By Andreas PetrossiantsIn June 2020, hundreds of thousands of individuals internationally 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 rise up in Minneapolis after police murdered George Floyd. This rebellion introduced the phrase “abolition” into mainstream discourse, and made it attainable for extra folks to contemplate a world with out police, prisons and state violence. There was a palpable sense that folks had been questioning what abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the “manufacturing and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to untimely demise” – in different phrases, racism.For over three many years, Gilmore’s work has been essential to the research 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 the direction of Liberation, contains Gilmore’s essays on policing, capitalism and organizing and are extra crucial than ever two years after the biggest road 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 seems 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 speak the speak, however to take motion. Within the following part, “Race and Globalization,” she explores how “by jail growth and jail export, each U.S. and non-U.S. racist practices can develop into figuring out forces in locations nominally ‘free’ of white supremacy.” To do that, she seems at how the appearance of NGOs and worldwide treaties that unfold U.S.-style policing and prisons has buttressed the growth 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 capabilities, like well being care and housing, to non-public pursuits. Promoted by leaders like Reagan and Thatcher, and each liberals and conservatives since, the aim 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 residence. 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. their organizing, she concludes that activists should broaden their considering, and “transfer past place-based identities towards identification throughout area, 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 aim is to alter how we work together with one another and the planet by placing folks earlier than income, welfare earlier than warfare, and life over demise.”As politicians use summer season 2020 to bolster a law-and-order agenda, as activist teams in Atlanta combat 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 alter is particularly essential. The one strategy to escape the cycles of police violence, protest and retrenchment will probably be to collectively construct widespread, abolitionist frameworks for relating to one another. Gilmore’s work helps us transfer towards that aim.