Autonomist Leadership in Leaderless Movements: Anarchists Leading the Way

Abstract

• Autonomist Leadership is a non-hierarchical, informal, and distributed leadership style found in emancipatory social movements, especially networked social movements.
• It originates from anarchist theory and practice, thriving in digital and physical networks of contemporary social movements, utilizing mobile communications and digital platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
• Five principles define it: Spontaneity, Autonomy, Mutuality, Affect, and Networks.
• Activists both enact and disavow Autonomist Leadership, causing dissonance and internal tensions.
• Affective attachments to being leaderless hinder social movement development.
• Acknowledging Autonomist Leadership can help activists move beyond the fantasy of being leaderless and engage in social change more effectively.

Introduction

• Bakunin's quote illustrates an early form of anarchist-inspired leadership: “I receive and I give – such is human life. Each directs and is directed in his turn. Therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination.” (Bakunin, 2012/1882: 33)
• Autonomist Leadership is defined as an anti-hierarchical, informal, and distributed leadership specific to emancipatory social movements (Western, 2013: 79-84).
• The five principles are: Spontaneity, Autonomy, Mutuality, Affect, and Networks.
• Anarchist-inspired leadership has re-emerged, flourishing in digital networks and physical spaces of contemporary Networked Social Movements (NSMs) after being marginalized during the height of communism and capitalism in the 20th century.
• NSMs use digital technology as a primary communication tool, reflecting today's networked society.
• Social media and mobile communication enable rapid information diffusion and increased autonomy.
• New communication technologies influence society broadly: Bennett (2012) discusses the ‘personalization of politics.’
• NSM activity extends beyond the virtual realm, involving occupation of urban spaces (Castells, 2012: 2).
• Activists aim to develop radical participatory movements, overcoming the gap left by removing hierarchy and traditional leadership.
• This is done through:
  • Maximizing participative democracy drawing on experience from previous social movements and anarchist theory and practice.
  • Innovating Autonomist Leadership.
  • Filling the gap with the utopian fantasy of being ‘leaderless’.
• The term 'leaderless' operates as a Lacanian ‘objet petit a’, temporarily filling a gap but also revealing a lack and desire for leadership.
• Celebrating the absence of leadership doesn't fill the gap; new forms of leadership are needed.
• Autonomist Leadership has achieved powerful results in protest movements like the Arab Spring and Occupy, but these movements struggle to move beyond protest due to the disavowal of leadership.
• Associating leadership with hierarchy creates cognitive and emotional dissonance, leading to internal tensions and limiting the movements’ agency.
• This dissonance could be overcome by adopting a critical leadership theory approach, which reveals how leadership can be distributed, informally, and non-hierarchically.
• However, the disavowal continues due to activists’ affective investments in being leaderless.
• Affective attachments override cognitive considerations, especially when associated with jouissance (Lacan).
• Consumer society and nationalism also draw on affective attachments (Stavrakakis, 2007).
• The paradox of leadership being enacted in leaderless movements needs a disruptive intervention by naming and defining non-hierarchical leadership as Autonomist.
• The prefix Autonomist breaks the emotionally binding ties between leadership, hierarchy, elitism, authoritarianism, and coercion.
• Naming and owning Autonomist Leadership removes inner conflicts and allows activists to re-attach to their emancipatory aims.
• Acknowledging Autonomist Leadership makes tensions developmental rather than regressive, enabling the working through of challenges such as power dynamics and struggling for meaning and ideas.

Anarchism and Leadership

• Anarchists have an ambivalent relationship with leadership, with the slogan ‘No Gods, No Masters!’

• Radically democratic forms of leadership are present within anarchist circles.

• Individuals and groups take temporary leadership autonomously without formal power (Bakunin 2012 [1882]; Joll, 1979; Woodcock, 2004).

• Bakunin on anarchist view of leadership:

  $At the moment of action, in the midst of the struggle, there is a natural division of roles according to the aptitude of each, assessed and judged by the collective whole: some direct and command, others execute orders. Hierarchical order and promotion do not exist, so the commander of yesterday can become a subordinate tomorrow. No one rises above others, or if he does rise, it is only to fall back a moment later, like the waves of the sea forever returning to the salutary level of equality.$

(Bakunin, cited in Joll, 1979: 92)

• Anarchists developed innovative forms of leadership without naming it, because:

  • Leadership was seen as rare for specific domains such as military, emperors and kings.
  • The terms ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ are synonymous with Messiah leadership discourse (Western, 2008; 2013), differing from anarchist's egalitarian emphasis.

