The limits of contemporary reparations discourse lie not only in its political and economic formulations but also in its grammar. The prevailing grammar of to repair organizes reparations through the logic of injury, in which harm authorizes recognition and justice is rendered as compensation. Within this framework, Black life becomes legible only through suffering, and the state’s moral authority is affirmed through its ability to account for loss. This article advances a shift from to repair toward repair to, a grammatical and political reorientation that moves from restitution to composition and from recognition to relation. Repair to describes a reparative practice grounded in place and oriented by collective life, in which repair is practiced through the making and maintenance of relation rather than just the settlement of accounts.
This article develops the portal as a spatial theory that fosters chrono-geographic vigilance toward the erasure of earth relations in the making of a decolonial subject of rights. Drawing on archival research in the UK and South Africa, it reconstructs a geo-social history that links slum housing in east London and diamond mining in South Africa to contemporary data mining and manipulation through AI. Responding to the theme of inhuman reparations, the article asks, What reparations are needed to repair the severance of environmentally displaced lives that cannot land? The article responds with a discussion of a series of artworks from the exhibition I am in your dreams, but you are not in mine (2025), which attends to the silences and erasures of environmental harms while offering alternative ways of inhabiting the decimated environments of extraction. The artworks develop speculative nonfictions to account for a full life of subjects, bodies, and earths taking place within and against the long shadows of colonialism. Against the severing tides that cut the environmental ties to bodies in extractive economies, these speculative nonfictions encourage a form of inhuman jurisprudence that recognizes the historical legacies that tie human subjects to wider ecologies.
This article is framed by the relationship between the concept and practice of quilombo and the concept and practice of reparation. The article presents the Brazilian quilombo as an emergent figure of ontological disobedience founded on the inseparability between body and territory, time and memory, life and world. In this frame the quilombo ceases to be a historical leftover and becomes an insurgent presence in contemporary life and space. The authors build on a collaborative project to translate and interpret the relationship between quilombo and the world and suggest avenues for translating quilombo through plurality, emergence, and excess.
This article considers what we might gain from premising reparative frameworks on the notion of ephemerality. Engaging with multimodal artist Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro's notion of “perishable spaces of freedom,” it argues that Black women (cis, trans, femme) provide insight into the temporality (including the temporariness) of reparative frameworks by demonstrating how death, transmutation and transfiguration are necessary elements of any reparative frame in a world where colonial violence and its offspring continue to govern our social logics. When systems of oppression sustain themselves by killing everything they deem necessary to sustain patriarchal white supremacy — including animals, plants and minerals — the hope for freedom lies not in the promise of permanent liberation but rather in the promise of death, transmutation and transfiguration.
By drawing on the work of the Architects for Gaza collective, this article offers a critical examination of the notion of repair within the fractured context of Gaza, a city that has endured repeated cycles of destruction and systematic erasure. The recurrent violence enacted on this geography has been integral to the tactical denial of the Gazans’ right to home, street, and neighborhood, as a part of the broader colonial project aimed at dismantling Gaza as a physical and mental space, and shredding of its social fabric. By centering the necessity to uphold this right, the notion of repair is discussed through the lens of Patricia Stuelke’s conceptualization of repair as a symptom of systemic failures rather than part of the solution. Pushing against the prevalent neoliberal narrative that posits repair as a technocratic, top-down, linear process with a fixed end point, this article argues that partial repair — small-scale, open-ended, community-rooted process of stitching, reclaiming, and reuse — is, in itself, an anti-colonial tactic and a form of what Gerald Vizenor calls survivance.
Land reparations have often been dismissed as too complex, politically unworkable, and legally questionable. Questions of who qualifies are thorny. Land restoration might require a second act of dispossession. Too much time has passed. Claims to and uses of land overlap and are often conflictual. What happens, though, if we approach such complexity as not a reason for the infeasibility of land reparations but rather a reflection of the irreparability of the ownership model of property itself? This is a model, after all, that constitutes an individualistic earth-owning subject with exclusive legal rights grounded in racial hierarchies. Repair rooted solely in this model risks further division and exclusion. How might attending to the complexities of land reparations move us toward forms of repair beyond the ownership model? What might these complexities reveal about the ongoing collective negotiation of the intensive and extensive nature of harm and care? This article thinks with contemporary forms of localized landed repair across the North Atlantic to consider how they take place within normative socio-legal structures while also making space for epistemologies and subjecthood beyond ownership.
