Book launch: Lessons from the Zapatistas

The Leo Panitch School for Socialist Education is proud to host Lia Pinheiro Barbosa and Peter Rosset for the online launch of their new book Lessons from the Zapatistas: From Armed Insurgency to People’s Autonomy (Fernwood Publishing).

Lessons from the Zapatistas is essential reading for anyone interested in liberation, democracy and radical social transformation. It tells the story of the Zapatista insurgency, including the contemporary breadth and depth of their territorial autonomy, tracing how an Indigenous uprising burst forth from southern Mexico’s Lacandon Jungle to stage the 21st century’s first and most electrifying example of autonomy in action.

Lia Pinheiro Barbosa is an activist and professor of sociology at the State University of Ceará (UECE) based in Fortaleza, Brazil. She has written extensively on the Zapatistas in Mexico and the MST (Landless Workers Movement) in Brazil, including her book Educación, resistencia y movimientos sociales: la praxis educativo-política de los Sin Tierra y de los Zapatistas (Education, Resistance, and Social Movements: The Educational-Political Praxis of the MST and the Zapatistas) published in 2015 by the UNAM Press in Mexico.

Peter M. Rosset is an academic, author and activist. He is a university professor at the Ecosur Advanced Studies Institute in Mexico, as well as at universities in Brazil and Thailand, and the author of more than 10 books and more than 100 academic papers. He is a former secretariat staff member of the global peasant movement, La Via Campesina.

0:00 Introduction and Land Acknowledgment
2:40 Introduction by Errol Sharpe (Fernwood)
12:30 Peter M. Rosset (author)
24:48 Lia Pinheiro Barbosa (author)
31:50 Q and A

Recorded online, 12 November 2025.