Welcome to the 64th issue of The Funambulist. In the summer of 2025, nine Western States formally recognized the State of Palestine: the French Republic, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Dominion of Canada, the Commonwealth of Australia, the Kingdom of Belgium, the Portuguese Republic, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the Republic of Malta, the Principality of Andorra, and the Republic of San Marino. I use their full names on purpose as they show exactly how these States narrate themselves. For each of these nine States, this decision occurred following popular pressure put on them by their citizens and non-citizens, as well as the broader solidarity work with Palestine from other countries, almost two years in the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The respective degrees of complicity these States hold with this genocide or, more broadly, with what Rashid Khalidi called the “Hundred Years’ War on Palestine” (2020) has been established in detail by many people.
However, it’s important to note that 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.”
In addition to the continuously renewed Zionist settler colonial dream of Eretz Israel (Greater Israel), we therefore have to contend with another threat, that of the establishment of a Palestinian State—much like that of the Palestinian Authority after the Oslo Accords—which would in no way embody a popular sovereignty and would govern on territorial crumbs of Palestine. As I’m writing these words in January 2026, it is difficult to know whether this scenario is far away, or, on the contrary, if it will soon reemerge as a scenario deemed reasonable by those set up as the engineers of Palestinian futures.
In choosing to believe that this latter hypothesis is plausible, this issue intends to reexamine a concept that we have mobilized a few times in the history of The Funambulist, thanks to our regular contributor Sophia Azeb: the “no-State solution.” While Sophia is adamant about the fact that she did not coin this phrase—it is likely to be as old as the narrow debate between “one-State solution” and “two-State solution”—it was the topic of our very first conversation, in April 2014 for an episode of The Funambulist’s podcast. It was also the main object of her contribution to this magazine’s 10th issue (March-April 2017) entitled Architecture and Colonialism, and more generally appears between the lines in Sophia’s many contributions about Palestine in The Funambulist. She is, of course, present in this issue, to revisit the concept in conversation with Rebecca Gross.
The idea of the no-State solution borrows from an anarchist perspective on the State apparatus, considering it with high suspicion while envisioning forms of governance anchored in communities, as Lisbeth Moya González advocates in her text on Cuban and Venezuelan healthcare. We observe that, in their most common form, States are built to perpetuate the global capitalist order and the power of a small minority over the rest of people who live under it. When they are built to serve the structural interests of an identified majority, they often do so through racialization, and always through this specific State apparatus called citizenship. 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.
In his text, William C. Anderson describes the noxiousness of the enterprises set out by what he calls “Black Zionism” in Sierra Leone and Liberia, following Trinidadian pan-Africanist George Padmore. The idea (and its application) that Afro-diasporic liberation in the Caribbean and Abya Yala at large would come in the form of States established on the African Continent is indeed impregnated with European colonial ideology. Campaigns such as Marcus Garvey’s “back-to-Africa” not only flattened all specificities of the Continent by relocating formerly enslaved people to a fundamentally different place from where their relatives had been kidnapped by Europeans, it meant to establish a relationship of power between newcomers and continental Africans through the creation of States, such as the Liberian one.
This issue looks at two models of no-State societies in the examples of the Maya Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in Chiapas (Linda Quiquivix) and the Kurdish liberation movement (Havin Guneser). The fact that it is going to print less than a year after the self-dissolution of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and while the model of Democratic Confederalism applied in Western Kurdistan (aka Rojava) is under attack by Turkish-backed militias and the Syrian governmental forces, this issue accentuates the urgency to understand what is at stake here. What is at stake is that Kurdish stateless sovereignty has to contend with its existence within the borders of no less than four States: the Republic of Türkiye, the Syrian Arab Republic, the Republic of Iraq, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Whether the Kurdish model is romanticized by various people in the global Left is irrelevant here, what matters most is that it is an imperfect but rare example of a governance paradigm carried out in the day-to-day by people, that does not rely on a State apparatus. The same understanding can be applied with the society practiced by the EZLN in Chiapas, Mayan country. External perspectives often focus on the pictoriality of the Zapatista’s militancy—especially women carrying weapons in disciplined formations—while paying little attention to the model of governance they’ve been inventing for over three decades.
Framing the practice of these no-State societies as models or paradigms should however not suggest that they can be applied without a myriad of specificities linked to the historical, political, cultural, economic context of each geography. As such, this issue offers two visions of stateless liberated futures in the particular Oceanian contexts of Kanaky-New Caledonia (Florenda Nirikani) and Aotearoa-New Zealand (Kai-rui Cheng). In the case of Kanaky, the settler colonial power, France, is currently developing neocolonial forms of governance that would allow its interests to be preserved while providing the appearance of (Kanak and non-Kanak alike) self-determination—a model that the activist organization Survie has clearly identified as a reproduction of the Françafrique logics on the African Continent. As for Aotearoa, and looking more specifically at the settler colonial border regime, we contemplate what a borderless, stateless archipelago would look like under a resumed Māori sovereignty.
I would like to conclude this text with a critique of the title of this issue, The No-State Solution, and more particularly this concept of “solution.” In the context of this issue, we merely (and provocatively) use it to mirror and critique the scenarios of so-called one-State and two-State solutions—and even in our 2014 conversation with Sophia, we were adamant in making explicit the scare quotes around this notion of “solution.” However, we do use this word and, as such, we participate in normalizing it. It is important to be attuned to the fact that solutions intrinsically involve a sense of finality. Of course, this sense of finality could not be made more explicit than in the Nazi formulation of the Shoah as “the final solution to the Jewish question.” Whether it is the Third Reich regime or settler colonial States, genocide and ethnic cleansing are indeed a “solution” to the “impediment” caused by people within their lebensraum (living space)—and in particular when it is on stolen land.
I invoke their use of the term “solution” here to play on their language, without suggesting that there is finality to what our collective liberation would look like. Liberation is not “the end of history.”
As is said by the character playing Algerian revolutionary Larbi Ben M’hidi in Gilo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966): “Starting a revolution is not easy, to pursue it is difficult, to win it, even more, but it is truly after our victory that real difficulties will begin.” With these words in mind, I wish you an inspiring read. ■