We are excited to announce the publication of the second issue of our journal, published by Common Notions. Available for order here.

MAKING ABOLITIONIST WORLDS: PROPOSALS FOR A WORLD ON FIRE 

edited by the Abolition Collective

What does an abolitionist world look like? Insights from today’s international abolitionist movement reveal a world to win.

Making Abolitionist Worlds gathers key insights and interventions from today’s international abolitionist movement to pose the question: what does an abolitionist world look like? The Abolition Collective investigates the core challenges to social justice and the liberatory potential of social movements today from a range of personal, political, and analytical points of view, underscoring the urgency of an abolitionist politics that places prisons at the center of its critique and actions.

In addition to centering and amplifying the continual struggles of incarcerated people who are actively working to transform prisons from the inside, Making Abolitionist Worlds animates the idea of abolitionist democracy and demands a radical re-imagining of the meaning and practice of democracy. Abolition Collective brings us to an Israeli prison for a Palestinian feminist reflection on incarceration within settler colonialism; to protest movements in Hong Kong and elsewhere, who use “abolition democracy” to advocate for the abolition of the police; to the growing culture in the United States of “aggrieved whiteness,” which trucks in fear, anger, victimhood, and a need for vengeance to maintain white supremacy; to the punitive landscapes that extend from the incarceration of political prisoners to the mass deportations and detentions along the U.S. southern border.

Making Abolitionist Worlds shows us that the paths forged today for a world in formation are rooted in antiracism, decolonization, anticapitalism, abolitionist feminism, and queer liberation.

Click here to get the Abolitionist Collective Bundle and save $12 (FUCK12)

ADVANCE PRAISE

“This brilliant and absorbing collection of rigorous research articles, thoughtful political interventions, and innovative artworks is immensely important to the work of committed scholars, activists and organizers. There is much that teaches, fortifies, motivates and mobilizes here.”

—Laleh Khalili, author of Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula and Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies

“Making Abolitionist Worlds is an urgent reminder that theorizing and practicing abolition must take place across prison walls and the boundaries imposed by the colonial state, heteropatriarchy, settler colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism. Finally, here is a journal providing a platform capacious enough to embrace the insurgent knowledge of activists, the analytical rigor of scholars, and the visionary power of artists.”

 —Jackie Wang, author of Carceral Capitalism

“As the world we know is shattering more rapidly than we might have ever imagined, comes Making Abolitionist Worlds, an urgent call to build the new. These pieces movingly remind us that liberation will not transpire solely through opposition; it demands radical inquiry, imagination, creation. This collection brilliantly illustrates a core truth: we don’t need ‘alternatives to incarceration,’ we need a wildly recreated society in which incarceration is unthinkable. Making Abolitionist Words will nourish and fuel struggles for transformation.”

—Maya Schenwar, author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better and coauthor with Victoria Law of Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms

“Making Abolitionist Worlds is a rich and compelling mixed-genre collection of radical perspectives that makes an urgent contribution to abolitionist world-making. Inspiring and incisive, these political interventions advance collective and transformative revolutionary praxis—what we need, now more than ever. On fire, indeed!”

 —J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, author of Hawaiian Blood and Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty and editor of Speaking of Indigenous Politics

Order at Common Notions website here!