Through twenty-some accounts of activists’ lives, this work invites readers to embark on a quest, from their early childhoods to the present day, to understand their political commitments, the scope and motivation of their political socialization, and the future of their uprisings, in order to better answer a question at once simple yet ambitious: how do we become independent?
Common experiences and trajectories are outlined, affording glimpses of the social fabric of independent activists. For we become self-sufficient neither by chance nor as a result of political enlightenment. All over the world, individuals act and are acted upon. And it is precisely what drives them to act that this work intends to survey.
Sociologist Colin Robineau is an associate researcher at the Interdisciplinary Media Analysis and Research Center (CARISM) at the University of Paris 2 and teaches at the University of La Réunion. In 2017, he defended a doctoral dissertation entitled La Politisation en terrain militant « radical ». Ethnographie d’un squat d’activités de l’Est parisien (Politicization at a "Radical" Activist Site: Ethnography of an East Paris Squat and its Activities).