of keep people from, you know, overthrowing the more obviously exploitive nature of the state. And one of the things that kind of occurred to me actually in the last week or so was I thought about it in terms of, you know, Michel Foucault's perspectives on biopower, right? This whole idea that states started getting into the game of building schools and hospitals and highways and all this stuff, not necessarily out of the kindness of their heart, right? But just this idea is, well, if it population made more productive and more docile, It made them better workers and it was actually a way to engage in more hyper exploitation.
Sasha Davis:Like it seems like they were doing it out of goodwill, but really it was about being able to capture productivity and healthy workers will make you more profits than unhealthy workers and educated workers will make you more profits than uneducated. And so now that we see some of that falling away, there's obviously immediate negative, horrible effects the people who are being thrown, who are going to be thrown off of Medicaid and who are going to be losing benefits and, you know, whose educational opportunities are going to go away. And I think we haven't scratched the surface of seeing effects of those cuts yet. I mean, it's going to get much worse in the coming years. But on the other hand too, the elites are cutting their own throats.
Sasha Davis:Right? Because not not by the fact that they're going to be first of all, yes, they're going to have people be more in opposition to them and people's lives are getting degraded, but that's also the source of their profits. If they replace a bunch of workers with AI and automation and all this stuff, who's buying their stuff that they make? Where's the next generation of employees in terms of education, where are they coming from? And it's like essentially a social strip mining operation.
Sasha Davis:If you're gonna squeeze the very last bits of productivity and not reproduce the ability for ten, twenty years, a wave to be productive in terms of human capabilities. But also if you cut down all of the national forests or you deregulate and you pump out all of the, know, frac all the oil or whatever, it's like, this can't possibly last and you're going to drive your contradictions into like hyperdrive, right? And so it seems like it is going to drive people to the point where like this is absolutely intolerable. We have to make change. And so I can't see this lasting any length of time, even on their own merits, like even on what they think it will do for them.
Sasha Davis:Yeah. It'll give you hyper profits for a while. And they've got to kind of know this at some level, but it's just like, we're going to drive it like we stole it till we go all the way off the cliff. At some level it's madness, but it is the context we have to think about. And so how we approach that, do we sit there and say, no, no, no, we just need to go back to what it was and these other things?
Sasha Davis:Or do we need to be like, yeah, those parts of the state are always there. It's really kind of the core function of it. And we really need to kind of replace it with something different. And that's why I kind of started it with the current context favors fundamental change.
Laurel Mei-Singh:Yeah. This conversation is so fascinating. I really appreciate it. Going back to the idea of a protostate, I find that really fruitful and generative. I would tweak your formulations slightly in that I don't see them as non hierarchical because in these formations, there always is a chain of command, whether it's, you know, organic or very much orchestrated and planned.
Laurel Mei-Singh:There are hierarchies in terms of who has decision making authority. So in that sense, I do see these formations as So I think the proto state is useful in helping us see it as a different form of hierarchy with a different set of ethics. So, yeah, I'd like to hear more about that if we're there in terms of our analysis or we're kind of still thinking through what a proto state means. In terms of the state, I agree with you both, you know, that the state's purpose right now is has been laid bare in terms of coercion, protecting property, and capital accumulation. And yet I still want to send my children to public schools.
Laurel Mei-Singh:Right? I still want my parents to have access to Medicare. I still want my trash to get picked up. I still want there to be laws around speeding so I don't have to, like, be terrified every time my four year old, like, steps his foot on the sidewalk, right, that he's gonna get hit by a car. So I wanna wrestle with these contradictions of, you know, like, the state has gotta go, and yet the state also has these important roles in terms of educating us, taking away our trash, even though, you know, our system of waste is completely horrible, right?
Laurel Mei-Singh:And, you know, providing health care. I don't trust the state of making sure we're all gonna thrive, but at least giving us some basic necessities that make our lives a little bit better than if, you know, the current political administration has their way of, like, just kind of stripping the state completely to its bare bones of coercion.
Khury Petersen-Smith:Can I add one thing to that exactly that point? The regulatory function of the state for me feels like the thing I'm like, how do you replace it? I feel very aware that I assume that when I turn on the tap, the water has been filtered into that. You know, I know that the quality of food inspection isn't like the best in the world, but there's some rules. You know what I mean?
Khury Petersen-Smith:You can't just put you have to put list the ingredients. I just wanted to add that to the pile. You know, how do you kind of grapple with that?
Sasha Davis:Yes. Yeah. And I think two pieces there. I think one, know, recognizing what Laurel was saying about hierarchy is I think important because I think there's different ways of thinking about hierarchy as a structure by category of some people just get to be in control of things as opposed to other people as more of a class or a caste type of system, or of course gendered divisions of labor that are imbued with expectations of who's in charge and that kind of a hierarchy. And one that's a little more of a informal or a kind of respect for understanding or skill sets and things like that.
