The transnational Zapatista solidarity network: an infrastructure analysis

In this article I present a descriptive and qualitative analysis of the infrastructure of the global Zapatista solidarity network that has emerged since the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico in January 1994. Most studies dealing with this network have looked at it from the outside without specifying what it means to speak about a network with regard to global Zapatista solidarity. I address this lacuna by examining the network from the inside. The analysis focuses on how the infrastructure of the network serves as a computer‐mediated circuit for the circulation of information and identifies five levels of actors according to their roles as either information gatherers, information processors, information distributors or information recipients. I argue that the infrastructure of the networks is not only computer mediated but that it also has a significant physical dimension that stands in a reciprocal relationship with the computer‐mediated dimension.