The legal form of reparation accounts for a limited set of relations of harm. Its very design excludes loss and damages embedded in socio-ecological infrastructures of harm spread across matter, subjects, space, and time. The socio-ecological infrastructures centered in this article are both material and legal: the siting and zoning of petrochemical plants in “Cancer Alley,” Louisiana, and the land use permits and property rights that emplace these plants in majority-Black districts. These infrastructures intoxicate resident communities and prevent them from communing with their enslaved ancestors buried in unmarked cemeteries in the back of former plantations now on the private land of big oil corporations. By analyzing the litigation strategies deployed by a fence-line community in St. James Parish, the author shows how their claim for declaratory and injunctive relief moves beyond a narrow, liberal rights-based demand for reparation by re-pairing entangled harms across generations of racial subjugation. This “relational re-pairing” renders legally legible socio-ecological attachments that law disconnects from one another. Juridical tactics for re-pairing severed relations thus confront, disrupt, and reckon with historically sedimented injustices to redress an irreparable past and present that can be accounted for only when connected harms are re-paired or paired anew.
This essay examines how dramaturgical practice can function as a reparative method within legal scholarship. Drawing on Eve Sedgwick’s concept of reparative reading, it considers how theatrical forms offer an alternative to the adversarial, suspicious, and hierarchical modes typically cultivated in legal training. Through an analysis of three theatrical works created by the author, the essay explores how staging legal questions enables affective and imaginative engagements with law that exceed the limits of traditional legal discourse. It then turns to two scholarly writings shaped by these theatrical experiments, highlighting how dramaturgical techniques such as immediacy and polyvocality can reconfigure legal writing. The essay suggests that genre experimentation offers a way for scholars who engage with law to unsettle normative legal forms and imagine more relational, responsive modes of authorship. It positions reparative dramaturgy as both critique and alternative: a practice that opens law to the transformative possibilities of other disciplines and to the futures that become thinkable when law is staged differently.
This article reads the Twelve-Day War against ongoing transformations of capital and power in the Middle East, arguing that it unfolds across three disjunctive temporal registers. (1) As genocide in Gaza intensifies after October 7, Israel pivots from a managed interwar tempo of attritional strikes to near-permanent war, while Iran and allies within the Axis of Resistance persist in the in-between time of neither war nor peace. (2) Israel’s temporal mutation is mediated by its integration into logistical-transnational circuits of accumulation amid the breakdown of US hegemonic synchronization, fracturing the world market into a centrifugal multipolarity that increasingly centered on rivalries over logistical power of capital circulation — ports, corridors, chokepoints. (3) The temporality of campism is out-of-sync with a globalized yet differentiated capitalism in which imperial domination is pluralized beyond the historical West. From strategic to doctrinaire, these campist positions and tendencies back the Islamic Republic of Iran against Western imperialism while bracketing internal repression and regional interventions. Against both campism and Western imperialism, how might an internationalist politics of time, linking Woman, Life, Freedom in Iran to Palestinian anti-colonial resistance, be regrounded in these disjunctive temporalities to coordinate counter-synchronizations that disrupt corridors of war and accumulation while defending the logistics of life?
This introduction gives an overview of the dossier, bringing together contributions on Israel’s invasion of Iran during the Twelve-Day War from inside Iran as well as from exiled researchers and activists. It advances an internationalist position that seeks to move beyond both imperialist narratives and campist apologetics by taking struggles for liberation as its point of departure. While situating this war within the broader process of transformations of the Middle East that primed October 7, 2023, and subsequent reconfiguration of the region through violence, warfare and the genocide in Gaza, this piece delves deeper into the genealogies of this war. Alongside the two nationalist tendencies of ethno-nationalism and patriotism described here, a third alternative began to emerge in the wake of the war, distinguished by its qualitatively different and emancipatory character. This alternative was articulated by both political organizations and activists inside Iran such as independent labor organizations and political prisoners, as well as diasporic leftist collectives. Constructed around a “dual negation,” this stance expressed a call for genuine democratic transformation grounded in grassroots mobilization and solidarity. It offered a critique not only of the immediate protagonists involved in this war but also of the broader structures underpinning violence and domination in the region, ultimately highlighting an internationalist path forward.
