On the theoretical and practical level, theorist-activists such as Bakunin, Reclus and Berkman all condemned and fought
against imperialism. In the colonial world, anarchists played an important role in anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles, notably those in Cuba, Ireland, Korea, Macedonia, Mexico, Nicaragua and the Ukraine.

For example, the national hero of Nicaragua, Augustino Sandino, who led a revolt against the American occupation in the 1920s and 1930s was an Anarcho-Syndicalist; in Mexico, the Anarchists of the PLM, the IWW and the CGT consistently challenged American imperialism and anti- Mexican discrimination in Mexico, both before, during and after the Mexican Revolution;

James Connolly, the famous martyr of the 1916 Easter rebellion in Ireland against British imperialism was an anarchist revolutionary union organiser in the United
States and Ireland; in Korea the Anarchists were a key force in the struggle against the Japanese occupation that begun in
1910 and even managed to establish a massive self-governed liberated zone in Manchuria in the 1930s;

in the Ukraine, the
Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Nestor Makhno expelled the occupying Central Powers in 1918-9.

In the imperialist countries, anarchists were also at the forefront of the fight against imperialism. For example, in Japan, the prominent Anarchist Kotoku Shusi was framed and executed in 1910 after his Commoner’s Newspaper campaigned against Japanese expansionism; in 1909, the Spanish Anarchists organised a mass strike against intervention in Morocco (the “Tragic Week”); in Italy, the Anarchists consistently opposed Italian expansionism into Eritrea and Ethiopia in the 1880s and 1890s and organised a massive anti-war movement against the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911, and intervention in Albania in 1919.