• Past anarchist leadership hasn't been as successful as hierarchical forms in socialist, communist, and capitalist systems.

• Anarchist critiques of hierarchical leadership have been proven right.

• They point to Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, Hitler, and contemporary Western political leadership that reproduces power elites.

• The problem is leadership itself creating a ‘power-over’ dynamic (Ricoeur, 1990).

• Engels stated that the Paris Commune of 1871 ended serious anarchist ideology. Their “ideological forms were inappropriate for making decisions of state […], making way for a single “Marxism”’(Engels, cited in Badiou, 2006: 263).

• Today's networked society reveals a shift towards horizontal organization.

• Marxist and capitalist traditions of hierarchical elite leadership are challenged by participatory forms, underpinned by anarchist theory and practice (Newman, 2001).

• Many anarchists denounce leadership, but theorists distinguish between anti-authoritarianism and anti-leadership.

• Ehrlich states that ‘Anarchy is not without leadership, it is without followership’ (1979: 108).

• Proudhon, the French anarchist famed for his slogan: ‘Property is Theft’, establishes the anti-authoritarian position of anarchists and expresses their antipathy to being governed.

• Anarchism's forms like mutualism and syndicalism offer examples of anarchist leadership.

• Kropotkin in Mutual Aid (2012 [1902]) presented an evolutionary perspective of mutualism, challenging social Darwinism and stating “There is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species; there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more of, mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defense […]. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle” (Kropotkin, 2012 [1902]).

• Contemporary anarchist Kevin Carson (2014) explains mutuality as ‘All relationships and transactions are non-coercive, and based on voluntary cooperation, free exchange, or mutual aid […]’.

• Mutualism balances individualism in anarchist circles.

• Leaders lack power over others; formal roles are temporary and recallable.

• Leaders and followers co-produce leadership; positions are exchangeable.

• Anarchist leadership has been tested in communes, co-operatives, anarcho-syndicalist collectives, and war zones like the Spanish Civil War (Thomas, 2001).

• Two strands of anarchist thinking and practice occur:

  • Acknowledging Bakunin's view of leadership's existence and posing the question of what kind of leadership is desired and how can leaders be empowered without disempowering others?
  • Conflating leadership with hierarchical governance and authoritarianism and, therefore, any form of leadership is discarded as not being compatible with anarchism.

• The second reflects a purity in anarchist thought idealizing natural social harmony post-removal of the state or powerful elites.

• Saul Newman writes: ‘Anarchism is based around this notion of the purity of the revolutionary identity. Human essence and natural human society is anarchism’s uncontaminated point of departure, the pure place of resistance that will overcome power’ (Newman, 2001: 48).

• The idealism of being ‘leaderless’ in today’s NSMs re-enacts this purist thinking.

• The 1960s counterculture saw a re-emergence of libertarian and egalitarian idealism and anarchist-influenced movements.

• Social movements emerged and organized around collective identity politics, e.g. the feminist, peace and environmental movements, whilst at the same time a more generic ‘hippy’ movement championed individualism, anti-establishment and anti-institutional sentiments.

• Radical feminists and peace activists denounced leadership as patriarchy and capitalist control.

• Many movements privileged individual autonomy over party discipline.

• Leaderless movements became popular within the counter-cultures of the 1960s and later, which have in turn informed today’s NSMs.

• Contemporary anarchist, Chaz Bufe states that “In the 60s and 70s many leftist, anarchist and feminist groups agonised over how to eliminate leadership, equating all leadership [including temporary, task-based leadership] with authoritarian leadership. Their fruitless efforts confirm what the more astute anarchists have been saying for over a century – that it’s a mistake to think that any kind of group or organization can exist without leadership; the question is, what kind of leadership is it going to be?” (Bufe, 1988: 21)

• Being ‘leaderless’ is a myth, propagated to support an ideological position to which activists become affectively attached.

• Jo Freeman, in her polemic ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’, articulated her observations of leaderless groups in the feminist movement, finding that removing leaders and clear structures simply masked power and created very negative dynamics and stating “[S]tructurelessness becomes a way of masking power and within the women’s movement was most strongly advocated by the most powerful. Awareness of power is curtailed by those who know the rules, as long as the structure of the group is informal. The most insidious elites are usually run by people not known to the larger public at all. Intelligent elitists are usually smart enough not to allow themselves to become well known […] Friendship and informal power networks dominate and exclude ‘out-groups’ within such movements and organizations” (Freeman, 1972: 156–157).

