If you look at social movements in Latin America, there are spaces where alternative politics are thought about on the ground, at the grassroots level, but they are always under threat. The problem in North Africa and the Middle East is the politics of oil. It means that the spaces for truly grassroots politics, involving those masses of people excluded from high politics, are very quickly closed down. They are not really allowed any kind of autonomy to develop, and that seems to be the real problem, which gets us back to the neo-colonial relationship.

Fifty years is the long time to think about a thinker's relevance or to think of the relevance of their work to a contemporary period.

Spaces of liberation are, in a certain way, some kind of social spaces where people can not only get together and think about something else, but also act together. If you are thinking about an elemental solidarity, you are thinking about people acting together and taking decisions together, and thereby beginning to think about what sort of society they want to create. So, there is a need for liberated spaces; that is really difficult.

Counter-violence against the colonial regime is liberatory because it is an act, and by acting, the absolute power of colonialism, internalized by the colonized, is shaken.

Many of the democratization projects are a real threat to real democracy.

The problem in Syria, I think, is that when there is so much violence, there is not only very little chance to create spaces for liberation, but also all talk is quickly swallowed up by it. People are trying to keep their heads down because they are being bombarded all the time.

The Syrian people do not recognize themselves in the elite politics of the Muslim Brotherhood or the left, each of which is looking for an external power rather than the people's own self-activity.