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Anarchist and Marxist scholarship differ mainly in emphasis: anarchists tend to emphasise cooperation, while Marxists have traditionally focused on exploitation and domination. The most recent wave of anarchist scholarship analyses nonstate spaces and practices that stand outside the logic of state and market, while Marxist analyses are still dominated by processes of accumulation and the capital relation. The aim of this brief intervention is to suggest that both approaches are needed, and that understanding life at the edges of capitalism, including possible emphases on relations of mutual aid instead of market competition, is necessary for a complete understanding of capitalism as a system.

There are two sides of Balkanization: 'Balkanization from above' is a historical project of breaking inter-ethnic solidarity and regional sociocultural identity, violent incorporation into the nation-state system and capitalist world-economy, and more recently, imposing neoliberal colonialism. 'Balkanization from below', on the other hand, stresses social and cultural affinities, customs in common resulting from mutual aid and solidarity and fostering inter-ethnic self-activity-which was largely severed by Euro-colonial intervention. This pluri-cultural reality finds expression in anti-authoritarian politics of local self-government, communal land use, and federative movements. Activists and scholars would do well to recuperate this precious, historical vision of a trans-ethnic, anti-authoritarian society that a Balkan federation would make possible. We must examine the implications of 'Balkanizing' theory and 'Balkanizing' politics if this vision of 'federalism from below', sustained by networks of autonomous and culturally-diverse communities, is to be built-a prospect with significance far beyond the Balkans.

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This paper will attempt to rethink Samir Amin's concept of delinking in terms of selective delinking and selective engagement. The notion of delinking is perhaps Samir Amin's most distinctive contribution to alternative development, as well as to a vision of a new kind of politics. Inspired by the ideas of Abdullah Ocalan, this talk will focus on stateless (con)federalism seen as an active dialectical engagement with the modern capitalist world-system, an active process of (dis)engagement capable of modifying the conditions of capitalist world-economy.