In the MENA as well globally, indigenous, occupied and colonized peoples continue to seek independence in ethnically and/or religiously defined sovereign states as the best way to escape systematic oppression and achieve a measure of independence. These struggles continue even as the long-term repression by the states that control these territories, along with changing geopolitical circumstances and opportunities, are leading to the imagination of new strategies of resistance and self-determination. This paper offers four case studies of this process, examining current imaginaries of political-territorial independence by nationalist movements in Western Sahara, the Occupied Territories, and the Rojava region of Syrian Kurdistan vis-a-vis the Zapatista notion of autonomia as a strategy for communal resistance and self-determination. Based on in-depth fieldwork and textual analysis, I explore the various ways in which Sahrawi, Palestinian and Kurdish Rojavan activists have imagined territorially grounded, state-centered identities, and attendant conceptualizations of self-determination, which remain very much in the conditional—and increasingly unreal—future. I then move to a consideration of the concept of autonomia, one of the defining concepts of Zapatismo. Autonomia is a grassroots-level material, political and cultural-spiritual concept that has powerfully subverted the control of the Mexican state in Chiapas by eschewing demands for territorial and political independence in favor of a focus on “bottom-up” self-government, communal freedom and respect for traditions as the best strategy to create sustainable lifeworlds. My discussion first explores the experiences of Palestinian and other Arab as well as Rojavan activists who've come to Chiapas to study the Zapatista experience as a potential model for their own struggles. I then contextualize these through a critical reading of Arab(ic), Sahrawi and Kurdish imaginaries of the “nation” and “nationalism,” and then to a consideration of the unique political and topographical terrain of Chiapas that enabled the Zapatistas to seize and hold previously colonized territory for the last twenty-five years. Finally, in light of these comparisons and in the context of increasingly brutal state repression and civil and drug wars, unprecedented global environmental threats, emerging post-nationalist and -territorial political imaginaries, and the emergence of locally grounded but globally connected challenges to a synergized state-global power structures, I assess both the potential and the limits of the Zapatista strategies and experiences of autonomy when applied to the Sahrawi, Palestinian and Rojavan/Kurdish cases.