Paper Bullets

Stickers don't ask permission. They're slapped up under cover of night, hitching rides on lampposts and bathroom walls, whispering-or shouting-messages meant to question authority and disrupt the ordinary flow of power. Cheap, fast, anonymous, and at times illegal, political stickers have long been among the most agile tools of resistance. This book tells their story.

From early twentieth-century anarchist stickers and labor "stickerettes" to their later use in struggles against war, fascism, patriarchy, corruption, state violence, colonialism, and surveillance, this book traces how adhesive slips of paper have exerted political force far beyond their size. Often produced in moments of crisis or urgency, stickers function as "silent agitators," portable calls to action designed to circulate ideas and demands when speech is dangerous, assemblies are banned, or institutions fail.

Through more than twenty essays by activists, artists, and scholars, readers encounter sticker campaigns born in union halls, feminist collectives, queer and AIDS-era direct action groups, revolutionary uprisings, fan cultures, and grassroots campaigns in the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. Whether denouncing corrupt presidents, confronting gender violence, calling for racial justice, or building solidarity across borders, these essays show how stickers have animated history and made politics visible in everyday life. These stickers trace generations of dissent, invention, and collective imagination but also hold current relevance as street-level interventions and testimony-proof for future generations that someone, somewhere, cared enough to print stickers and believed that even the smallest act could help change the world. Ordinary people, armed with ink, glue, and conviction, have always found ways to speak truth to power.

Contributors include Paul Buhle, Penelope Rosemont, CrimethInc. Ex-Worker's Collective, Lincoln Cushing, Guerrilla Girls, Josh MacPhee, Ganzeer, Todd Lawrence and Heather Shirey, Kevin Howley, Jen Hoyer, Nazar Kozak, Irina Bukharin, Eric Corriel, John Collins, Marina Llorente, and Kiara Welsch.