• Activists from egalitarian traditions became wedded to the idea of being leaderless, and contemporary NSMs have followed this stance.

• A wholesale rejection of leadership is detrimental because leadership and power relations don't disappear, rather they are enacted in hidden ways by ‘insidious elites’.

Autonomist Leadership

• NSMs draw on anarchist and egalitarian social movements’ traditions and are against hierarchical leadership.
• The rejection of centralized power has led to innovations in how NSMs organize, including leadership.
• New forms of anarchist-inspired leadership have re-emerged and flourish in these networked movements.
• However, these novel forms of leadership remain hidden because of the continued disavowal of all leadership.
• Autonomist Leadership is an innovation found in contemporary, emancipatory protest movements, especially NSMs.
• The impact of ‘leaderless’ protest movements caught the imagination of the wider media.
• These Networked Social Movements are contagious, inspiring one another, sharing experience and creating networked solidarity through new technologies.
• Mainstream observers fail to recognize the leadership, propagating that these movements are leaderless (Gerbaudo, 2012).
• Autonomist Leadership plays a part in these protest movements and can be important beyond protest movements.
• It is vital to name, define and describe this new form of leadership.

Five principles that define Autonomist Leadership

• Spontaneity, Autonomy, Mutualism, Networks and Affect.

Spontaneity

• Leadership arises spontaneously, is temporary, lacks fixed roles, and doesn't stabilize in key actors or governance.
• It emerges and falls away as contexts arise.
• A strength is that it perpetuates unstable networks of individualised-collective action, utilizing all activists' talents rather than small elites.

Autonomy

• The principle of autonomy applies to leaders, followers, and all participating actors.
• Anybody can take up leadership, there is no ranking or hierarchy, and there is a heightened awareness and commitment to autonomy, guarding against coercion and the manipulation of power.
• The principle of autonomy reflects many anarchists’ belief in individual freedom as a cornerstone of social justice, in contrast to socialist/communist privileging of collective allegiances over individual autonomy
• Leaders and followers are interchangeable and participate autonomously to co-create leadership.

Mutualism

• Leadership is enacted with mutual consent, mutual responsibility and for the mutual benefit of the movement/group.
• Autonomist Leaders are upheld and supported to act in the movement’s best interests.
• Mutualism is the counter-balance to over-zealous individual autonomy (found in some anarchist groups).
• Any enactment of Autonomist Leadership always works between two tensions and forces of mutualism and collaboration, on the one hand, and competing individual and group interests, on the other.

Networks

• Autonomist Leadership is embedded within networks as an active leadership dynamic that is fluid, changing and dispersed throughout the network.
• This differs from traditional leaders who may engage with and utilize networks.
• Autonomist Leadership is a multiplicity and is rhizomatic (Delueze and Guattari, 1987).
• Networked Autonomist Leadership can make these movements appear ‘leaderless’ to those looking for orthodox leadership structures.
• The digital age has created new virtual platforms enabling a mobilization of Autonomous Leadership in ways which were inconceivable before.
• The connectivity between virtual and physical networks has been one of the key innovations of NSMs and is transforming how social movements organize.

