Grubačić has publicly advocated for international humanitarian support and right to self-governance for the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, also known as Rojava.[8][9] He is one of the leading advocates of Balkan confederalism. Grubačić co-founded the Global Balkans network of the Balkan anti-capitalist diaspora,[10][11] the Yugoslav Initiative for Economic Democracy, Kontrapunkt (magazine), and ZBalkans–a Balkan edition of Z Magazine.[12] He is or has been active as an organizer in networks such as the post-Yugoslav coalition of anti-authoritarian collectives DSM!, Peoples Global Action,[13][14] the World Social Forum, Freedom Fight[15] and as a program director[16] for the Global Commons. He is a part of Retort collective, a collective of radical intellectuals based in the Bay Area.[17] He taught at Z Media Institute in Boston and at University of Rojava in Qamislo. He is a member the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or the Wobblies).[18] He is a member of the Collective 20 group.[19] He is involved with the mutual aid project with five prisoners on death row from Lucasville Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. He wrote about the 1993 Lucasville rebellion, when 450 Lucasville prisoners, including an unlikely alliance of the Aryan Brotherhood and Gangster Disciples, rioted and took over the facility for 11 days.[20] He wrote extensively on the California prison rebellion of 2011 and the so called Short Corridor Collective of the Pelican Bay prison (2009-2013). He has appeared in a number of KPFA interviews,[21][22][23][24] spoken at Anarchist Book Fairs,[25][26] and authored ZNet articles.[27]

Following the collapse of Yugoslavia, Grubačić left for the United States. He moved to Binghamton University where he participated in research working groups at the Fernand Braudel Center and worked with David Graber researching "an anarchist version of world-systems analysis."[28] In 2008 he moved to San Francisco and worked in the sociology department at the University of San Francisco[29] and urban studies department at the San Francisco Art Institute. He founded the department of Anthropology and Social Change at the California Institute of Integral Studies.[30] His interest in world systems analysis and anarchist anthropology has influenced his research perspective, which includes experiences of self-organization, voluntary association, and mutual aid on the world-scale. His ongoing research on exilic spaces in the modern capitalist world system considers how spatial expressions of concentrated mutual aid are produced and reproduced on the outside/inside of capitalist civilization. Exilic spaces and practices refer to liminal and non-state areas relatively autonomous from capitalist valorization and state control. His doctoral dissertation research focus is on the autonomous "cracks" peopled by Don Cossacks, Atlantic pirates, Macedonian Roma, Jamaican Maroons, and Mexican Zapatistas. This research is included in his UC Press book Living at the Edges of Capitalism. Co-authored with Denis O'Hearn, which was the winner of the 2017 American Sociological Association Political Economy of the World-System (PEWS) Book Award.[31] He is an active participant in the World-Ecology, a global conversation of academics, activists, and artists committed to understanding human relations of power, production, and environment-making in the web of life, and editor for the Kairos imprint on PM Press.He is the author of several essays concerning the intellectual impact of Kurdish sociologist Abdullah Öcalan. He is an affiliated Faculty in Residence with the UC Berkeley Center for Social Medicine.[32]

• Contemporary anarchism

• Andrej Grubačić at CIIS