“With the horizon ahead”: Emancipatory politics and radical imagination in the Catalan Pyrenees

The “left-behind places” debate associates the idea of peripheral and underdeveloped territories with the spread of right-wing politics. As a red flag, these discourses examine specific phenomena developing in concrete settings in order to provide a wider understanding of rural and peripheral regions. Conversely, I will focus on the unfolding of an array of initiatives that plant the seed for novel ideological pathways to imagine alternative futures, arising from the Indignados anti-austerity movement born in 2011. Based on the case of the Catalan Pyrenees, in northeastern Spain, I analyze the changing conditions for the emergence of an emancipatory political subject in this European periphery. Opposing a government proposal to hold the Winter Olympics, a wider array of actors came together to confront what was identified as an extractive model of economic production based on tourism, instead proposing heterodox paths for development. This movement triggered the promotion and convergence of various projects and initiatives developing within the framework of the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE), the new commons, and agroecological praxis. Together, these “rural resistances” form a fertile ground for the consolidation of organized social networks in search of alternative paths to oppose capitalism and neoliberal restructuring. I will discuss the transformative potential and the limits of these variegated initiatives, as well as the degree to which they are capable of opposing the hegemonic development models in the region. • The article analyzes the emergence of an emancipatory political subject. • I focus on the changing political and economic conditions of the Catalan Pyrenees. • I discuss the transformative potential of new social movements and initiatives. • Ethnography is used as a tool to understand recent changes in rural politics.