This article argues that Israel's colonial domination of Palestine's logistics and goods movement infrastructure (ports, roads, and supply chain) remains a central, yet understudied, aspect of both the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine and the broader Zionist settler colonial project. Israel's targeted military destruction of Palestine's key logistical nodes (Gaza's seaport and airport) coupled with Israel's devastating immobilization programs, combine to systematically disrupt and undermine the flow of Palestinian goods through a matrix of closures, security checkpoints, and militarized border crossings. Taken together, the systematic Israeli assault on the Palestinian logistical supply chain amounts to what we describe as the “logistics of occupation,” which not only suppresses the circulation of Palestine's goods but has directly lead to the simultaneous de‐development of the Palestinian economy.

While world-systems anti-systemic movement scholarship has briefly acknowledged the existence of anti-state “cultural” movements—namely, autonomous indigenous movements in the periphery and anarchist worker movements in the core and semi-periphery—it relegates them to secondary importance to statist “political” movements. In this paper, we provide an intervention in the world-systems anti-systemic movements literature by centering anti-state movements in our analysis. In order to investigate the mechanisms essential for anti-state, anti-systemic movements over the longue durée of the world-system, we operationalize a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) using nine cases of non-state spaces from different geographies and historical time periods throughout the world-system. We use a Boolean crisp set, or binary approach, denoting the presence, or absence of factors to determine the pathways that lead to the variation between explicitly anarchist and implicitly anarchistic movements as well as short-term or long-term non-state spaces established by anti-state movements. We find that the core and semi-periphery classification of anarchist movements is false. We also find that non-state spaces succeed when they are not repressed by statist anti-systemic movements or core imperial nation-states. In effect, the anti-systemic political actor replicates the logic of the core nation-state it claims to be opposed to when it comes to its repression of non-state spaces and movements. Prior to the “liberal geoculture” (1848–1968), even core states had difficulty repressing non-state spaces, and after the liberal geoculture semi-periphery and periphery states have had difficulty repressing non-state spaces.

This paper argues that sociological analysis of social movements has undertheorized non/anti-state social movements. It is argued that an alternative modality of resistance to that of movements seeking reform through the state or the capture of state power through revolution is to exit the world-system and set up parallel structures of governance and production. A conjunctural inter-regional comparison is taken up in order to map the inter-scalar and historical causal factors that led to exit-with-autonomy in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava) and autonomy-without-exit in Iraqi Kurdistan (Kurdish Regional Government). The paper shows that in order to exit the world-system social movement actors in Rojava used strategic loyalty bargains and political voice at specific historical conjunctures in order to maintain their movement and seize on non-state political opportunities. These same non-state political opportunities were not available for the social movement actors hoping to exit the world-system in the Kurdish Regional Government.

Editor's introduction to the special issue on non-state movements and spaces.

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