Fugitive Rehearsals for Peace: Cross-border Insurgent Solidarities and Abolitionist Infrastructures of Care

In today’s European context, defined by intertwined dynamics of racial capitalism, expanding militarization, and deepening ties between security, surveillance, and carceral infrastructures, there is not only silent complicity but also forms of active entanglement and involvement in ongoing colonial and imperial violence, most visibly in Palestine (Pervez, 2025; Pratt et. al. 2025; Shoman et. al. 2025). This is accompanied by the escalating criminalization of activist movements, from Free Palestine and broader anticolonial movements to environmental action and anti-war mobilizations, alongside the deployment of advanced surveillance technologies, the tightening of border regimes under the new EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, and the growing normalization of fascist, racist, and cisheteropatriarchal politics across the continent. We start writing this article by asking ourselves: What does it mean to think about peace in genocidal times? To pose the question is already to refuse the illusion that peace is a stable destination awaiting us just beyond the latest atrocity. We ask this question not from a position of academic detachment or in pursuit of yet another contribution to the global corporate academic-military complex (Baccheta et. al. 2018; Best et. al. 2010). We come to this writing as a collective of people whose lives and lineages are marked by war, displacement, and resistance. Our histories are shaped by contexts of war and violence in which U.S. and European imperial interventions have played decisive roles, from the Balkans to West Asia. Some of us carry memories of revolutionary dreams seeded in the midst of ruin; others carry the weight of witnessing those dreams betrayed, co-opted, or crushed. These shared yet divergent experiences, shaped by the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, the war in Yugoslavia and the genocidal wars on Bosnia and Kosovo, and the everyday violences of “peaceful,” liberal Western democracies (Azarmandi, 2024; Sunca, 2024), have brought us together: to think, work, and to imagine a different world. Our work emerges not from a place of scholarly distance, but from deeply embodied, entangled positions formed through anticolonial queer and trans* struggles and long-standing collaboration as researchers, educators, and activists.Across the following sections, this article weaves together abolitionist theory, lived struggle, and political activism to interrogate how “peace” is constructed, mobilized, and weaponized in Western academic and political discourse. Rather than a neutral or benevolent condition, we trace how peace is often deployed to obscure structural violence and uphold racial capitalism, imperial domination, and carceral control. In response, we center fugitive rehearsals for peace, imperfect, insurgent, and embodied practices that refuse the terms of domination and instead nurture abolitionist futures in the present. Drawing from Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s insistence that “abolition is life in rehearsal” (Estes, Gilmore & Loperena, 2021, p. 262), we understand peace not as a final state, but as a collective, ongoing praxis of survival, experimentation, and world-building amid, and against, genocidal conditions (Azarmandi, 2025). The present, however violent, remains the only ground from which such rehearsals can take root. Rehearsal, unlike recital, is a mode of learning that requires us, to think together, to embody what we notice, and to act in ways that show the social ground of struggle “can be changed.” This is not metaphorical, but grounded in the work of organizing “with people who are already organized,” building connections across movements and communities to forge what she names an “abolition geography” (Estes, Gilmore & Loperena, 2021, pp. 262–263).