Thirteen years on, this volume reads like a message from a moment that understood something was breaking but hadn't yet decided what would replace it. Published in 2013, after Occupy but before the full algorithmic colonization of political life, *Social Movements and World-System Transformation* gathered a serious group of scholars—Smith, Goodhart, Manning, Markoff, and their interlocutors—to ask whether the capitalist world-system could be transformed from below, and if so, by whom, using what epistemologies. The answer, characteristically for edited volumes of this ambition, was: it depends on how willing you are to unthink everything you think you know. What strikes me now is how correct that instinct was, and how insufficient the tools they had for following it. The book's most prescient move was its insistence that emancipatory politics could not be conducted within the epistemological furniture of the system it sought to dismantle. Its chapters on the coloniality of knowledge, on the limits of Eurocentric social movement theory, on the need to center indigenous and feminist worldviews—these were not decorative gestures. They were structural arguments. And the world has, in its lurching way, confirmed them. The rise of indigenous-led resistance to extractivism, from Standing Rock to the Amazon, the mainstreaming of intersectional analysis in activist spaces (however unevenly), the global resonance of buen vivir as more than anthropological curiosity—all of this was prefigured here, sometimes with startling specificity. The book's treatment of the World Social Forum's gendered hierarchies anticipated the broader reckoning with movement spaces that would come with #MeToo and its global echoes. Its critique of NGOization—the slow bureaucratic capture of radical energy—now reads less like a warning and more like a postmortem.

What the book could not see, and what no one writing in 2013 could fully see, was the degree to which digital platforms would restructure the terrain of collective action itself. The volume's discussions of movement linkage and delinking, of ideology as a contested public discourse, proceed as though the primary mediators of political communication are still conferences, forums, and print. There is no reckoning with algorithmic amplification, with the way social media would simultaneously globalize protest repertoires and fragment them into affective micro-publics. The Arab Spring had already happened, but its lessons about the fragility of digitally coordinated movements—how quickly they could be surveilled, co-opted, or simply exhausted—had not yet been metabolized. By 2026, we know that the "nomadic organizing logics" the book celebrates carry real costs: movements that are everywhere and nowhere, that trend and then evaporate, that mistake virality for solidarity. The book's faith in the World Social Forum as a generative counter-hegemonic space also looks dated; the WSF has not so much declined as been overtaken by a political landscape in which authoritarian populisms have proven far more adept at mobilizing grievance across borders than the left anticipated. The rise of right-wing transnational networks—something entirely absent from this volume—is the elephant that wandered into the room after the editors left.