This article is part of an ongoing conversation between two people whose very different lives and commitments stretch – when permitted - across the borders of nation states. We have thought together over several years about the connections between the increasingly exclusive nationalisms of regimes in power in the countries that we live in and have moved between, as well as the entanglements of these with racial nationalist movements and state regimes elsewhere, and with capitalist exploitation, oppression and dispossession. Because such connections and entanglements reinforce the power of states, militaries and large private corporations, and thereby render pathways to progressive, emancipatory change within any single nation state ever more limited, it is important to explore the potential for transnational solidarities of struggle.