About 40% of the time, there is still silence.

Thirty-two. No, make that 35. That’s the highest number of reviewer requests we’ve had to send out for a single manuscript. That is, admittedly, the worst case we have ever encountered. Until then, we had not had to send out any more than 16. That said, one of our first ever manuscripts edited for PoLAR had required sending out 12. When we conveyed our panic as ones only just taking up the role of editor, we were assured that this was very unusual. Indeed, it is.

Why share this with you here? Especially when PoLAR has just issued its call for the next set of Editors (starting phase-in and shadowing in late January 2024 and officially taking over as Co-Editors following release of the November 2024 issue after the American Anthropological Association annual meeting)?

On one hand, because of our shared value of, and need for, transparency. Amidst the desperate real-world crises previously mentioned, these correspondences are largely what our lives revolve around these days. Living our privileged lives and, it often feels like, buckling under the weight and exigencies of #firstworldproblems, our lives have been reduced to such relative seeming-minutiae as counting the numbers that form the metrics by which a journal’s success and failure is depicted in the report that is shortly due to our section leaders, to whom we are ultimately accountable for our stewardship of the journal: the number of review requests sent out, number agreed, number declined; the number of days since the manuscript was submitted, number before we sent it out for review, number remaining before the decision on the manuscript is late… and so on.

These seeming-minutiae, though, are ultimately measured in impacts on people’s lives. Impacts whose stories we do not often get to hear but glimpse when authors write to us to ask when they might get a decision on their manuscript as they are preparing to go on the job market and/or submit their tenure portfolio soon, or request that we petition Wiley to ungate an article PoLAR published several years ago that still has something to say to us in the midst of today’s crisis on the Israel/Palestine border(s). We know they matter and we do our best to look through the tick tock, tick tock, tick tock of the day-to-day work carried out while we, like the White Rabbit in Alice’s Wonderland hurriedly try to get to the next deadline … constantly aware of time, anxiety, and societal pressures amidst the invisibilizing rhythms of our fast-paced modern life and the anxieties that can come with it—especially in a rapidly changing and less and less humanizing publication landscape.

But, more importantly, we share this here because we are still here. And, in large part, that is because of community.

You see, the reason our transparency seems necessary in this moment especially is because it hopefully opens up space for us all to consider together, in the mutually dependent relationship of what is known in South Africa and beyond as “ubuntu” (our shared and mutually constitutive humaneness captured by the phrase, “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” or “a person is a person by, through and because of other people”), what it takes for us to survive when we were never meant to. At the very least, that is community.

And, so we return to the question with which we opened this editorial: What does living with Audre Lorde’s ever-timely declaration of (some of) our never having been meant to survive mean during this time of crisis?

From where we stand as the Editors of PoLAR, the work of editing the journal and navigating the publishing landscape in these precarious times would scarcely have been possible without each other, and the other members of the PoLAR Editorial Collective: Stephanie Custer (Managing Editor), Jennifer Curtis (Associate Editor of PoLAR Online), Deniz Yonucu and Caroline Parker (Directions Editors), Smoki Muharaj and Matthew Canfield (Book Reviews Editors), our Editorial Board members, as well as our Section leadership (Ilana Gershon as President, Rebekah Park as Treasurer, Heath Cabot as President-Elect, and so many others). Hence, the PoLAR Editors’ Call strongly recommends doing this work as a collective. Whatever the specifics of the model they ultimately opt for, we hope our successors take us up on that invitation. Even if they are matched with someone or some others they do not know, so much more is possible in community. We can attest to this: after all, we did not know each other until January 2021 and are so grateful we were brought together by our vision for what might be possible to accomplish in and through PoLAR’s limited pages and wider community.

Finally, we share this here because of our appreciation for that wider community. This editorial is therefore also a note of thanks to those of you who have said YES when receiving our invitations to review for PoLAR—whether once or several times. Thanks to those of you who have said, “I can’t do it in 3 weeks but 4-6 weeks is possible. Is that ok?”. Thanks too to those of you who have taken the time to say, “I’m really sorry I can’t do it right now but here are some wonderful people who I think are really worth asking; and, if they can’t do it, please feel free to come back to me for more names and/or I might just be able to do it at that time.”

Thanks, frankly, to those of you who have responded to our requests at all—and done so within the first few hours or a couple of days—whether to say yes or no. If to say no, thanks especially to those who have taken the extra 5 minutes to enter the names and emails of three to five other people we might reach out to in your stead. The personal notes of thanks for what we do in service of the field some of you have even taken time to send us when declining our invitations to review, though not required, make a sometimes rote and somewhat impersonal ritual more humanizing and, to use a horrible cliche, really warm our hearts.

Of course, the flip side of all the thanks we have to express is an invitation to those who have perhaps given up on peer review as a priority area of service. One might possibly even think of this editorial as amplifying a relatively muted if implicit foundation of the positive peer review conversation curated by our colleagues for feature in the Directions Section and PoLAR Online with our first issue as Co-Editors in May 2022: it is an invitation to step up to do peer review at all, and thus enter into that partnership relationship of supportively thinking with a possibly-unknown other.

In other words, … well … HELP! Yes, YOU. We need YOUR help!

When you get that first message shared above, please say yes. Or, at least, send us something back to let us know that we are not in this alone—whatever this is (at least, in part, a desperate plea for our individual and collective survival?).

