Rehearsing Abolition: Cross-Border Insurgent Solidarities and Infrastructures of Care

Abstract

This article examines rehearsing abolition and creating spaces of life, refusal, and mutual aid within and against the violenceof the EUropean “peace,” entangled in racial capitalism. Interrogating imaginaries of Europe as a peace project, we show how“peace” is produced through exclusion, bordering, and the management of populations across frontiers. Rather than redefiningpeace, we ask how this violence is confronted through relationality as praxis and cross-border insurgent solidarity. Focusing onmutual aid collectives, t.i.c.t.a.c. in Barcelona and the Europe Other Collective in Tirana, we trace how fugitive rehearsals of abo-lition take shape through care, legal support, political education, and transnational organizing. Emerging within interconnectedborder geographies, these practices transform sites of containment into anticolonial interstices: fragile, ongoing processes thatrefuse anti-relational logics and make life possible. Centering abolition as “life in rehearsal,” we foreground collective practicesthat forge alternative relations across difference, opening possibilities beyond racial capitalism.