Making Our Way Out

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.