Raghav Sharma is a writer and political activist currently in his senior year at the University of Pittsburgh studying politics, philosophy, and economics. Having spent the last few years learning about deliberative democracy through both theory and practice, he found an entirely new form of social interaction from what he was previously exposed to through the traditional channels of American democracy. Grassroots political struggle has made Sharma keenly aware of the inadequacies of the current liberal democratic paradigm underlying the majority of contemporary nation-states. But it is the authoritarianism which threatens to supercede these institutions that he regards as the ultimate challenge facing our generation. In service of the war against these forces, Sharma seeks to offer alternative systems of political engagement based on what he has experienced in nonhierarchical political movements.