Affect

• The importance of Affect is amplified in NSMs.
• Activists have personalized self-narratives and emotional attachments that draw them to ideals such as freedom and to fight against oppression and abuse of power.
• Movements generate feelings such as hope, solidarity and love that arise from the idealism, camaraderie and unity expressed within them.
• An individual’s personal affective attachments are reinforced and shaped through the networked conversations and exchanges that take place.
• Sub-groups are formed that appeal to diverse individual needs, desires and passions.
• Autonomist leaders act upon their personal affective investments and are mobilized by others into taking acts of leadership.
• NSMs are charged with libidinal energy that arises from these affective investments and when attached to the emancipatory object, this produces and sustains pluralist and fluid forms of Autonomist leadership.
• When affective attachments become disinvested from the emancipatory object and become attached to fantasy objects such as being leaderless, the movements are weakened as activists’ energies become displaced and Autonomist Leadership is curtailed.
• There are two reasons for the recent emergence and success of Autonomist Leadership in contemporary NSMs:
  • Due to the new zeitgeist that has emerged within the networked society, giving these movements opportunities for new forms of connectivity and activity in the digital realm that are later enacted in public spaces.
  • Newman states that “The situation is changing, and the new forms of autonomous politics that are currently emerging demand the use of another term: anarchism. Shipwrecked on the craggy shores of state power, anarchism is now moving to the forefront of our political imagination. There has been a certain paradigm shift in politics away from the state and formal representative institutions, which still exist but increasingly as empty vessels without life, and toward movements” (Newman, 2011)
  • Due to the ‘personalisation of politics’ (Bennett, 2012; Bennett and Segerberg, 2011).
  • Bennett claims that the demise of social loyalties and institutional ties (Putnam, 2000), alongside the impact of the personalisation of society expressed via consumerism and social media activity, have also impacted on political engagement.
  • Bennett states that “Among the most interesting aspects of this era of personalisation has been the rise of large-scale, rapidly forming political participation aimed at a variety of targets […]. The more diverse the mobilisation, the more personalised the expressions often become, typically involving communication technologies that allow individuals to activate their loosely tied social networks” (Bennett, 2012: 21)
• This personalisation of society becomes a personalisation of these movements, which have less rigid identifiable causes, political programmes or collective identities than previous social movements.
• This facilitates wider participation so that individual activists can personalise their political commitment.
• Autonomist Leadership often begins in cyberspace and transitions to the public squares which then offers new opportunities and new demands for Autonomist Leadership. Experience from previous anarchist-led movements is present in discourses shaping practices in these gatherings, the General Assembly at the Occupy movement being a good example.
• Autonomist Leadership fits with these movements’ ethos ‘to practice in the present, the future changes they seek’ (Melucci, 1989: 5-6).
• Autonomist Leadership is aspirational.
• The five principles act as a description of the parameters, not a rulebook.
• Working within these parameters is an ongoing contestation.

Situating Autonomist Leadership within Critical Leadership Studies

• Autonomist Leadership can only be recognized, developed and scrutinized if situated within a Critical Leadership Studies (CLS) expanded view of leadership that challenges the mainstream leader-centric view (Jackson and Parry, 2011).
• The mainstream organizational literature and popular view of leadership can be summarized as: Leadership = Person + Position + Authority (Western, 2013: 80).
  • Leadership is situated within a person, i.e. individuals are attributed innate transformational or inspirational qualities (Bolden and Gosling, 2006; Avolio and Gardner, 2005; Burns, 1978).
  • Leaders hold formal positions in hierarchical structures, e.g. CEOs, priests or political leaders who influence followers both through their personality and from their position.
  • Leadership relates to exercising authority over others, either using soft-power (Nye, 1990) or overtly using coercive forms of authority that range from economic levers (pay and promotion) to despotic leaders wielding authoritarian control.
• CLS scholars argue that leadership is not only defined by what individual leaders do (Hosking, 1988) but that many actors in a network interact to produce the agency of leadership (Gronn, 2002; Bolden, 2011; Latour, 2005; Law, 1993).
• CLS scholars emphasize leadership as a process, which corrects the mainstream imbalance towards the individual.

CLS Definition of Leadership

$Leadership is a psychosocial influencing dynamic.$

(Western, 2013: 36)

• Psycho: refers to the psychodynamics of leadership, referencing that leadership occurs both within and between people. Leadership and followership stimulates unconscious and emotional responses within us, and relational dynamics between us.

• Social: refers to the social construction and social dynamics of leadership. Leadership goes beyond relational dynamics; it also references social power and authority that operate through discourses shaped by powerful elites. The social field, and how it influences and controls material and symbolic resources, must be accounted for in our understanding of leadership.

• Influencing: leadership signifies the specific agency of influencing others. Influencing is a wide-ranging term, and leadership draws on a vast array of resources, from personality to coercive power to influence others.

• Dynamic: refers to the dynamic movement within leadership. Leadership cannot be fixed to a single person, group or formal position, or reduced to a set of behaviors, skills or competencies. Leadership moves between people (and things) as a dynamic social process, and can often emerge where least expected.

• Autonomist Leadership, when viewed through the mainstream leadership lens, is rendered invisible because no individual or group holds position, power or authority over others.

