Anarchism is a set of ideas and practices focused upon the elimination of hierarchies (political, economic, social), and prioritizes creating horizontal, self-managing, cooperative, egalitarian, and empowered communities. Anarchist movements have been active since the mid-Nineteenth century and have pursued insurrectionary, mass-organizing, and cultural strategies. Anarchist analyses of power argue the state and other hierarchical institutions have a colonizing influence upon people’s lives and communities. In their place, anarchist organizations affirm direct democracy and federated tactics in place of states. Political sociology has found ways to study anti-authoritarian movements like anarchism, but their uniqueness presents epistemological and theoretical challenges, since most sociological scholarship has focused upon non-radical movements. Finally, an inter-disciplinary field called anarchist studies has incorporated sociology and other disciplines, most notably with a hybrid approach to social analysis called anarchist sociology, that prioritizes an anarchist lens.