Description
Recent critical scholarship on counterterrorism have critiqued the logics of counterterrorism, outlining its racist and colonial genealogies. This paper builds upon such scholarship and engages with critical abolitionist theories to theorise/speculate about the meanings of abolition in relation to counterterrorism. Drawing upon recent scholarship on abolition such as Day and McBean’s Abolition Revolution, Davis, et al’s Abolition. Feminism. Now, Gilmore’s Abolition Geography, and Richie’s Practicing New Worlds, this paper considers the meanings of the state, violence, and future(s) through the lens of abolition. After providing an outline of abolition as related to counterterrorism, the paper argues abolitionist theories offer opportunities to think about and act on to dismantle systems that uphold and perpetuate militarized counterterrorism regimes. By theorizing action beyond and without the state, abolitionists engage in critique and dismantling, but also worldbuilding. This paper focuses upon this worldbuilding and on abolitionist theories and practices for dealing with violence and making alternative futures. As such, it is a manifesto in the sense of a call to action, in line with abolitionist thinking and practice.
