Anarchism is the political philosophy that opposes all compulsory forms of domination and seeks to replace them with voluntary, non-hierarchical forms of association. Unlike liberalism, which opposes specific abuses of authority, anarchism opposes the principle of authority itself — the claim that some are entitled to command and others obligated to obey.
The tradition encompasses multiple currents: anarcho-communism (Kropotkin, Malatesta), anarcho-syndicalism (labor organizing without party mediation), insurrectionary anarchism (Bonanno, informal organization and immediacy), green anarchism (ecological analysis as inseparable from anti-domination politics), and anarcho-nihilism (action without requiring hope for success). These currents disagree on strategy, organization, and scope, but share the refusal to separate means from ends — the structures of resistance must embody the relations they seek to create.
A distinction matters for this research: anarchism-as-identity (a political label, a subculture, a movement affiliation) and anarchism-as-analysis (a framework for identifying and opposing structures of domination wherever they appear). The second is more durable. Many Indigenous governance systems embody what anarchist analysis describes — non-hierarchy, consensus, direct participation — without deriving from the European anarchist tradition or needing its label.