Acknowledgements

The ideas for this book started to take shape in 2013, in what seems, in retrospect, to have been much gentler times. The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funding that made the research possible was awarded in the run-up to the Brexit referendum in 2016. The empirical research began just as Donald Trump was elected to the White House for the first time and ended as Boris Johnson was campaigning to become Leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of the UK. We finished the research with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, had to pause the project until that was over and then restarted the writing as Britain left the European Union. The final draft was completed as Donald Trump’s United States spiralled towards despotism.

Throughout this period, our research partners and fellow travellers, especially those in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and Radical Routes (RR), have been beacons of hope, reaffirming our faith that not only is another world possible but also that it already exists. This book spotlights their experiences, traces their intellectual genealogy and amplifies their voices. We hope it inspires others to learn from their example, to mimic and to innovate. The book would have been impossible without them, and we owe them a huge debt of gratitude.

We owe Thomas Swann the single largest individual debt of gratitude. As a research fellow on this project from 2016 to 2019, he brought his intelligence, kindness, energy, insight, creativity and fearless adventurousness in research methods to the project. The research with RR and the IWW as well as the analysis of the Occupy documents would not have been possible without him. His interactions with the multiple groups he contacted and worked with, many of which did not make into this book, were indispensable for drawing out the lived anarchist constitutional tradition we recount in this book. His work fundamentally shaped the last three Chapters 5, 6 and 7, our methods and our reading of the historical tradition.

We would also like to thank Matthew Wilson, not just for his tireless support for the project but also for his practical help. He suggested and made possible the work with RR, authored the report that we used in our analysis and provided feedback on drafts of Chapter 7. Many other people also helped us shape and focus the project. Thanks, in particular, to participants at the RR co-op meetings we attended for their welcome and to Spencer Cooke, Hannah McCann, Cath Muller, Jed Picksley, Milan Rai and Jennifer Verson for their kindness, conviviality and mutual aid. In the Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England Regional Administration (WISE-RA) of the IWW, fellow workers Maff Tucker, Russ Spring and Frank Syratt deserve special thanks. Thanks also to Jed Forward, Heledd Melangell Williams, Pete Davis, Richard Musgrove, Kenyon Zimmer and Jade Saab for their comments on the final draft of Chapter 5 and to Matt Wilson and Cath Muller for saving our blushes by fact-checking the final draft of the chapter on the RR. All remaining errors are our own.

We benefitted from formal and informal conversations about anarchist constitutionalising with members of the Anarchist Federation (AFed), volunteers at the anarchist social centre Andrými, in Reykjavik, at Base for Anarchy and Solidarity in Easton (BASE) social centre in Bristol and participants at ‘anarchist constitutionalising’ workshops organised at the London and Sheffield Anarchist Bookfairs, the Glasgow Radical Independent Bookfair and the Edinburgh Autonomous Centre.

We fleshed out our conception of non-domination and anarchist constitutionalising in ‘Anarchism and Non-Domination’, published in the Journal of Political Ideologies (2019), and ‘Occupy and the Constitution of Anarchy’, published in Global Constitutionalism (2019). None of the content of those papers reappears in this book, but the ideas echo resoundingly. We would like to thank Mark Bray, Ian Carter, Dario Castiglione, Keith Dowding, Benjamin Franks, Elizabeth Frazer, Harry Gould, Iain Hampsher-Monk, Marisa Holmes, Ana Juncos Garcia, Tony Lang, Bruno Leipold, Christina Oelgemoller, Phil Parvin, Andy Schaap, Simon Springer, Nathan Tamblyn, Simon Thorpe, Mathijs van de Sande and Stuart White for helping us articulate them.

Anarchic Agreements (PM Press 2022), a practitioner synopsis of this book, was written with Thomas Swann and the invaluable assistance and guidance of Rebecca Smith at Seeds for Change, and would have been impossible without our conversations with Jon Walker and Angela Espinosa, who helped us think through the relationship of systems theory to anarchist constitutionalising.

We have been sustained by the enthusiasm, friendly critique and interest of hundreds of colleagues. Special thanks are due to John McCormick who suggested Constitutionalising Anarchy as a possible title for the book before we’d even started the project, and for his endorsement of the finished product, and thank you to participants at the workshop that closed the ESRC-funded phase of the project held in Bristol January 2018: Ken Barlow, Arne Heinz, Lukas Hornby, Eileen Jerrett, Birgitta Jonsdottir, Tiffany Kane, Alexis McKay, Jón Ólafsson, Sara Oskarsson, Jed Picksley, Susan Rae, Carne Ross, Arin Savran, Viktor Valgarðsson and Matthew Wilson.