• Whilst CLS provides the explanatory theory that accommodates Autonomist Leadership, very little is written about leadership in NSMs in the critical literature (Einwohner, 2007: 1307; Reger, 2007).

• Two exceptions to this omission in the CLS literature are Neil Sutherland, Chris Land and Steffen Böhm’s (2013) paper on ‘Anti-leaders(hip) in Social Movement Organizations’, and Paolo Gerbaudo’s (2012) book Tweets and the streets.

• Sutherland et al.’s research affirms the ambivalence towards leadership in anarchist groups and their paper affirms the commonly held belief that leadership is commonly seen as a bad thing.

• It also confirms that activists discuss leadership from within the mainstream Messiah discourse (Western, 2013), i.e. as a power-over form of elitism that leads them to an ‘ideological rejection’ of leadership (Sutherland et al., 2013: 10).

• They position leadership as being discursive and a process, and claim that ‘just because an organisation is leaderless, it does not necessarily mean that it is also leadershipless’, (ibid.: 1) concluding that ‘although individual leaders were not present, there was still evidence of leadership occurring’ (ibid.: 16).

• They argue the CLS line that leadership is not confined to stabilised positions or individual actors, but is a process.

• When addressing individual leaders, however, they revert to the mainstream view that constrains individual leaders to being in stable, power-over positions.

• Their paper argues for leadership but without leaders, and in order to achieve this, leadership is limited to being a discursive function of meaning-making and individual leaders are substituted by ‘leadership actors’ (Fairhurst, 2008).

• This presents two challenges:

  • Leadership occurs in diverse forms and cannot be limited to a meaning-making discursive function (Drath, 2001).
  • Individual leaders can have agency without being reduced to being stable individuals with position power. The term ‘leadership actors’ is not specific enough to identify the particular form of leadership taken by individuals because it is a generic term that can denote anybody taking an informal leadership role (which may be progressive, reactionary, coercive or manipulative).

• By eliminating individual leaders, a kind of decaffeinated leadership is described, where leadership is desired, but it is not the real thing, and the theoretical nuances of having ‘leadership without leaders’ are difficult conceptually to enact in practice.

• Sutherland et al.’s research affirms that in spite of the attempts to make leadership disappear, stealth leadership often takes place as a ‘return of the repressed’ and this happens in dysfunctional ways.

• Gerbaudo (2012) also challenges the notion of leaderless movements and writes that ‘I argue that far from inaugurating a situation of absolute “leaderlessness”, social media have, in fact, facilitated the rise of complex and “liquid” (Bauman, 2013) forms of leadership which exploit the interactive and participatory character of the new communication technologies’ (Gerbaudo, 2012: 13).

• Gerbaudo says that leaders within NSMs subscribe to the ideology of horizontalism and are ‘reluctant leaders’ or ‘anti-leaders’.

• Gerbaudo claims these reluctant leaders ‘become ‘soft leaders’ or choreographers, involved in setting the scene, and constructing an emotional space within which collective action can unfold’ (ibid.: 5).

• He warns against another form of ‘stealth leadership’ happening behind the scenes.

• Clearly, stealth leadership occurs when leadership is denied and hidden, while some form of organized leadership undeniably takes place.

• The term choreographer does not describe the diverse, plural and fluid forms of Autonomist Leadership that occur within these movements.

• Autonomist Leadership operates as an emergent process, not as scripted or choreographed from behind the scenes. On the other hand, collective and individual Autonomist Leaders may plan, strategize and organise, sometimes within consensual participatory structures, sometimes in a cell-like rhizomatic way, outside of traditional organisational structures and sometimes with complete spontaneity, e.g. the first anarchist in the crowd to throw the rock!

• Sutherland and Gerbaudo’s work supports the notion that anarchist organisations and NSMs are not leaderless, and both offer different accounts of what leadership means in these movements.

• This paper adds to this literature claiming that emancipatory movements are filled with Autonomist Leaders who aspire to act within the specific parameters set out in the five principles.

• Autonomist Leadership has proved to be a key strength in NSMs through mobilising distributed and informal leadership which enables autonomist actions and fast adaptive responses.

• A weakness within these movements is the disavowal of leadership caused by the affective attachments to being leaderless.

• This creates tensions through the dissonance of experiencing leadership happen whilst at the same time having to repress awareness of it.

• In this scenario, acts of Autonomist Leadership are encouraged, welcomed and celebrated (under another name), and are also condemned and constrained.

