The Funambulist

The cover artwork titled 'Unfinished Fragments' was created by Palestinian geographer Samir Harb. The drawing purposely appears as incomplete to convey this sense of “no State,” a decentralized model where heterogeneous fragments exist alongside each other.

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There's too much history of 'it's not colonization/occupation/zionism when we do it' that's either horribly under-discussed or shockingly normalized. I'm still thinking about Paul Gilroy's “essential innocence” clouding people's awareness that their state-building dreams and reality are both deadly.

Hello, we definitely ship to the US. There is no shipping fee for bookstores that want to stock us. In case you are placing an individual order, we charge approximately 2 EUR shipping fee.

"The no-State solution is thus a provocation to think of what Indigenous sovereignty can look like without reproducing these structures, in particular the violent dichotomy of citizenship and its absence."

This is the question. Encouraged to see @williamcson.bsky.social here. 🔖

I wrote about the history of Black Zionism for @thefunambulist.bsky.social and the baffling ways that people use identity/oppression to justify genocidal and colonial state projects past and present. Marcus Garvey, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and much more offer disturbing warnings. Preorder if you can!

The Funambulist 64 - The No-State Solution Can liberation ever take the form of a State?

This issue asks: can liberation ever take the form of a state?

Cover artwork by Samir Harb.

Preorder now to receive your print copy at the earliest.

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In 2025, nine Western States formally recognized the State of Palestine. This State recognition and the resurrection of the moribund so-called “two-State solution” is combined with a criminalization of calls to liberate Palestine “from the river to the sea.”

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The Czech Prison from the Socialist Republic to Today The following research is part of our series of publications of architecture student theses. In it, Adéla Vavříková describes the carceral continuum in Czechia, then in Czechoslovakia…

"In this context, the movement for prison abolition will seek its place primarily among groups concerned with the future of the world: collectives that incorporate their professional practices into broader political reflection."

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After the coup, between 1948–1952, the structure and management of prisons were gradually sovietized. During this time, Czechoslovakia operated 400 judicial prisons, correctional institutions, and labor camps, holding 40,000 people—at least a third of them assigned to forced labor in mines."

of prisons from the 1950s onwards. In the years immediately following the end of World War II, before the Communist Party’s coup of 1948, prisons were overcrowded, largely due to the internment and expulsion of German populations from the country’s north-western borderlands

Despite an evident lack of intellectual investment in prison abolitionism in today’s Czechia, she tries to apply this political horizon to the specificities of Czech carceralism.

"This post-war expansion of the carceral system can be traced in Czechoslovakia (later Czechia) through the construction

This research is part of our series of publications of architecture student theses.

Adéla Vavříková describes the carceral continuum in Czechia, then in Czechoslovakia, during the Socialist Republic’s rule to the capitalist present, despite the turning point the 1989 Velvet Revolution embodied.

An important thread and article for the “It can’t happen here, it’s not legal” folks.

LEARNING WITH OUR ELDERS /// Relearning Solidarity in Tamil Eelam Transcribed and translated from Tamil by Anushani Alagarajah. For this second opus of our “Learning With Our Elders” series, we are happy to present this account of a Eelam Tamil activist…

"We can only hope that our allies not only see us as icons of resilience whose only responsibility is to lead the protests, but also as women and humans who have to deal with the brutality of day-to-day life."

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"Even if the collective breaks, the cause of the movement will remain true as long as we live to seek and demand answers against injustice. My hope for myself and for others like me is to be kind and open to learning and unlearning as we navigate this unfamiliar reality."

boundary-conscious solidarity to avoid the exploitation or cooptation of the movement.We are grateful to our contributor, Anushani Alagarajah, for collecting her words and translating them into English.

during the last year of the 53-year long genocide of the Tamil people. Following our prompt to describe a teachable moment following a (collective or individual) mistake or failure, she describes how she learned that political organizing must be grounded in community-centered, accountable, and

For this second opus of our “Learning With Our Elders” series, we are happy to present this account of a Eelam Tamil activist, Arivuchelvi (anonymized), who has been fighting the Sri Lankan state for the past 16 years to obtain truth and justice for her husband who has been forcefully disappeared

Denationalization and Historical Memory: The Panamanian Case In this text inspired from her book Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century (2022), Kaysha Corinealdi retraces the five years that led to 50,000 (mostly Black)…

Black migrants from the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean whose ancestors had been kidnapped from the African Continent and enslaved in the plantation, as well as the descendants of Asian migrants mainly from China."

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"Another important factor shaping this silence is the hemispheric-wide discrimination targeting migrants and citizens of African and Asian descent in the Americas that was the norm throughout the first half of the 20th century. Those targeted for denationalization in Panama were the descendants of

"When Panama appeared in international discussions it was mainly due to the Panama Canal joining the Pacific Ocean to the Caribbean Sea (and the Atlantic Ocean) and the presence of the US military’s Southern Command. What was happening, internally, in Panama, received little if any attention."

"As I see it, there are three core reasons for the apparent amnesia connected to mass scale denationalization in Panama. The first has to do with when this is all taking place. The 1940s was marked by bloody world wars, genocides, and the rise and embrace of fascist movements."

In this text inspired from her book 'Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century' (2022), Kaysha Corinealdi retraces the five years that led to 50,000 (mostly Black) Panamanians who were stripped of their citizenships in the 1940s.

“the conversion of a sum of money into a sum of commodities” for each poem you write about the debt, fifty eight unicorns meet at the bottom of a pool. every time you write DEATH TO THE COLONIZERS, a golden coquí is born. each time you repeat: VOTE FOR THIS IN…

"for each seal of solidarity without remuneration,
a diamond becomes a hummingbird.
every time i gather my skins and caramelize them into poison,
i recover my name."

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"each time you repeat iván three times into the mirror (3),
the wind will become projector transparencies,
that will become broken windows,
that will become airs frozen by the gyres
of all those tortured by la comay."

an anti-cruise ship of hope,
and we sink all the cruise ships,
and we sink all the cruise ships."

(Excerpted from the poem by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera)

"for each (there is only one many times insisted)
debt you don’t pay,
you are donating a hundred flying hammocks
to the victims of neoliberalism.

for each miscalculation,
you save a bay.
for each bay you save,
we give this island

The Canal of Mourning This text by Iman Mohamed explores the enduring legacy of Italian colonialism in southern Somalia’s Shabeelle valley, where forced labor and exploitation shaped both landscape and memory.

and making widows of their wives... Some say keli asaayle was the result of the continuous practice of using men temporarily as physical barriers for dike breaches, killing them in the rush of water that followed."

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"What calamities happened at this canal for it to have been given such an ominous name? Among Somali elders, keli asaayle conjures stories of extreme violence and exploitation. Some recall it as a single incident in which a canal levee burst, instantly killing dozens, if not hundreds, of workers