We are grateful to attendees at presentations on anarchism, anarchy and non-domination at the University of Sydney in 2016 and the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster in 2016, colleagues at the Centre for Advanced International Studies at the University of Exeter in 2021, Tony Burns and colleagues at the Centre for Global and Social Justice for giving us the space to present an overview of the whole book in 2024 and those at political theory seminars at the universities of Oxford, Roehampton, St. Andrews and Edinburgh. At the latter, Regan Burles, Hamish Kallin, Zoe Malcolm and Tom O’Shea gave us enormous encouragement at the final stages of drafting.

Participants at the following conferences generously engaged with our work, tested our ideas and shared their insights: ‘Emancipatory Transformations’ at the University of Sussex 2016; the Kent Critical Legal Conference 2016, ‘Constitutions – Poetry or Prose?’, at the University of Iceland in 2016; the Political Studies Association Annual Conference, Glasgow 2017; International Studies Association annual convention, San Francisco 2018; the roundtable on co-production at the British International Studies Association (BISA) annual conference 2018; the University of Exeter Law School Research Seminar, 2018; the Sociocracy at Work Conference at Nottingham Trent University in 2019; the Anarchist Studies Network Conference in Belfast in 2024 and, finally, two events in 2025: the 2025 Exeter Critical Legal Conference and the European University Institute conference ‘Law and Revolution: Prefiguration or Abolition?’

We would like to thank colleagues at the University of Exeter and Loughborough University, especially members of the Centre for Political Thought, and Isobel Ashford at Loughborough, who helped promote our work in her networks, as well as guiding us through the Higher Education Authority (HEA) funding application. We would also like to express our gratitude to the University of Exeter for providing funding and a convivial environment for a manuscript workshop in the summer of 2024, and we are enormously grateful to the colleagues who gave up their time to read and comment on individual draft chapters and meet with us to discuss how to improve the book: David Bailey, Jonathan Havercroft, Bice Maiguashca, Manjeet Ramgotra, Andy Schaap and Matt Wilson. Finally, we would like to thank Peterson Silva, who read the whole first draft and gave us a challenging, constructive critique that helped us bolster some of the arguments, and Melis Kirtilli and Stephanie Wanga, who helped us think the book had a chance.

Without the generous funding this project has received, the project would have looked very different indeed. The initial research was funded by the ESRC, under its ‘Transformative Social Science’ call in 2015 (‘Anarchy as a Constitutional Principle: Constitutionalising in Anarchist Politics’ ES/N006860/1). This grant enabled our work with the IWW and RR and the retrospective work on the Occupy Wall Street movement. Alex Prichard and Lara Montesinos Coleman secured a Small Groups Grant from the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) under the title, ‘Co-Producing Political Philosophy and Social Theory With Grassroots Constituencies: Towards Emergence And Transformation’, which enabled us to think through our co-production methods with a wider group of scholars: Rhiannon Firth, Uri Gordon, Saio Gradin and Chris Rossdale. Follow-up work with the activist educational initiative Seeds for Change, who collaborated with us on Anarchic Agreements, and Common Weal in Scotland, was funded by an HEA Impact Grant at Loughborough University (2018–19). We were able to catch up with writing the book after the pandemic, thanks to a shared ISRF Mid-Career Fellowship (2023–24). We owe our funders huge thanks for their confidence in this project, especially Lars Cornelissen, Despoina Livieratou, Chris Newfield and Stuart Wilson at the ISRF. Funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI, grant number: ANON-B8FT-2EVN-F-1) made it possible for this book to be published open access, making the digital version freely available for anyone to read and reuse under a Creative Commons licence. We are grateful to David Campling at Loughborough University for guiding us through the process and to the UKRI for its sympathetic consideration of our application.

Our thanks go to the past and present editors of the London School of Economics (LSE) International Studies Series, especially George Lawson, the three manuscript reviewers for their anonymous, but fulsome, vote of confidence to Rachel Schragis and Josh MacPhee for letting us use their artwork and to Carrie Parkinson, Natasha Whelan and the team at Cambridge University Press for helping us through the production.

And finally, none of this would have been possible but for the love and support of our nearest and dearest.