Description
Recent critical scholarship on terrorism has centred matters of race, class, and gender regarding how counterterrorism policies are connected to multiple systems of hierarchical power relations. This paper builds upon this scholarship and looks towards the future. It utilizes the practices of prefigurative politics and mutual aid drawn from abolitionist and anarchist political thought and connects these to contemporary examples drawn from fieldwork experiences in Appalachia (United States) and Kathmandu (Nepal). In doing so, this paper theorizes and imagines futures for ‘countering terrorism’ that are connected to anarchist and abolitionist theories of the state, violence, and the role of the individual. Overall, an anarchist abolitionist approach calls for anti- statist, mutual-aid based practices to prevent and counter harm to communities. In contrast to ‘power politics’ which centres the state, an anarchist abolitionist approach asks how safety and security can be reimagined and re-made in the absence of a state.
