Borders must be abolished. Borders produce and are produced by carceral, racist, classist, sexist, and xenophobic regimes. Border Abolition Now offers a vision of transformative politics that seeks to dismantle these intersecting systems of oppression. The contributors argue that what the abolitionist tradition brings to border studies is a way to contextualize the spread of carceral and policing apparatuses across a long historical arc, an understanding that undoing police and carceral regimes requires the fundamental transformation of all existing social institutions, and a political commitment to building new worlds beyond police, prisons, and the border regime. The contributors draw from different locations, disciplines, and struggles, bringing a much-needed bottom-up and global perspective to border abolitionist praxis. Across three sections, the chapters address key issues, such as how abolition theory is being envisioned through feminist decolonial and anticolonial praxis, as well as how lived experiences of borders and organizing against them inform abolition. The volume also examines the connections between carceral border regimes and other institutions of governance (asylum, reception, camps); how the political theory of abolition is being advanced and challenged by theoretical concerns emerging from border contexts (mobility); and specific conditions of border organizing (detention, climate change).
