We have benefited so much from the leadership of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology (APLA), under the guidance of former APLA president Ilana Gershon and current president, Heath Cabot. We are grateful for the collaborations we have had with other members of the APLA Board, such as the emerging scholar workshops we co-hosted with Hayal Akarsu and Sahana Ghosh, as well as the leaders of other AAA (American Anthropological Association) sections who accepted our invitations to engage in scholarly conversations that helped shape our understanding of and vision for how enacting solidarity might look like in PoLAR’s pages and beyond. Several of them joined our editorial board and the current Directions issue produced in Indigenous languages is the result of one of the enduring partnerships with the former and then-leaders of the Association of Indigenous Anthropologists, Valerie Lambert and Richard “Richie” Meyers, respectively. With that, we are also thankful for the input and leadership of the outgoing PoLAR editorial board over the past 3 years, especially for those who have helped us review work and suggested reviewers in turn. As we have navigated the aforementioned publishing challenges, we have felt only support, encouragement, and “thick solidarity” from our colleagues. We are so thankful to know and work with you.

The stakes of political and legal anthropology have never been higher. Since we became co-editors, Russia invaded Ukraine, the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision has reversed the rights attached to Roe v. Wade, the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, elections have been imperiled in numerous countries from the DR Congo to Turkey, Iran has seen mass protests and violent crackdowns on political dissent, authoritarian political leadership has continued to rise across countries in Europe and Latin America, conflict has erupted in Ethiopia and Sudan, artificial intelligence has become widespread, and, following attacks and kidnappings by Hamas, Israel has launched a violent assault on Gaza that has resulted in the deaths of at least 41,000 people. All this, while people are still managing the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the increasing effects of climate change, from record-breaking heatwaves to more frequent and devastating wildfires and flooding.

Throughout our tenure, structural issues have constrained the foundations of our “thick solidarity,” leaving us barely able to sustain the daily business of moving articles through the review process, let alone any of the careful, deep work that is necessary to decolonize anthropological publishing. Just as we got our bearings with the process of moving papers through to publication, the terms of these systems would shift as the AAA publishing portfolio introduced new editing processes and expectations. So much of our editorship has felt like the “busy work” of managing constantly evolving expectations and changes from publishers, rather than the deep work of “thick solidarity”: engaging with our editorial collective (our editorial board included), potential authors, reviewers, and building more just systems of publication within PoLAR itself. In all honesty, the overall effect has been somewhat demoralizing and certainly time-consuming.

As our readers are only too aware, the bulk of scholarly publishing work—writing, editing, and reviewing—is unpaid. Yet, as we have experienced, the workload seems to increase with the building pressure to measure scholarly value according to key performance indicators rather than the ways our work contributes to the field. As publishing and academia continue to morph alongside new intersections of neoliberalism, managerialism, anti-intellectualism, and censorship, we ask how the projects we care so much about—solidarity, decolonization, inclusion—can be achieved when we are physically and emotionally exhausted by the minutia that is required to navigate these intersections. It is a reminder that administrative work is not merely tiresome, it is political. Continuous structural changes and instability result in lost time, energy, and potential. Nevertheless, amidst these struggles of journal editing over our tenure, we are grateful for the solidarity that we have experienced with other AAA journal editors similarly navigating this publishing volatility.

All anthropology is political anthropology. While it is disingenuous to claim that our times are unprecedented, there is no question that our times warrant careful, longitudinal ethnographic study from scholars working in and from all over the globe. The struggles of journal editing over our tenure articulated above have only emphasized to us how crucial it is to maintain the work of political and legal anthropology amidst volatile times. As the journal transitions to excellent leadership under Dr. Deepa Das Acevedo and the new editorial collective she is constituting, we are assured that PoLAR will continue to be at the forefront of scholarly interventions across political and legal anthropology.

The articles in this issue address classic topics in political and legal anthropology—the state, citizenship, security, policing, humanitarianism, and courtroom linguistics—in new and insightful ways. Kanosky examines contested notions of security in a rural Illinois community that has become a site for militarized police training. Describing how the children of migrants from Myanmar have “Without-A-Surname” added to their proper names upon enrolling in Thai schools, Sudchaeroen describes how naming practices reflect political exclusion, showing how the applied suffix reflects the ambiguous political state and liminal social position of migrants.

Based on fieldwork in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, Millar provides insight into localization policies as an alternative to humanitarian provisioning, showing how community based organizations facilitate the integration of refugees into the bureaucracy of state life, including them but also requiring that they practice “stateness” in order to claim legitimacy. Continuing the theme of the oft dehumanizing role of state formation around border conflicts, Dasgupta provides critical insight into the various spaces Tibetan refugees create in “disaggregating citizenship,” as individuals and communities, navigating identity and belonging in India as well as Tibet and, thus, pushing back against the precarity in terms of status and security that results for them from exclusionary state policies.

With a focus on language and the law, Rao’s “Linguistic Dimensions of the Crimmigration Regime” provides us with an understanding of how language ideology often troublingly shapes the working conditions for interpreters in court. At the same time, Garcia shows us that it is, at least partly, because Indigenous languages are “a scandalous presence” in US courtrooms and reveals how exclusionary language ideologies and practices as political play out in law courts in ways that disadvantage Indigenous immigrants in proceedings and their broader communities, their interpreters included, while also revealing the advocacy spaces these communities of interpreters try to nonetheless carve out for themselves and their broader communities in these unwelcoming settings. It is especially fitting then that this issue of PoLAR should end with a collection in Directions that centers Indigenous languages from around the globe in an attempt to upend some of the problematic language ideologies Garcia and Rao aptly describe. To hear the authors read their Indigenous language contributions out loud, please visit PoLAR Online, where our editorial collective colleagues (Caroline, Deniz, and Jennifer) have curated this as a mixed media collection.

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