[“In this society, safety and security will not be premised on
violence or the threat of violence; it will be based on a collective
commitment to guaranteeing the survival and care of all peoples.” ]
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TO ABOLISH PRISONS AND MILITARISM, WE NEED ANTI-IMPERIALIST ABOLITION
FEMINISM  
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Nadine Naber and Clarissa Rojas
July 16, 2021
Truthout
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_ “In this society, safety and security will not be premised on
violence or the threat of violence; it will be based on a collective
commitment to guaranteeing the survival and care of all peoples.” _

Abolition begins with dismantling the heterosexist, racial and
imperial framework of the military and prison industries., INCITE!
Community News via Facebook

 

“In this society, safety and security will not be premised on
violence or the threat of violence; it will be based on a collective
commitment to guaranteeing the survival and care of all peoples.”
— _Critical Resistance/INCITE! Statement on Gender Violence and the
Prison Industrial Complex_
[[link removed]]

Since the turn of the 21st century, the prison- and
military-industrial complexes have not only expanded, but they are
revealing now more than ever how deeply intertwined
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they are. At this moment of multiple global crises and the spirit of
prison abolition in the air, we must seek paths toward confronting
militarism, imperialism and the prison-industrial complex at once.

We write as former co-organizers of the feminist antiwar and
anti-militarism task forces within the INCITE!
[[link removed]] movement of radical feminists of color
organizing to end the interconnected realities of state violence and
violence within our communities. Since its inception in 2000, INCITE!
recognized that it is impossible to seriously address sexual/domestic
violence within communities of color without addressing these larger
structures of violence, such as militarism, prisons, attacks on
immigrants’ rights and Indian treaty rights, economic
neocolonialism, and the medical industry. INCITE! organizers
understood the entrenched relationship between the military-industrial
complex and the prison-industrial complex. Our organizing against
U.S.-led militarism and war
[[link removed]]during the decade
following the attacks of September 11, 2001, emerged in tandem with
INCITE!’s work toward abolishing prisons: a political vision
insisting that
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prisons and policing do not keep people safe and that to build safe
and healthy communities we must move away from relying on carceral
strategies like punishment, containment and prisons.

The INCITE! movement offered up what we call anti-imperialist
abolitionist feminism: a vision insisting that in order to abolish the
prison-industrial complex we are going to need to dismantle the
colonial heterosexist, racial and imperial underpinnings of
carcerality. We believe that this approach can expand anti-militarist
and abolitionist struggles through a politics of joint struggle or
coalition. As we reflect on this movement, we are reminded of the
urgent need to continue to grow coalitional anti-militarist
abolitionist movement approaches today.

In order to move toward an anti-imperialist abolition feminist future,
we must start by bearing witness to some of the many ways the prison-
and military-industrial complexes are bound together. Here are just a
few recent instances that make this connection plain:

* In Oakland, California, in January 2020, the Alameda County
Sheriff’s department engaged in an act of war
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and reproductive violence when it used military-grade tanks and
weapons to raid and evict Black mothers and babies from the home where
they were staying.
* Local, state and federal governments have intensified the
militarized criminalization of resistance, as evidenced by the
trumped-up charges, protracted legal battles and the conflation of
resistance to state violence with “terrorism.”
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We saw this in Ferguson, at Standing Rock, and throughout the
abolitionist uprisings that emerged across the U.S. over the past
year.
* The case of Palestinian American Rasmea Odeh exemplifies the
collaboration between immigration control, U.S. prisons and the war
_of _ Incarcerated by the Israeli state in 1967 based on a confession
achieved through sexualized torture, Odeh
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displaced from her land to the U.S. In 2017, the U.S. targeted Odeh
for deportation. Arrested for “immigration fraud” vis-à-vis a
U.S. prosecutor who portrayed her as a “terrorist” to the jury
using Israeli-produced and fabricated documents, Odeh was incarcerated
in a U.S. women’s prison in Detroit before her deportation to
Jordan. She continues to be denied access to her homeland, Palestine.
* The expansion of militarized immigration control steered by the
Department of Homeland Security has escalated the killing, deportation
and incarceration of migrants. Meanwhile, U.S. policy in the Americas
is furthering these root causes of migration/displacement
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the historic and ongoing imperialist invasion and interventions to
privatize and militarize México, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador,
and elsewhere.

