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

This article examines rehearsing abolition and creating spaces of life, refusal, and mutual aid within and against the violence of 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 redefining peace, we ask how this violence is confronted through relationality as praxis and cross-border insurgent solidarity. Focusing on mutual aid collectives, t.i.c.t.a.c. in Barcelona and the Europe Other Collective in Tirana, we trace how fugitive rehearsals of abolition take shape through care, legal support, political education, and transnational organizing. Emerging within interconnected border geographies, these practices transform sites of containment into anticolonial interstices: fragile, ongoing processes that refuse anti-relational logics and make life possible. Centering abolition as “life in rehearsal,” we foreground collective practices that forge alternative relations across difference, opening possibilities beyond racial capitalism.

Mahdis Azarmandi, Tjaša Kancler, Piro Rexhepi

17 July 2026

This article examines rehearsing abolition and creating spaces of life, refusal, and mutual aid within and against the violence of 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 redefining peace, we ask how this violence is confronted through relationality as praxis and cross-border insurgent solidarity. Focusing on mutual aid collectives, t.i.c.t.a.c. in Barcelona and the Europe Other Collective in Tirana, we trace how fugitive rehearsals of abolition take shape through care, legal support, political education, and transnational organizing. Emerging within interconnected border geographies, these practices transform sites of containment into anticolonial interstices: fragile, ongoing processes that refuse anti-relational logics and make life possible. Centering abolition as “life in rehearsal,” we foreground collective practices that forge alternative relations across difference, opening possibilities beyond racial capitalism.

t.i.c.t.a.c—Banner, “Not One Minute More! Smash Racial Capitalism!”, at the Transfeminist March, 7 M Barcelona 2025. Source: Authors.

Activists organizing a protest calling for a suspension of the Italy–Albania deal after the suicide of Hamid Badoui, a Moroccan migrant who took his own life due to fear of being sent back to Italian centers in Gjader, Albania, May 2025. Source:

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