This thesis explores contemporary anarchism, in its re-emergence as a social movement and political theory over the past decade. Its method combines cultural sociology and philosophical argumentation, in a participatory research framework. The first part, "Explaining Anarchism", argues that it should be addressed primarily as a political culture, with distinct forms of organisation, of campaigning and direct action repertoires, and of political discourse and ideology. Largely discontinuous with the historical workers' and peasants' anarchist movement, contemporary anarchism has fused in the intersection of radical direct-action movements in the North since the 1960s: feminism, ecology, and the resistance to nuclear energy and weapons, war, ...