The inspiration for this themed section originated in a conference organised by the Crime, Harm and Justice Research Group based at London South Bank University. The conference entitled Fighting for Justice: families, communities and solidarity networks against state harms and violence, convened in July 2021, created a space for academics and activists from the UK and further afield to come together to share, reflect and explore state harm and violence from multiple perspectives. Similarly, this themed section creates a forum for the voices of those with lived experiences of state violence in different contexts, from state-enabled processes of violent land dispossession to liberal settler colonialism, as well as the use of torture, abusive forms of surveillance and harmful policy reforms. But it also, and perhaps more significantly, emphasises the significance and power of solidarity, through collective action, protest, and wider forms of support to challenge state harms and violence in all its forms and demand accountability. Families, communities, activist groups, and campaigners unite in different ways and resort to a variety of strategies. Common to all parties is the desire to stand in solidarity with those affected; to denounce states, their agents and policies; to form resistance and ultimately compel states and societies to ‘see’ and to ‘listen’.

Solidarity, denunciation, and resistance are key themes threading through all the articles in this themed section, as they all contribute to making visible the too often concealed or denied violence of state agents and policies, but also the interstices where resistance, built on acts of solidarity and denunciation, happened, happens, can happen. By resituating the analysis of specific cases in a long-term historical perspective, these articles raise contemporary significant political questions also about the right to protest in ‘liberal democracies’.

The violence inscribed in differential strategies of repression and criminalisation of political activists in the ‘liberal settler’ state of Israel is explored in Weizman’s (2023) analysis of the ‘thresholds of threat’. The recourse to targeted violence aimed at intimidating or suppressing those protesting against land dispossession and in solidarity with Indigenous populations in Brazil are the focus of Cavalcanti et al’s (2023) article. The latter also illustrates how the former President Bolsonaro’s far-right government and neoliberal economics sustain and reproduce the colonial logics of extractivism in the Amazonian region. In both articles, long-standing colonial practices, neoliberalism and racial capitalism appear as central to understanding how states resort to coercion, via legal, as well as informal strategies, to criminalise activists and undermine, or even suppress, mobilisations. Repressive state violence against political activists and militants is also the focus of Brian and Lubbers’ (2023) and Rossi’s (2023) articles. The first traces the history of the Police Spies Out of Lives campaign and mobilisations to reveal the extent of state deceptive practices of surveillance and abusive intrusion of undercover police officers in the lives of (mainly women) activists since 1968. In this context, the Undercover Research Group has played, in solidarity with and support of affected individuals, a crucial role in campaigning to release secret state documents, gather and interpret evidence for the Undercover Policing Inquiry established in 2015. Silenced for decades were also the accounts of torture on radical left militants by the police in Italy during the 1970s–early 1980s (Rossi, 2023). This article analyses how the hegemonic narrative of the ‘victory of democracy against terrorism’ supported the various forms of official denials, but also illustrate how mobilisations since the 1980s attempted to challenge state narratives and break the silence about torture. The final paper in this themed section turns our attention to the hidden social harms justified by a neoliberal agenda of cuts to the welfare state. Here, Stewart (2023) points to the public health crisis triggered by the UK social policy reforms implemented since Thatcher and the demolition of the social safety net. The devastating consequences for vulnerable groups, like disability benefit claimants, are clear from the analysis presented.

Together the articles in this themed section offer an insight into different cases of state harms and violence and mobilisations against them. The section invites us to reflect on the commonalities of those cases and how new solidarities can emerge. It is also an opportunity to advocate for politically committed academic research as a form of allyship with the oppressed; research that does not look down or frown upon taking a stand, and, on the contrary, uses its tools, words, and privilege to listen to, learn from and speak the words of the unheard.