In order to abolish the prison-industrial complex we are going to need
to dismantle the colonial heterosexist, racial and imperial
underpinnings of carcerality.

Like generations before us, we are facing the ongoing life of
colonialism. The U.S. was founded on and grows its power through the
tactic of genocide, including the colonization of Indigenous peoples
and lands, slavery, exploitation of migrants, mass incarceration,
increasing police violence and economic warfare, all of which rely
upon sexualized violence, as INCITE!’s 2001 antiwar packet notes.
This analysis views U.S. militarism and the prison-industrial complex
as simultaneously essential to sustaining the power of the U.S. as an
empire today. With a determined commitment to eschew its derivatives
and mobilize the end of U.S. domination, INCITE!’s antiwar posters
testified, “Genocide
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[[link removed]] Justice: Only
We Can Liberate Ourselves.”
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How might a coalitional anti-imperialist abolitionist feminism
approach some of the most urgent issues today? A coalitional approach
to abolition commits us to take up the struggles to decolonize and to
dismantle racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, militarism, war and
border control. These examples of how coalitional approaches are
addressing these struggles emanate from the collective theories and
practices of coalitional feminist-of-color insurgencies, including
INCITE! We can witness this approach today in political formations
mobilizing at the coalitional nexus of many movements.
[[link removed]] As we
strive to guarantee the present and future survival
[[link removed]]and care of all
[[link removed]]peoples
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grow coalitional and joint struggle strategies like anti-imperialist
abolition feminism.

ABOLISHING PRISONS, DETENTION AND POLICING REQUIRES DECOLONIZATION

Foregrounding a critique of the U.S. nation-state reveals that the
ongoing life of U.S. empire depends on the colonial strategy to
capture and confine both lands and peoples, in part to extract their
gifts. The prison-industrial complex combined with the U.S.-México
border and war are functions of this colonial strategy.

The potential for those same social conditions and practices that make
prisons unfathomable also make war, empire and colonial occupation no
longer relevant.

Therefore, abolition requires decolonization and an end to
imperialism. What do abolition, decolonization and an end to
imperialism truly require?

