The grandson of Ratomir Dugonjić, former president of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the vice president of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Grubačić graduated from University of Belgrade and completed master's and doctoral degrees from the State University of New York at Binghamton.

[4] Living at the Edges of Capitalism, which Grubačić co-authored with Denis O'Hearn, won the 2017 American Sociological Association's Political Economy of the World-System Book Award.

[5] Grubačić's work is a synthesis of Braudelian history, Hegelian Marxism, and the anarchist anthropology of Peter Kropotkin.

[7] Grubačić is a member of the Retort collective and has participated in grassroots alter-globalization movement[8] and has supported international projects in Yugoslavia[9] and Rojava.

As a professor at the University of Rojava and social science editor at PM Press,[11] he is responsible for a number of books on the Kurdish struggle published in English.