Lucien van der Walt, an industrial sociologist who works on labour and left movements and capitalist restructuring, also has an activist background.

[3] These regions are knitted together into a single global account, which overviews core themes, developments and debates in the anarchist and syndicalist tradition.

According to van der Walt, "once you look globally, you find mass movements of comparable, sometimes even greater, influence in countries ranging from Argentina, to China, to Cuba, to Mexico, to Peru, to the Ukraine and so on.

Attention is also paid to figures and movements partially influenced by anarchism, such as Augusto César Sandino, and the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union, in southern Africa.

"[4] The anarchist and syndicalist canon must be understood as a global one, that must "include figures from within but also without the West", ideally including figures like Li Pei Kan (Ba Jin) and Liu Shifu ("Shifu") of China, James Connolly of Ireland, Armando Borghi and Errico Malatesta of Italy, Nestor Makhno and Piotr Arshinov, of Ukraine, Juana Rouco Buela of Argentina, Lucía Sánchez Saornil and Jaime Balius of Spain, Ricardo Flores Magón, Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza, Antonio Gomes y Soto and Práxedis Guerrero of Mexico, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis of the Netherlands, Ōsugi Sakae, Kōtoku Shūsui, and Kanno Sugako of Japan, Lucy Parsons and Emma Goldman of the United States, Enrique Roig de San Martín of Cuba, Shin Chaeho and Kim Jwa-jin of Korea, Rudolph Rocker of Germany, Neno Vasco and Maria Lacerda de Moura of Brazil, Abraham Guillén of Spain and Uruguay, and S. P. Bunting and T. W. Thibedi of South Africa.

[4] According to the book, the core ideas of anarchism (including its anarcho-synidcalist variant) include revolutionary class struggle by the working class and peasantry, internationalism, opposition to all forms of social and economic inequality, anti-imperialism, and a commitment to creating a self-managed global system of libertarian socialism, based on participatory planning and the abolition of markets and states.

Black Flame's core theses include the propositions that "the global anarchist movement emerged in the First International, that syndicalism is an integral part of the broad anarchist tradition, that this tradition centres on rationalism, socialism and anti-authoritarianism, that the writings of Mikhail Bakunin and Pyotr Kropotkin are representative of its core ideas, and that this 'narrow' definition is both empirically defensible and analytically useful.

Other areas covered include: The book engages with contemporary academic thinking on issues, such as race and gender, but does so by a close examination of "the rich veins of anarchist and syndicalist thought on the national question, on women's struggles, on union strategy.

"[6] Black Flame insists that while anarchism owes an immense debt to the earlier current of mutualists and to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, it cannot be reduced to, or conflated with, Mutualism.

They write that "[t]he insurrectionist approach, in contrast, claims that reforms are illusory, that movements like unions are willing or unwitting bulwarks of the existing order, and that formal organisations are authoritarian."

Consequently, insurrectionist anarchism typically emphasises violent action, which is known as propaganda by the deed, as the "most important means of evoking a spontaneous revolutionary upsurge" by the popular classes[6] The book has been very well-received, and quickly sold out its first print run.

Reviewers have praised the book for its "deeply impressive quality of research, analysis and writing", as an "outstanding contribution" for "examining anarchism from a worldwide perspective instead of looking at it only from a west European angle", for its "useful and insightful treatment of one of the most fascinating alternatives to industrial capitalism and the modern nation state", its "grand work of synthesis", and its "remarkable job in drawing together a vast international body of literature, showing convincingly that anarchism and syndicalism were far more significant political forces than historians have generally given ... credit," and "a serious and coherent political philosophy.