* A RETURN TO INDIGENOUS STEWARDSHIP OF THE LAND. Movements like
#LandBack [[link removed]]call for the return of lands to
decolonizing Indigenous stewardship. The violence of prisons,
detention, policing and the environmentally catastrophic development
of border walls all take place on unceded lands and waterways.
* ABOLISHING RACIAL CAPITALISM. Capitalist social organization
requires the hierarchical ordering of life. It utilizes racial
ideologies and violence to structure and legitimize settler-colonial
claims of ownership and the accumulation of land and labor. Prisons,
policing, war and borders produce and depend on the capitalist
technologies of racism and white supremacy.
* ABOLISHING HETEROPATRIARCHY. Heteropatriarchy is a colonial racial
strategy that produces gender and sexual binary hierarchies through
violence. Policing, detention, prisons and war produce and depend on
heteropatriarchal racial-sexual violence. Methods of sexualized
torture and degradation are shared between prisons, the military,
police and immigration control, reinforcing the heteropatriarchal
“war culture” that permeates U.S. schools, hospitals and civil
society.
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* ABOLISHING THE MILITARY. Militarism and policing
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inseparable material forces enacting the colonial strategy to
confiscate land and life. They produce genocide. They populate
concentration camps like prisons and detention centers. They are the
force behind the colonial and racial capitalist idea of land and
people as property. As scholar-activist Sangeetha Ravichandran
explained to us, “The U.S. empire’s surveillance, counterterrorism
and counterinsurgency have been imported from the global war into
policing practices domestically and have always had an import/export
approach to their carceral strategies.”
* AN END TO IMPERIALIST WAR. As INCITE! organizer and abolitionist
Andrea Richie [[link removed]] contends: through
imperialist wars, the U.S. operates as the global police. Consider,
for example, how U.S.-led global policing has transferred
[[link removed]]the
incarceration of prisoners to secret prisons (for instance, in
Guantánamo, Somalia and Egypt), funded authoritarian regimes from the
Philippines to Egypt and far beyond, which incarcerate activists
resisting U.S.-led wars, and then remade secret prisons in the U.S. in
places like Homan Square
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Chicago. We believe that imperialist wars also strengthen the power of
the U.S. domestically and globally, while expanding its
settler-colonial project and exporting its practices of enslavement
and elimination. U.S. imperial wars target countries directly (through
bombing and invasion) or indirectly (through support of dictators,
supplying military infrastructure, or economic warfare like sanctions
and neoliberal restructuring). In Israel,
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U.S supports settler colonialism to expand U.S. empire and Israeli
soldiers train U.S. law enforcement
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how to combat
[[link removed]]activists
with military force, reinforcing
[[link removed].] racial and
heteropatriarchal U.S. systems of policing and prisons.
* ABOLISHING ICE, THE BORDER PATROL AND COLONIAL BORDERS, INCLUDING
BORDER WALLS, VIRTUALLY SURVEILLED BORDERS, AND RACIAL/SEXUAL/NATIONAL
CITIZENSHIP HIERARCHIES. Colonial borders and border wars and walls
are sustained through sexual violence such as the rape and forced
hysterectomies of detained migrants. Colonial borders and border wars
and walls divide Indigenous lands and peoples. Returning the land to
Indigenous stewardship requires bringing down colonial border walls.
Demands for an end to colonial borders must be accountable to the
Indigenous peoples living on those lands. Policing and militarism
depend on the racial, sexual and nation-based colonial strategy of
citizenship hierarchies. Citizenship hierarchies populate prisons and
detention centers
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they lead to the separation of children from caretakers, constitute
fragmented kin structures and turn survivors of U.S. military
invasions into unfree labor.
* ABOLISHING THE VERY IDEAS OF A CRIME AND A CRIMINAL.
Decolonization and the abolition of prisons, policing and detention
requires abolishing the very ideas of a crime and a criminal.
Criminalization is the racial and heteropatriarchal process whereby
peoples’ ways of being in the world (including cultural practices
and survival tactics) come to be seen as criminal. Definitions of
crime and the bodies that come to be framed as criminal are functions
of colonial racial and heteropatriarchal logics.
* EMBRACING, DEFENDING, GROWING AND UPLIFTING RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS.
The U.S. state has a long history of repressing resistance through
racial and sexual militarized policing, detention, the incarceration
of political prisoners, and the conflation of activists with war
criminals, terrorists or enemies of the nation. U.S.-backed global
policing — as we saw when the U.S.-backed authoritarian regime in
Egypt used “virginity testing”
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denuding of women protesters in an attempt to shame women of the Arab
Spring revolutions into silence — relies on sexualized violence to
contain activists, journalists, lawyers, human rights advocates, and
anyone challenging U.S. empire.
* BUILDING COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION,
NURTURING THE CAPACITY FOR EMPATHY, CARE AND INTIMACY. Colonialism,
racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy rely on systems of policing,
prisons and detention to debilitate and incapacitate the masses by
separating and individualizing. They disrupt kin relations, collective
social organization and intimacies.

Our hope is that calls to end prisons and policing recognize that the
entire scope of violence must be faced if we are to survive.

Today, we can find these discussions in the praxis of building
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feminist abolitionist futures through transformative justice
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accountability [[link removed]]
practices [[link removed]],
harm reduction
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mutual
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aid [[link removed]]. In an
effort to further the integration of anti-imperialism and prison
abolition, we are reminded of the urgent Black feminist abolitionist
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that potentiates a set of social conditions where prisons are
unfathomable. And we posit that the potential for those same social
conditions and practices that make prisons unfathomable also make war,
empire and colonial occupation no longer relevant, or even imaginable.

