Andrej Grubačić is a US-based Yugoslav Sociologist, Balkan federalist, and university Professor who has written on autonomous zones and mutual aid in world history. He is the grandson of Ratomir Dugonjić, Yugoslav partisan leader and communist revolutionary. Grubačić was a prominent member of the now defunct antiglobalization or global justice movement. Grubačić is a long standing friend of the Kurdish freedom movement and one of the most prominent supporters of the democratic revolution in the Kurdish region in Syria, also known as Rojava. His writings and interests range from comparative world history of exilic spaces and autonomous zones to the neo-marxist world-systems analysis, and from historical sociology to the history of mutual aid. He is an active participants in the World-Ecology. He is a social science editor at PM Press. He taught at the University of Rojava in Qamislo.
Political activism
Grubačić is a long standing friend of the Kurdish freedom movement and one of the most prominent supporters of the democratic revolution in the Kurdish region in Syria, also known as Rojava. Grubačić co-founded the Global Balkans network of the Balkan anti-capitalist diaspora, the Yugoslav Initiative for Economic Democracy, Kontrapunkt , and ZBalkans–a Balkan edition of Z Magazine. He is or has been active as an organizer in networks such as the post-Yugoslav coalition of anti-authoritarian collectives DSM!, Peoples Global Action, the World Social Forum, Freedom Fight and as a program director for the . He is a part of Retort collective, a collective of radical intellectuals based in the Bay Area. He taught at Z Media Institute in Boston and at University of Rojava in Qamislo. He is a member the Industrial Workers of the World. He is involved with the mutual aid project with five prisoners on death row from Lucasville Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. He wrote about the 1993 Lucasville rebellion, when 450 Lucasville prisoners, including an unlikely alliance of the Aryan Brotherhood and Gangster Disciples, rioted and took over the facility for 11 days. He wrote extensively on the California prison rebellion of 2011 and the so called Short Corridor Collective of the Pelican Bay prison.
Academic career
Following the collapse of Yugoslavia, Grubačić left for the United States. He moved to Binghamton University where he participated in research working groups at the Fernand Braudel Center on implications of anarchist Anthropology for world-systems analysis. In 2008 he moved to San Francisco and worked in the sociology department at the University of San Francisco and urban studies department at the San Francisco Art Institute. He is now a Professor and Department Chair of Anthropology and Social Change Anthropology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and a visiting Professor at the University of Rojava. His interest in world systems analysis and anarchist anthropology has influenced his research perspective, which includes experiences of self-organization, voluntary association, and mutual aid on the world-scale. His ongoing research on exilic spaces in the modern capitalist world system considers how spatial expressions of concentrated mutual aid are produced and reproduced on the outside/inside of capitalist civilization. Exilic spaces and practices refer to liminal and non-state areas relatively autonomous from capitalist valorization and state control. His principal research focus is on the autonomous "cracks" peopled by Don Cossacks, Atlantic pirates, Macedonian Roma, Jamaican Maroons and Mexican Zapatistas. This research is included in his UC Press book . Co-authored with Denis O'Hearn, the book is a winner of the 2017 American Sociological Association PEWS prize for Distinguished Scholarship. He is the author of several important essays concerning the intellectual impact of Kurdish sociologist Abdullah Öcalan. He is an active participants in the World-Ecology, a global conversation of academics, activists, and artists committed to understanding human relations of power, production, and environment-making in the web of life.
Publications
In 2006, Grubačić teamed up with activist and historian Staughton Lynd to write the book He went on to edit The Staughton Lynd Reader, and offer a new programmatic proposal for the "libertarian socialism for the 21st century," inspired by Lynd's work. His most recent academic book is Living at the Edges of Capitalism, co-authored with Denis O'Hearn and winner of the 2017 American Sociological Association Political Economy of the World-System Book Award. His other works include books in Balkan languages, chapters and numerous articles related to the history and utopian present of the Balkans, anarchism, and radical sociology. Grubačić worked with David Graeber to develop an anarchist version of world-systems analysis. Grubačić is a Professor and Department Chair at CIIS California Institute of Integral Studies.
Selected books
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Noam Comski, Politika bez Moci''. Izdavac: DAF Zagreb, 2004..