Asylum seekers confined in refugee camps in Greece are targeted by administrative rules, policies, and arbitrary measures aimed not only at restricting their mobility but also at governing by starving them and hampering their social reproduction activities. By situating hunger-strike protests within a broader spectrum of struggles in refugee camps and sites of confinement, this article forwards a twofold argument. First, it contends that migrants’ hunger strikes unsettle the biopolitical hold exercised over them by embodying the intolerable, that is, by laying bare a life that has become unlivable. Second, a focus on hunger strikes sheds light on the field of tension between debasement and resistance, which are usually seen in opposition to each other. By considering the migrant hunger strikes of 2015–25, the article shows that, while those occurring during the first years of the so-called refugee crisis in Greece demanded freedom of movement and struggled for the right to asylum, after the pandemic they mainly addressed the unlivable conditions in camps. Indeed, a focus on hunger-strike protests reveals that nowadays migrants are increasingly governed and disrupted by the debasing of their lives and the dismantling of their life-support infrastructures.
Spanning more than six years, with some hunger strikes lasting up to 558 days, the Death Fast Resistance in Turkey (2000–2007) unsettled the instrumental logic of politics, even as hunger strikers’ endurance surpassed medical projections for human survival. Rather than evaluating the resistance through the lens of victory or defeat, the article poses the question of duration and endurance from the perspective of the lived passage. The first section challenges readings of self-immolation as the sovereign right to death, foregrounding instead a more-than-human assemblage composed through the transindividual circulation of affect among women prisoners. The second turns to a photograph of a hunger striker, showing how her body, essentially transindividual, gathers non-contemporaneous times into the lived duration of the hunger strike, making it not merely resistance in time but resistance as time. The article argues that prevailing readings of the hunger strike remain bound to dyadic, vertical models of domination and resistance and fail to apprehend the lateral, affective compositions among bodies — relations that exceed, rather than merely invert, the grammar of domination. Attending to these assemblages of bodies and times at the limit of endurance, the article introduces a new understanding of the hunger strike, one not modeled on the sovereign power of death.
This article focuses on the 2012 hunger strikes of Kurdish prisoners in Turkey. In the vast history of hunger strikes in Turkey, what sets 2012 strikes apart from the rest is that the strike was not related to the bodily autonomy of the prisoners or to the limiting of state's power over them. Instead the strikers demanded the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan's freedom. In that sense the 2012 strikes, rather than being a complicated form of subjectivization against the sovereignty of the state by prisoners turning their bodies into weapons, involved an act of generous entrust of their lives into the hands of people. The article utilizes the diary form to interject the reader in both the quantum time the hunger strikers thereby created and the universality they performed. Spilling and leaking into the streets through the bodies of other actors, into the consciousness of other oppositional actors through the memories they evoked, and into the speeches of the prime minister and his cabinet by the turmoil they caused, the prisoners ethically transformed space and time into a place in which care, mutual responsibility, connection, and solidarity reigned against denial and destruction.
This article examines the hunger strike as a form of embodied resistance among Palestinian political prisoners, arguing that it transforms individual bodily suffering into a site of collective anti-colonial subjectivation. Drawing on interviews conducted between 2015 and 2018 with former hunger strikers, the article is grounded in a feminist decolonial methodology rooted in storytelling. Hunger strikes are framed by participants not as isolated acts of individual protest, but as contributions to the collective national struggle for freedom and self-determination. By situating the Palestinian case within a transnational framework, including Irish Republican and Turkish leftist hunger strikes, the article explores how the incarcerated body becomes a site of political meaning making and resistance to colonial state violence. In Palestine the hunger strike confronts both the material conditions of imprisonment and the broader settler-colonial logic that seeks to depoliticize and erase Palestinian political life. The striker's body, always under threat of death, emerges as a living archive of struggle and a defiant evo-discourse to colonial domination.
To assemble a Benjaminian theory of hunger striking requires delving into his theory of the revolutionary strike as a suspension of corporeality from a continuum of subjugation. Revolutionary strikes and divine violence both dissolve inculpation and expiation, “for the domination of law over the living ceases with mere life.” This excess of mere life to law opens the political logic of the hunger strike. Benjamin's search for a violence of pure means passes through his theory of citable gesture — the death fast. The citable death fast resonates across multiplex bodies, voices, and topologies, qualifying as a means without preassigned ends — an incalculable event. The striking gesture is manifested on a podium like the body on a death fast or the suicide bomber posed upon an explosive apparatus. It separates the actor from the audience like the dead from the living. The abyss between the podium as the locus of gestural inception, as the space of enactment, is expressed by Verschuttung that suggests “nothing as much as the filling in of a grave.” Hegel's phenomenology of the body as a philosophical anthropology of digestion and nausea is a theatrical choreography of citable gestures entangled with economies of interruption, elimination, and alienation in the form of corporeal abjection and rejection.
