In 2023, we dedicated the final issue of Alea to David Graeber. This special edition gathered four of his essays—previously unpublished in Italian—on debt, magic, games, and political imagination. Through an incisive and personal argumentative style, Graeber’s analyses embodied the urgency to challenge the structures and values that have turned our present into a rotting interregnum: the Lands Between. This time, we aim to be even more ambitious. We seek to navigate the Lands Between, mapping out the multidimensional and multi-situated processes that, for now, we have chosen to call:
The Long Goodbye
Global warming, debt crises, fascism, expropriations, regional wars, epidemics, and gender violence are symptoms of the opposing forces shaping the Lands Between. On one side, dominant social groups—the wealthy, the 1%—deploy economic and political institutions (banks, stock exchanges, multinational corporations, religious and state bureaucracies, governments) to uphold the credibility of the capitalist world-system and its relentless drive for profit accumulation. Neoliberal ideology has played a crucial role in legitimising wage suppression, the resurgence of forced labour, and the exploitation of care work, reducing the concept of social security to the control of violence and obsessive compliance with market rules and private property. On the other side, political movements, communities in struggle, and social experiments are emerging—rejecting the practices and values that sustain the capitalist model. These refusals take the form of squatted homes and factories, the founding of eco-villages, mass resignations from bullshit jobs, and a multitude of climate justice and anti-border struggles. Yet their rejection is not simply negation—it is the immediate creation of alternatives, shaped by cultural imaginaries that do not reduce difference to identity, but rather unfold as concrete acts of social creativity.
In the Lands Between, capitalism’s fantasies have become ghostly farces, spreading disappointment and humiliation, while the material processes of production and resource extraction continue to devastate human and non-human ecosystems alike. At this juncture, the system’s obscene reality is laid bare: the violence and corruption through which the few have amassed wealth and social power are not perversions of capitalism—they are its core substance. The game is rigged because it can be nothing else. New fascisms attempt to suppress this traumatic realisation by channelling resentment towards racialised and marginalised groups, turning them into scapegoats for paranoid delusions and real violence. Meanwhile, creative refusals of these engineered apocalypses seek to realise alternatives in the present, rather than postponing systemic upheaval to the arrival of a long-awaited global revolution.
The Long Goodbye is precisely this: the violent, futile attempts to sustain a collapsing illusion, alongside the imaginative and tangible efforts to build something else. What unites them is the awareness that the farewell has already happened—what remains is a rotting interregnum.
Take the belief in self-regulating markets, in the supposed free movement of goods, in human nature as inherently selfish. Blend it with climate denialism, oil obsession, nostalgia for empire, population decline panic, and migration hysteria. Listen as they explain suburban and ghetto uprisings as demands for jobs and integration. Or as they attribute drug use to a lack of discipline, the decline of the nuclear family, and the supposed failure of the woman-mother role. These refrains manufacture an idealised past, a sanitized utopia where colonialism, imperialism, misogyny, and white supremacy were simply the natural order of things. In the face of this (tragic) common sense, we ask:
→ Who are the intellectual-performers constructing this spectral lore? What knowledge, institutions, and media sustain the credibility and (symbolic) power of their narratives—fabricated from outdated categories passed off as objective facts?
→ What kinds of pasts and futures are reinvented through these spectral narratives?
→ More importantly, what material conditions allow these phantasmagorical stories to persist as valid interpretations of contemporary society?
Remember: «The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House». Prisons cannot be reformed. Borders do not exist outside the violence of armies and police. Socio-economic inequalities cannot be managed away, just as bushes cannot replace the forests felled to make way for parking lots, industrial sheds, factory farms, and plantations. Creative refusals are not acts of withdrawal, but acts of resistance against the forms of domination that shape the interregnum. They manifest through direct action, civil disobedience, occupations, and wildcat strikes—establishing new ways of social being beyond racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, imperialism, and market utilitarianism.
→ How do we occupy factories, forests, houses, universities, fields, or prisons and transform them into other spaces—liberated places?
→ What practices and knowledges can ensure that hierarchies and discrimination do not creep back in through the cracks?
→ How do we withstand the siege of ‘civilised’ institutions—police, bureaucracies, courts, media?
→ What cultural forms and social practices emerge from creative refusals, and how do they reshape time and space?
The Lands Between are composed of twilight zones—each differing in how it is established, in the imaginaries it enacts, and in the architectures it materialises. Consider Gaza: its creation by Israel has relied for years on state violence, anti-Palestinian propaganda, and surveillance technologies—constructing a space-time of death and humiliation. The Zone is a condensation of imaginaries and practices, prefiguring one of the possible futures of the Lands Between. Then there are the Red Zones—used to manage pandemics and elite gatherings like the G7—where social space is ‘sanitised’ through police violence and bureaucratic control. The same logic applies to Special Economic Zones, where governments engineer the conditions for capitalist accumulation to reboot itself. But creative refusals generate their own Zones—pirate utopias, islands in the network, self-managed spaces(-times). Their structures may vary, but what unites them is the attempt to carve out places of liberation, where unprecedented and alternative ways of sociality can be affirmed.
→ What architectures define these Zones, and what aesthetics do they draw upon?
→ How do Zones emerge, and what forms of human and non-human sociality do they produce?
→ What kinds of imaginaries do Zones generate, and which spaces(-times) remain truly unimaginable?
→ How does a particular kind of Zone establish itself as a dominant model of spatial and temporal organisation?
For this issue, we are looking for original and innovative contributions that sharpen the questions outlined in the research areas above. Alea actively supports early-career and precarious authors, offering, where possible, fair compensation for editorial work (typically, an article is paid up to €150).
To participate in the open call, we invite authors to consider the following contribution categories:
Send us a short pitch in either English or Italian (max. 250 words) outlining your idea, along with a brief biographical note (max. 100 words) and, if available, samples of previous work or publications.
Send your pitch to: pitch@aleamag.com
For more information, contact us at: ciao@aleamag.com
