George Katsiaficas
I have been active in social movements since 1969 when I participated in the anti-Vietnam War movement. A target of the FBI's COINTELPRO program (Counterintelligence), I was honored to be classified "Priority 1 ADEX" meaning in the event of a national emergency, people like me were to be immediately arrested. For 11 years, I worked in Ocean Beach, California (as described at the end of Andre Gorz's book Ecology as Politics) in a radical countercultural community that fought against war, police brutality, and rape as we built up a network of alternative institutions (free school, food store, bookstore/cultural center and others). After living in Berlin for 1 1/2 years and learning first-hand about the autonomous movement there, I wrote about that movement (The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life). For years, I was active for the cause of Palestinian rights. A graduate of MIT and UCSD (where I studied with Herbert Marcuse), I wrote my dissertation about the global movement of 1968 (published as The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968). I have been teaching at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston.
In 2001, I did research at the May 18 Institute at Chonnam National University in Kwangju South Korea, especially focusing on the 1980 uprising, and am now writing about Korean social movements. For 6 six years, I was editor of New Political Science and brought many unknown issues into public view, with special issues on the Sudan and one on the Black Panther Party (published as a book by Routledge--Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party--coedited with Kathleen Cleaver.) A peace advocate by nature, I am also unwilling to tolerate injustice and work incessantly for the realization of my ideals.