Editor of Ethos, Greg Downey, called for solidarity.⁶ We stand in solidarity here with his call, affirming the fact that it is indeed imperative to all our survival.

Will you stand in solidarity with us all and with each other? Authors, all of us; just trying to get our life’s call (what sometimes feels like a lone voice in the wilderness) heard by someone and maybe even something done with it to help us all better survive and to make the world—including ourselves—somehow saner.

With that said, in thinking about how to frame the works that are published in this issue of PoLAR, the question, “What crisis?” returns to us. This issue includes a searing historicized analysis of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling from Carol J. Greenhouse (“After Dobbs”), which provocatively reminds us that while “everything is political,” what is (and is not) politicized works across different—and indeterminant—scales. Greenhouse urges us, as ethnographers, to think about our experiences as people and analysis as scholars in scalar terms, suggesting that in doing so we are opening up new forms of political agency and possibility. This ability to see in a “crisis” such as the aftermath of Dobbs a “creative openness” speaks to the focus of this issue’s Directions section, Co-Edited by Deniz Yonucu and Caroline Parker, which brings us articles from Amy Cohen and Ilana Gershon, Malay Firoz, and Ridhima Sharma. Each asks in their own way how, as anthropologists, we might work with the indeterminacies that shape our analyses, pedagogies, and material worlds (what Greenhouse might see as different scales), and in doing so challenge “epistemological certitude” (Malay Firoz, “Indeterminate critique”).

These and other works in this issue of PoLAR enter into crises of various scales, and each works us through these with deft and thoughtful attention to the political possibilities engendered in indeterminacy—as well as the violence of imposed structures of rigidity. Achermann, Borrelli, and Pfirter’s article, “For Just Decisions We Need You!” shows how migration control in Switzerland has become an increasingly disaggregated—what they term “relational” process—which sees decisions on deportation being made in consultation with various social service actors, thereby asking us to see migration status as a “co-produced” outcome which reflects the expansion of migration control into broader fields of bureaucratic life. But migrant lives are not defined by these systems, as the article, “Stitching a Rights Narrative,” from Verclyte and Destrooper emphasizes. They bring attention to the embodied and material ways that Syrian refugees in Beirut literally weave multi-layered understandings of their rights into skilled embroidery practices, again reminding us that political possibility shows up when we pay attention to scale.

Infrastructure is another theme that works its way through this issue of PoLAR. Bhattacharjee’s article, “Zones of Compounded Informality,” shows how exclusion and informality is spatially produced—and productive—in India’s Delhi, National Capital Region, and creates barriers for the many workers living within these zones to access citizenship and social protection rights. That is, spatial informality becomes a technique of governance. In contrast, Civelek’s article, “Beyond Lawfare,” focuses on the temporality of urban infrastructures, showing how attempts at urban renewal in Eskişehir, Turkey create a continuum of (re)negotiation: “nesting” layers of legal process which defy simple explanations of political dominance or resistance. Finally, Channell-Justice emphasizes the stakes of urban projects in their article “From Garbage Wars to Green City,” showing how waste management in Ukraine has become a site through which broader questions (and hierarchies) about Europeanization are navigated; a timely intervention that has only become more pressing in the context of Russia’s devastating invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Which crisis? Whether speaking to the war in Ukraine, migrant rights, urbanization, or the judicial control of sex and sexuality, the articles in this issue cut across multiple crises. But these pieces bring attention to political possibilities within these contexts. In that vein, in “An Ontological Struggle,” Ramadhan shows how increasingly conservative notions of personhood have become central to recent and unprecedented judicial moves in Indonesia to criminalize sexuality. This is a powerful essay that sees the Indonesia case (and the experiences of activists and scholars across Southeast Asia) as part of broader global movements to figure sexuality and gender as the “battleground for (contemporary) conservative and religious movements.” Ultimately, Ramadhan ends with a call to “attend to [these] stubborn presences to better make sense of our world and to imagine—and actualize—possibilities and potentialities for another world that is not laden with violent times,” a perspective that is both provocative and speaks to what this issue of PoLAR is broadly encouraging us to do.

Sindiso MnisiWeeks, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Georgina Ramsay, University of Delaware, are Co-Editors-in-Chief of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review.

Author Action Recommendations

Emily Channell-Justice: While the article criticizes the shifting of responsibility for the creation of waste and pollution onto individual actors, decreasing the amount of waste we produce certainly can’t hurt. Given our reliance on so many destructive technologies as part of waste management, producing less waste overall means we might have to use them less.

At the same time, waste and waste management are political and politicized issues. Elected leaders often benefit from the corporations creating the massive amounts of waste. How can we hold them accountable for their role in the creation of waste, especially in the context of increasing global temperatures and climate disasters? Action has to be taken at the political level, not just with you and me reusing water bottles.

And finally, the article focuses on Ukraine. The war there continues unabated, even as Ukrainians continue to resist in remarkable ways, sometimes by just existing (such as the city of Lviv’s ongoing composting pilot project). Let this article inspire you to read more about Ukraine and be educated about the daily lives of people who are living through war.

If you are interested in supporting Ukrainians through donation, please consider Solidarity Collectives https://www.solidaritycollectives.org/en/main-page-english/. This is a group of anti-authoritarian and leftist activists who regularly deliver humanitarian aid to frontline communities.

Review Essay

After Dobbs: Reflections on Political and Legal Anthropology
Carol J. Greenhouse

Research Articles

Notes