This introduction examines the cultural reception of Gandhian and Irish Republican hunger strikes circa World War 1. In 1922 W. Norman Brown in this journal dichotomized hunger striking into practices diversely legitimated by a precolonial moral economy (Gandhian) and military instrumentalism (Irish Republican). This binary analytically pivots between the processual dimension of striking as expressive ritual versus stressing the political justification of self-harm as a weapon of war. As in all such binary diagrams these dichotomies were descriptively inadequate. Irish Republican public culture rescripted the hunger striker as allegorically incarnating the nineteenth-century famine in colonial Ireland as British genocide. Moving beyond the dichotomies of moral economy versus instrumentalist action, Miguel Abensour proposes that the wildcat labor strike (grève sauvage) exemplifies Claude Lefort's “savage democracy.” The death fast, considered as a wildcat strike, mobilizes tactics and emblems of self-disincorporation to dramatize and accelerate the disincorporation of concentrationist power such as mass incarceration, migrant detention centers, gulags and lagers, militarized borders and apartheid checkpoints. The self-inflicted wildcat strike savages the body of the hunger striker molding it into a conduit for the savaging of programs of disciplinary normation. In the wildcat strike the hunger striker is both above themselves as agent and below themselves as patient at the same time, thereby closing the circle of subjugation and self-determination.
The political import of the liquidated and self-liquidating subject pervades this volume — to be liquidated is literally to be depleted of substance. This essay is concerned with the relation between substance depletion and the striking-of-the-subject as abstinence, abstention, assaulting the subject, and the striking out of the category of the subject placed under erasure. This essay asks: does insurrectionary bodily self-alteration merely play back the pathogenic authority it opposes — thereby repeating the latter's political and legal wastage of the very same body that hunger strikes? The hunger striker self-subjugates their body as an interiority lodging a truth to be surfaced like the hieroglyphics of Hortense Spillers's flesh turned and torn inside out. However, for Spillers the ripping and tearing is perpetrated by racist hierarchies with the sanctioned power to do so. The subjugated hunger striker is accorded no legal right to treat themselves in this manner, and therein lies the transgressive power of the strike that ex-appropriates for the rightless the most intimate and enigmatic right of sovereignty: to re-create itself through corporeal extractivism.
How can the Twelve-Day War between Iran and Israel be understood through the lens of the new global war regime? And what does this war reveal about that regime? The Twelve-Day War unfolded not as a simple bilateral conflict but as a multi-scalar episode within a global regime of corridor competition: a struggle over chokepoints, logistical routes, and infrastructural sovereignty embedded in the broader architecture of supply-chain capitalism. Revisiting the genealogy of this war since the critical conjuncture of 1977–82 — the Mahapach in Israel, the Iranian Revolution, and the Carter Doctrine — the article examines how the two states’ divergent security rationalities took shape during the transition from the fading Cold War order to an emerging multipolar one. While Israel transformed itself into an augmented hub within global circuits of accumulation, Iran weaponized chokepoints as security levers — an enduring expression of its strategic solitude. In light of the geo-economic transnationalization of security — which has fragmented national territories, particularly across the peripheries, integrating some as nodal zones in a vascular cartography of transnational flows while rendering others disposable and war prone — the article calls for rethinking internationalism as a transversal alliance of struggles across the zones of war and circulation: a just-in-time internationalism.
This article problematizes two dominant approaches to the Twelve-Day War, which we delineate under the rubric of localism and campism. Drawing on state theory, these approaches can be considered as ramifications of two conceptions of the state. Localism treats the state as one or a particular state, focusing on the internal dynamics and circumstances of a particular nation-state. Campism, on the other hand, treats the state as an abstract universal, approaching it with a broad brush as a generic political form rather than attending to the concrete determinations of any one state. What is overlooked in these dual conceptions, it is argued, is the parallax gap between the two, which brings to light the actual force fields among states. Dwelling within the transpositional movement, the parallax gap exposes the limitations inherent in focusing exclusively on either perspective, which masks the antagonistic relationships that exist among actual states — namely, the persistent reality of war. This is even more palpable in our contemporary conjuncture in which wars and military conflicts have increasingly turned into a fundamental facet of capital accumulation and its complexities. Failing to recognize this parallax moment has critical consequences for radical politics, which will be explored in this article in the context of the Twelve-Day War.
A wave of constitutional reform is sweeping the Caribbean, yet the reform efforts are leaving the (neo)colonial political systems intact, offering symbolic changes without structural transformation. As the Caribbean faces contemporary challenges of governance, debt, violence, inequality, and climate vulnerability, this collection of essays calls for constitutional reimagining that dismantles (neo)colonial systems, to ensure that the people are the authors and foundations of their constitutions.