Sasha Davis:I think that there have been some movements that have taken de hierarchicalization to a point where it limits function, right? Where like, so for instance, if there's somebody in the movement that's really good as a spokesperson and talking and they're like, no, no, we're just going to rotate you in and out with some folks that aren't that comfortable with it to be more equal and to have different movements do all the time. But sometimes you got to recognize that some people have some skill sets and some different things, or some people are well connected and they know some of these other folks, or some people can get these particular resources, have knowledges. And I think in the, you know, examples in Hawaii, of course, in the respect, you know, for elders that are in those protests, you know, that they are the ones that are leading it and you're and you're not really doing anything that's, you know, they get kind of the say really, of kind of setting some of the tone for some of that. And I think that's common, but it feels a little different than some of the structured hierarchies that, I guess, maybe are more class oriented or caste or or gender oriented.
Sasha Davis:But it's important to recognize that, yeah, like, sometimes an effort to completely do away with hierarchy entirely can get you into some trouble. And I think some of the stuff I talk about, one of the middle chapters of the book too, is some of the arguments that happen between people that come from an anarchist perspective and some of the indigenous activists that can also butt heads around this idea of hierarchy and that there are certain folks that have certain knowledges and things like that. And so it's something that people have to be cognizant of. The second point too about, I think boils down to me to security, right? There are certain things that the state, the current state does that we find security in, right?
Sasha Davis:That we can turn on the tap that our kids, you know, my kids at public school right now, right? That there's some level of security. And I think that is also a real challenge when we think about replacing the state and the things like, how do you do it in a way that maintains security? That doesn't just unravel everything for a while and then say, we'll figure it out later. And I think that's important because there definitely are perspectives on protest that want to maximize disruption.
Sasha Davis:And I talked about this in the book too, where it's like, you maximize disruption, you destabilize the state, and then you just tip it over. And then we'll figure out what to do after that. Right. And it's like, that's an incredibly insecure space for everybody. It also, I think drives people then into the arms of anybody who is saying, well, the worry will make you all very secure.
Sasha Davis:That could be a much more right wing, you know, kind of, you know, authoritarian sort of space. And that's why I think these social movements also have to develop and they do to some degree develop systems of security within them as well. And also articulate this is what, you know, in this space that we're kind of in control of and hopefully can expand. This is how we're going to meet some of those needs for things like clean water, childcare, expectations of behavior among each other, things like that. And also have the capabilities to make those agreements sort of stick so that people can actually feel secure.
Sasha Davis:And I have definitely seen aspects of that in these activist spaces. But sometimes it's also not obviously as well developed as it is in the larger, you know, in the larger state run, you know, spaces. Like, it takes a lot of work. It also is one of those things where it's a chicken and egg. It's like you have to be able to provide security and have logistics and have resources.
Sasha Davis:It's hard to do that unless you have control, but it's hard to have control unless you have these things. But people have been building, I think, towards that sort of thing. But it's something we absolutely have to think about, I think, activists and movement builders. How do you do it with security? Because not everybody wants to just topple and then figure it out later and have, you know, a chaotic scene of of insecurity and uncertainty.
Sasha Davis:And I think that that's why you kinda have to do some of these things and build them as you go. And that's, again, going back to, you know, some of the stuff from, the build and fight formula and stuff like that from, like, cooperation Jackson and other folks. It's like, yeah, you have to build while you fight.
Laurel Mei-Singh:Sasha, could you talk about what your current project is? What's next coming from doctor Sasha Davis?
Sasha Davis:Yeah. Interestingly, what's coming next for me is about organizing. It's not about writing. I am fairly consciously right now trying to put myself in the space where I'm writing less and doing more. I think it's the time where I feel like, especially with producing this book, I feel like it's a fairly kind of coherent kind of set of my thoughts on, you know, the kind of ideas for organizing.
Sasha Davis:And it can sometimes as an academic, very easy to then get stuck in that space, both in terms of the head space, but also the space of just kind of think, right. Repeat, you know, observe, you know, right. You know, and I'm actually aiming to break out of that a little bit. And part of, I think my process for that is actually to write a little bit less and to do a little more organizing locally where I am here in New England. I mean, that's also another thing for me, you know, being a kid who grew up in Arizona, who does most of his research in The Pacific and other kind of island environments, bringing it home and being an effective, you know, member of a movement here for me is, you know, something that I've been certainly working my way into over the past few years.
Sasha Davis:And that's kind of, where I want to put my, energies is into that, grassroots ground level organizing. And I think that I'll end up, you know, of course, having more to write about through that experience, but it's kind of a conscious decision to write less and act more. And that's sort of where I'm at. And it's hard because I've got like four or five writing projects that I would love to do is all sitting there and document and I'm all ready. Like yourself, Laurel, I would love to get more into like, you know, documentary filmmaking.
Sasha Davis:And I have this whole idea for a whole thing. I'm like, and I'm trying to rein myself in a little bit because I feel like the moment is really now for that more on the ground, organizing. And of course, you know, over the coming months, I also want to do some promotion for this book, which I think the way I'm hoping to do, like, you know, in person events and other things is really going to be around sparking conversations to do that organizing. Right. And so that's what I'm kind of hoping to do here in the near future.
Sasha Davis:And what about you both in terms of the projects that you're working on right now?
