The Autonomous Research Institute for Direct Democracy and Social Ecology is an organization of independent activists and scholars dedicated to the documentation and study of ordinary people’s social revolutions throughout history and their relationship to the natural world. We hope that our work will illustrate how social crises are always also ecological crises and that the well-being of our ecology is intimately connected to the abolition of all hierarchy and oppression in human society. 

Based in Midway, Georgia, the scope of our work is simultaneously local and global. Through our research, writing, and activism, we hope to chronicle and analyze social movements from the past and present, placing them into conversation with one another as we uncover their common thread of directly democratic self-organization.

Throughout history, everyday people have organized and re-organized themselves again and again into new and ever more radically democratic social structures as they resist hierarchy and coercive authority. This revolutionary and perennial historical process offers hope for a viable collective social and ecological future.