By Andreas PetrossiantsIn June 2020, hundreds of thousands of individuals the world over took to the streets to protest the continuing homicide of individuals of colour by the hands of police.The motion, led by Black youth and supported by a variety of demonstrators, emanated from a insurrection in Minneapolis after police murdered George Floyd. This rebellion introduced the phrase “abolition” into mainstream discourse, and made it doable for extra folks to think about a world with out police, prisons and state violence. There was a palpable sense that individuals had been questioning what abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the “manufacturing and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to untimely dying” – in different phrases, racism.For over three many years, Gilmore’s work has been essential to the examine of policing and jail abolition; her basic work, Golden Gulag, charts how the variety of folks imprisoned within the U.S. elevated by greater than 450% between 1980 and 2007. Her latest anthology, Abolition Geography: Essays In direction of Liberation, consists of Gilmore’s essays on policing, capitalism and organizing and are extra crucial than ever two years after the biggest avenue mobilization in many years. Expertly assembled by students Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano, the anthology reproduces Gilmore’s essays chronologically from 1991 to 2018.Within the first part, Gilmore appears to be like at how intellectuals and students relate to abolitionist actions, revisiting Audre Lorde’s well-known query: If “the grasp’s instruments won’t ever dismantle the grasp’s home,” then who will? In her reply, she pushes teachers and different information staff to not solely discuss the discuss, however to take motion. Within the following part, “Race and Globalization,” she explores how “by means of jail enlargement and jail export, each U.S. and non-U.S. racist practices can turn into figuring out forces in locations nominally ‘free’ of white supremacy.” To do that, she appears to be like at how the arrival of NGOs and worldwide treaties that unfold U.S.-style policing and prisons has buttressed the enlargement of mass incarceration. Gilmore then addresses the racialized state in addition to the “anti-state state,” a time period that describes the outsourcing of conventional state features, like well being care and housing, to non-public pursuits. Promoted by leaders like Reagan and Thatcher, and each liberals and conservatives since, the objective of the “anti-state state” is to feign “small authorities” whereas really beefing up the capability to hold out violence, from wars overseas to incarceration at dwelling. Right here, Gilmore maps the terrain of prisons and jails and charts how racism, colonialism and neoliberal capitalism have conspired to place hundreds of thousands of individuals behind bars, whether or not for personal revenue, racialized capitalist self-discipline, or as a “jail repair” for land or labor issues.Lastly, she underlines the work of abolitionists and anti-carceral organizations like Moms Reclaiming Our Youngsters, which since 1992 has supported folks of colour arrested on false or exaggerated fees. Taking a look at their organizing, she concludes that activists should broaden their considering, and “transfer past place-based identities towards identification throughout house, from not-in-my-backyard to not-in-anyone’s-backyard.” If “abolition is a motion to finish systemic violence, together with the interpersonal vulnerabilities and displacements that maintain the system going,” Gilmore writes, then “the objective is to vary how we work together with one another and the planet by placing folks earlier than income, welfare earlier than warfare, and life over dying.”As politicians use summer time 2020 to strengthen a law-and-order agenda, as activist teams in Atlanta battle the development of a 300-acre police coaching facility, and as President Biden argues, once more, that police reform requires giving departments much more federal funding, Gilmore’s name to vary is particularly essential. The one option to escape the cycles of police violence, protest and retrenchment can be to collectively construct standard, abolitionist frameworks for relating to one another. Gilmore’s work helps us transfer towards that objective.