For two years now, the pandemic has had a severe impact on French society, creating an atmosphere of anxiety, fear, and insecurity that paralyzes individuals and congeals worsening conflicts and social problems.

ACAB is the rallying cry that proclaims, “All cops are bastards.” As a hashtag, it accompanies more than 2.2 million posts on Instagram.

The popular uprising in Algiers on Friday, February 22 surprised most observers, starting with those who had rhapsodized over the regime’s stability since the emergence of the “Arab Spring,” or who had emphasized the passivity of a people traumatized by colonial violence, by authoritarian rule, by the civil war in the 1990s. But Algerian society was not cut off from international capitalism or from its regional environment.

Today in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, in western France, there is an area of about 4,000 acres that is illegally occupied, called ZAD (Zone à défendre, Zone to Defend). A few hundred people from different autonomous groups cohabit this place of social and ecological experimentation.

“They stole the Revolution from us!” exclaims Majd, an early actor in the Syrian Spring, now a recent refugee in France. Since the popular uprising in March, 2011, networks of resistance have formed in the continuum between militants in exile and those working in Syria’s liberated zones.