How do we do the work of undoing carcerality in the broadest sense?
How do we undo the work that carcerality does to stitch together a
social landscape productive of strengthening the U.S. nation-state and
its global racist, capitalist, heteropatriarchal expansion,
imaginaries and structures? How can movements advance abolition while
mobilizing in ways that undo the colonial-imperial underpinnings of
carcerality? How do we counter militaristic practice through our daily
life, socialities and intimacies in ways that undo the inner workings
of empire with its attendant divisions, extractivist accumulation,
violence and torture? What socialities, relationalities and intimacies
get animated at the convergence of the decolonial, counter-carceral
_and_ anti-imperialist ways of being in the world? What do the
decolonial, anti-militarist and abolitionist commitments and
sensibilities foster in our relations with each other, with the land,
with ourselves? What other colonial institutions and techniques of
violence grow in irrelevance as we invoke the decolonial and
abolitionist imagination and corresponding practices?

One of the most salient lessons in our years organizing with INCITE!
was that fostering alternatives emerge in practice, working
collectively and in coalitions. Against the capitalist approach that
urges us to produce — _Presto! you made an abolitionist society!_
— INCITE! taught us that movement work is constantly becoming, that
we build on legacies and lessons learned through practice. The goal
then, of a decolonial abolitionist feminism is not a liberated utopian
world without police, prisons or war, but rather a process where over
time we learn and remember the skills for living better, in better
relation with one another and all life, on the path to ending
violence.

So, what can we do to build a world without policing or militarism? In
addition to asserting that the police and prisons do not keep us safe
or protect us, indeed the same can be said about the U.S. nation-state
and its imperialist wars and policing of its borders. Perhaps we
don’t need them anymore. When we defund the military, ICE and the
police, we must also defund U.S. support for authoritarian dictators,
puppet regimes and Israeli settler-colonialism, which sustain the
global economic networks of U.S.-backed prisons, torture of activists,
policing, border walls and control, and secret prisons/black sites.
Our hope is that calls to end prisons and policing recognize that the
entire scope of violence must be faced if we are to survive.

And if we were to abolish courts and prisons and cops, border patrol
and ICE and U.S.-led empire, with what would we be left? Everything.

By affirming an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist feminist abolition,
we are also affirming the core belief that if we want to abolish
prisons, we are going to have to dismantle systems that cage and
punish while also dismantling the structure of the U.S. nation-state
and its local and global extractivist and expansionist systems of
genocide and war, ethnic cleansing, displacement and dispossession.

Coalitional feminist of color movements, as we witnessed with
INCITE!’s organizing at the turn of the 21st century, coalesce the
visionary impulses of generations of struggles against slavery,
displacement, genocide, feminicide and military invasions which are
produced by the conditions of colonial heteropatriarchy and racial
capitalism. The convergence of shared struggles for liberation today
can enliven the potentiating ancestor-inspired dreams and practices of
nurturing feminist of color socialities of care and nurturing
relations with the land and each other through the wielding of
cultural wisdom practices and a commitment to practices of just and
accountable self-determination. And if we were to abolish courts and
prisons and cops, border patrol and ICE and U.S.-led empire, with what
would we be left? Everything.

_Truthout‘s journalism has survived on $10 and $20 donations for two
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Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission. 
Reprinted with permission.

 

_Nadine Naber [[link removed]] is professor of gender and
women’s studies and global Asian studies, and interim director of
the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University
of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author and/or co-editor of five
books [[link removed]], including Arab America:
Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism (NYU Press, 2012) and Color of
Violence (Duke University Press, 2016). She is a TEDx speaker
[[link removed]],
board member of the Arab American Action Network [[link removed]],
co-founder of Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity
[[link removed]], founder of Liberate Your
Research [[link removed]], founder of
the Arab American Cultural Center, and co-founder of the Arab and
Muslim American Studies Program
[[link removed].]
(University of Michigan). Nadine is a Public Voices
[[link removed]] fellow and
columnist for the Chicago Reporter
[[link removed]]._

_Clarissa Rojas Durazo grew up in the border cities Mexicali, Baja
California and Calexico, California. She teaches Chicanx Studies and
is affiliated with Cultural Studies and Gender Studies at the
University of California, Davis. Rojas Durazo is co-editor of Color of
Violence: the INCITE! Anthology
[[link removed]] and Community
Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence
[[link removed]].
She is an internationally published poet whose writing appears most
recently in Sinister Wisdom Journal
[[link removed]]._

 

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