• Autonomist Leadership clearly sits within, and draws upon, CLS literature, whilst also opening new areas for further research:

  • how leadership influence operates where conventional power-over relations and hierarchical structures of governance are actively discouraged
  • how individual leadership is enacted and its relation to distributed leadership processes that are emergent within these networks
  • how leadership moves between digital networks and physical spaces i.e. do the same leadership actors operate in both domains?

The Disavowal of Leadership

• Autonomist Leadership exists within these movements, yet the disavowal of all forms of leadership persists in order to support the activists’ ideal of ‘leaderless’ movements.
• This paradox creates dissonance that undermines a movement’s agency and prevents them from developing beyond their protest mode.
• Two reasons account for this disavowal:
  • All leadership is seen as hierarchical and authoritarian.
  • Leadership is disavowed due to activists’ strong affective investments in the term ‘leaderless’.
• Knowledge of new forms of non-hierarchical leadership are readily available.
• Affective attachments to being leaderless override the conscious knowing that non-hierarchical leadership exists, and this knowing becomes disavowed.
• Affective investments fuel individual and collective libidinal drives shaping and energizing these movements (Ahmed, 2013; Stavrakakis, 2007).
• The affective investment in being ‘leaderless’ is to unconsciously seek pure jouissance (Lacan, 2007), which means to unconsciously identify with the fantasy of obtaining excessive enjoyment, a utopian fantasy that is unobtainable.
• The idea of being leaderless acts as the objet petit a, the object that temporarily offers relief by filling the gap, and at the same time symptomatically points to the lack of, and the repressed desire for, leadership.
• Discarding traditional leadership can create innovative forms of organizing.
• However, the disavowal of leadership is regressive because it is represses conscious knowing that leadership is taking place, in order to pursue the fantasy of attaining pure jouissance.
• When this happens, affective investments become displaced from their emancipatory ideals and become attached to seeking the excessive enjoyment of being a protestor.
• When leadership is disavowed:
  • Stealth leadership occurs whereby elite in-groups or powerful individuals take leadership without it being named, and without consent (Freeman, 1972-1973).
  • Autonomist Leadership occurs alongside stealth leadership, yet it is not acknowledged openly.
• In these movements, a displacement of energy takes place and activists engage in debates about power, equality and consensus politics, producing paralyzed groups, bureaucratic decision-making, and the sabotaging of talent/agency.
• Scholars and media commentators also share the contagious enjoyment of the ideal of being leaderless.
• Castells (2012) sees confusion and dissonance in these NSMs which he identifies as being leaderless.
• Turning to the Egyptian revolution, Noha Atef explained how he uses the internet to communicate with others ‘to increase their anger, this is my favourite way of on-line activism […] when you ask people to go and to demonstrate against the police they were ready because you had already provided them with materials, which made them angry’ (Castells, 2012: 58).
• This is Autonomist Leadership.

Conclusion

• In this paradox where Autonomist leadership exists within ‘leaderless’ movements, something must change.
• The disavowal of leadership creates tensions that are unsustainable.
• The only way forward is to acknowledge the Autonomist Leadership being practiced.
• By using Autonomist as a prefix to leadership, the relationship between leadership and authoritarianism and hierarchy is broken.
• Describing the five principles create a space for activists to determine how Autonomist Leadership is being enacted and how it can be developed.
• Engaged scholars agree that NSMs and anarchist/egalitarian-inspired social movements are not leaderless but have different forms of leadership.
• HOW Autonomist Leadership is enacted is not agreed on in the literature.

This paper contributes to the field in five ways

1. The term Autonomist Leadership fills a gap in the literature naming and describing the specific form of leadership enacted in NSMs, making leadership visible where previously hidden.
2. Autonomist Leadership offers anarchists and social movements a leadership term which they can adopt and utilise as their own, diminishing the impulse to disavow all leadership.
3. Autonomist Leadership is a form of individualised collective leadership that is embedded in networks and enacted by autonomous individuals and groups.
4. The paper highlights the role of affect in Autonomist Leadership.
5. The social-political zeitgeist is moving from vertical to horizontal relations, from rigid structures to networks, resulting in new organisational forms and new forms of leadership. Whilst Autonomist Leadership is specific to egalitarian-inspired NSMs, it also resonates with other developments. Advances in our understanding of Autonomist Leadership can also be applicable and transferable to other areas.