Laurel Mei-Singh:Well, what I really appreciate about this book is that this book germinates from movements, and its purpose and audience is to speak to people within movements and to push those movements and efforts forward. So and, you know, the practices of replacing the state. It's a really good document and I've used the word guide. It's a manual or a guide for social movements. What I'm trying to do is similar, but because I'm still working on tenure, maintain some focus on the writing, but also make sure the writing I'm doing is speaking to broader audiences.
Laurel Mei-Singh:That's what brought me into documentary filmmaking. Working with a film team based in Hawaii on a a documentary version, like a shorter documentary version of my book that focuses on Makua. And the US Army has recently allowed announced their plans to let go of Makua military reservation, and the future is still unwritten. Like, what is life beyond occupation? What is life beyond the military base?
Laurel Mei-Singh:So the purpose of this film is to really uplift the grassroots efforts that have been working to protect the land and return the land and with the hope that these people who've been working for decades will have a voice, a strong voice in the future of the land. And I think I think that's already a very strong possibility, but the purpose of the documentary as well as the book is to kind of push that forward in making sure that the future is from the ground up, not from the top down. Yeah. Courtney, what are you working on?
Khury Petersen-Smith:I'm very grateful to be connected with storytellers and professional communicators and artists primarily, you know, who have roots and origins in in The Middle East, but who are also, you know, mostly live in North America and are kind of familiar with The US audiences. Trying to cultivate some conversation about conversation. How can we talk about this here in a way that invites people living in this place called The United States to a conversation around what this US Israeli offensive looks like? What are the ways that the many, many ways that we're, those of us who live here, kind of entangled in it, and ways that we can contest it fundamentally in ways that stand with people located in that region. Also, I am working on a book that is about internationalism.
Khury Petersen-Smith:In so many ways, reading your book, Sasha, there's all these resonances. Literally, we've been to the same places and talking to some of the same people. When I've had the great privilege of going to Okinawa or Guam, I hit up both of you first. I'm like, hey, who should I talk to? So it makes sense that we've learned from and with, you know, some of the same people in the same places.
Khury Petersen-Smith:The whole project, the kind of analytical and activist projects of organizing and thinking and being as sort of globally minded internationalist people, you know, among critical folks or leftist folks or whatever you want to call it, think in The US we're at a real deficit. At the moment, notion of what it means to be progressive or leftist, for the most part, is considered a very domestic question. And if we're talking about official politics, for example, somebody can run as a progressive candidate and not have anything to say about anything beyond The US's borders, and that sort of goes unquestioned. And then I think for those of us who do work to build anti war resistance, to stop Israel's genocide, things like that, or just kind of engage with the rest of the world, I think we tend to look to frameworks that are a bit outdated respectfully. Frameworks that are rooted in the twentieth century, that historical experiences that I think are extremely important points of reference.
Khury Petersen-Smith:You know, I think about the Bandung conference, I think about the non aligned movement. You know, there's all these moments that are extremely, you know, various revolutions in twentieth the century, but the world has also moved and it's time to develop some different frameworks. And so I'm hoping to gather, you know, insights I've found from some of the more inspiring movements around the world and in this country and look at their linkages, see how we can learn and work with each other.
Sasha Davis:Great. And I completely agree in terms of the focus has become more and more domestic, think particularly, A, because you have kind of one side of the political spectrum becoming in the right side of the political spectrum, becoming so hyper focused, America first and all of this, as if nobody else in the world existed to some degree. And then, but on the left, sort of trying to defend against that onslaught really here instead of necessarily building bridges of solidarity with, and thinking that they have something to learn from other movements and other places and things like that, particularly beyond just sometimes the bringing up of like, you know, European Nordic socialist, you know, kind of ideas. And so I think that's a really great, you know, project because I think it's something where, I think that people in The United States particularly really do have a deficit of that international perspective and a contemporary international perspective in what is now really, you know, clearly a multipolar world that is in flux. Well, I cannot thank you both enough for taking the time to meet today and to, you know, for spending the time with my book and to then spend the time talking about it today.
Sasha Davis:I've learned so much, and it's been really, really enjoyable to be able to talk with with both of you. And like I said, I I can't tell you enough, you know, how much I appreciate, you know, joining in this conversation.
Laurel Mei-Singh:Thank you for all that you do and all that you do support scholars and activists and movements and I'm sure your students. So this book is a testament of that. Thank you.
Khury Petersen-Smith:Yeah, absolutely. Really grateful. It's really, really reflective, Sasha. Like I just think it's really cool that you've looked out over the expanse of your efforts in life to change the world and you reflected on it in a way that I think is so useful.
Sasha Davis:Thank you. I appreciate that. Like I said, one thing too with this book is obviously I also write academic papers and things. I really wanted to make sure that the focus on an audience that may not have spent a semester digging into Foucault, right? You know, like this is something that people that are in activism and that people that are coming to these ideas kind of more recently and something that could be accessible to them.
Sasha Davis:So, I hope that I was able to hit that mark.
Laurel Mei-Singh:Definitely did.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Replace the State How to Change the World When Elections and Protests Fail by Sasha Davis is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.