Abstract Communiqués were central to the coordination of the mass popular uprising that challenged Israeli rule over Palestinians from 1987 until the early 1990s. These short political texts were called manasheer or bayanat al-Intifada, in Arabic. This essay demonstrates a methodology for engaging with the body of intifada bayanat as a source by focusing on the first of these serialized communiqués, which was distributed early in the first Intifada on January 8, 1988.

Abstract Focusing on the UK case, this essay explores how ideas and political practices around sex as work took root in a particular national space and shifted over time. Sex work helped to alter the political and social perception of sex traders, repudiating their marginality and positioning them in the mainstream of ordinary working lives. Beginning in the 1970s, political activists aligned the idea of sex as work with a defense of female practitioners as “ordinary” women doing ordinary women’s work. Sex work offered substantial rhetorical advantages for rights activists, who linked a work paradigm to practical demands for criminal justice reform and social and health initiatives. At the same time, the idea of sex as work provoked challenges inside and outside the ranks of sex traders. Antiviolence campaigners disputed that prostitution was a “job like any other” and competed with sex work projects for state resources and recognition. The discourse of sex work also occasioned some resistance within the ranks of sex traders, revealing disparate views about identity politics, the state and the market, and even what sex and work meant.

Abstract The massive and multiscaled scope of state violence—religious and racist genocide, medical apartheid, colonial dispossession, global austerity, and capitalist resource extraction that accelerates our climate catastrophe—indexes the immense potential of state infrastructures. Global systems that can accumulate and wield such sprawling powers might instead be used to redistribute resources on that same scale. This issue of Radical History Review, organized around the theme “Feminists Confront State Violence,” asks about the capacity of the state to affirm life given its structural investments in violence, paying specific attention to how activists have theorized and devised strategies to win redress from extant institutions. Ultimately, contributing authors document how feminists have negotiated a fundamental contradiction: how, and why, does one make demands for the equitable distribution of care, safety, and life on a state that unequally distributes violence, immiseration, and death? Together, these essays provide an archival toolkit of Black, abolitionist, anarchist, anticolonial, and anticapitalist feminist strategies to radically remake worlds inside this one.

Abstract This article studies the Hope–Princeton Highway, a regional route in the province of British Columbia (BC), Canada, through the lens of uneven mobilities. Bringing together insights from infrastructure studies, mobility studies, and settler colonial studies, uneven mobilities is a concept that historicizes mobility research in terms of colonial and carceral logics. Using this concept, the article provides insight into political actors, namely incarcerated forced laborers of Japanese descent, whose unjust confinement and forced labor on this infrastructural route remained unacknowledged until recently. The article relies on a range of archival sources that engage the visual culture of the highway and the subtle linkages between an imagined scenic landscape and an imagined multicultural Canada. The article also narrates this highway route by constructing pictorial and landscape relationships of colonialism and carcerality, linking it to uneven mobilities and economic development through the ubiquitous highway road sign—a contemporary initiative to mark and interpret sites of historical and cultural importance along this and other BC routes. The article then explores the infrastructural politics of this route at the scale of the body to highlight modes of resistance. This article advances a tentative theory of uneven mobilities by centering so-called road disturbances through acts of resistance such as rest, play, and work stoppages to reveal how uneven mobilities are entwined with the production of embodied subjectivities.

Abstract The Bonnet Carré Spillway, a mile-long concrete and wood weir in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, is embedded in a landscape of flood control infrastructure and an institutionally repressed history of the Black communities displaced for its construction from 1929 to 1931. Two cemeteries of enslaved and formerly enslaved people were plowed under and then resurfaced decades later, prompting a movement for commemoration led by descendants. Through histories of both the spillway structure and that of enslaved and formerly enslaved communities, this article examines a growing movement for commemoration that challenges and dismantles the political infrastructure generated by and for the preservation of physical infrastructure.

Abstract This essay traces the emergence of the carceral warfare project, a clandestine campaign to infuse US prisons with the logics and techniques of counterinsurgency. First exposed by Black Liberation Army member Dhoruba bin-Wahad, the project came into being between 1970 and 1978. The article begins by discussing the theory undergirding the carceral warfare project, a reactionary idea known as “the issue exploitation thesis.” Starting in 1970, seasoned cold warriors renovated their long-standing arguments against communism for application against imprisoned Black revolutionaries. Next, the FBI’s little-known Prison Activists Surveillance Program (PRISACTS) is discussed. Focusing on the words and deeds of George Jackson and Donald Bordenkircher—two central figures positioned on opposite sides of the struggle—the essay shows how the bureau used PRISACTS to treat carceral spaces as zones of counterrevolutionary warfare. Although the FBI officially discontinued PRISACTS in 1976, the final section argues that the FBI’s counterrevolutionary methodology had already been integrated into state prison systems by this date. Ultimately, this essay demonstrates that through prisons, internal security operatives engage in a plausibly deniable form of counterinsurgency warfare that seeks to isolate political prisoners from each other, from the general prison population, from their outside networks of support, and even alienates them from themselves.

Abstract On the fifth anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s release after twenty-seven years in political prison, and nine months after his election as South Africa’s president, his new government and its allies held an important event. On February 11, 1995, 1,200 ex–political prisoners traveled to Cape Town for the Robben Island Reunion. The first day was held at the former maximum-security prison, the site of subjugation and struggle for many of the participants. The day culminated with a creative happening, as the former prisoners enthusiastically smashed rocks in the Limestone Quarry, negating this once oppressive labor and transforming it into an affirmation of freedom. On ensuing days, the reunion celebrated and demanded support for the ex-prisoners and set Robben Island on the path to becoming the country’s first national peoples’ museum and UNESCO World Heritage Site. Drawing on oral histories and photographs, this article examines the museum’s process of becoming and its subsequent trajectory in the continuing struggle for liberation.

Abstract Calling some prisoners political prisoners and others social prisoners classifies the former as worthy of support and the latter undeserving of it. Instead of labeling prisoners this way, it is important to recognize the political nature of incarceration and that all prisoners deserve people’s solidarity.