By Bernard E. Harcourt The rich conversation at Abolition Democracy 12/13 underscores the often-implicit or unspoken distinction, in debates over borders, between jurisdictional boundaries for purposes of democratic self-governance and territorial borders for purposes of migration. The difference between boundaries… Continue Reading
By Seyla Benhabib* I. If the COVID-19 pandemic has made anything clear it is the absurdity of our faith in closing borders which many citizens and residents all over the world clamored for as a measure against an invisible virus, while… Continue Reading
By Paulina Ochoa Espejo Should we abolish borders? Today every country’s borders are unjust, cruel, and rotten. This is true even of open, cooperative borders, like those inside Schengen Europe. They too are unjust, in that their relative openness depends… Continue Reading
By Bernard E. Harcourt Border control regimes—like the beams that crumble when you try to drive a screw into them—are rotten and cannot be fixed, but they stand because of all the institutional and economic structures around them act like… Continue Reading
By Bernard E. Harcourt “The responsibility is entirely yours. You must make your efforts to uproot caste, if not in my way, then in your way.” — R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936)[1] We arrive at the final session of… Continue Reading
By Bernard E. Harcourt “The Red Deal continues this call for divestment from fossil fuel industries, but we go one step further. We draw from Black abolitionist traditions to call for divestment away from the caging, criminalizing, and harming of… Continue Reading
By Bernard E. Harcourt We were “state children,” court wards; [the judge] had the full say-so over us. A white man in charge of a black man’s children! Nothing but legal, modern slavery—however kindly intentioned. — Malcolm X, The Autobiography… Continue Reading
By Phillip Wayne Tomlin [Editor’s note: Phillip Wayne Tomlin is currently incarcerated at the Limestone Correctional Facility in Harvest, Alabama. Mr. Tomlin spent 27 years on Alabama’s death row. Since then, he is serving a sentence of life imprisonment without… Continue Reading
By Bernard E. Harcourt The horror. Unimaginable. Intolerable. It is not just the scale of the inhumanity. Thirteen executions. Thirteen executions in less than six months. No, we had already become numb to the inevitability of the next execution… It… Continue Reading
By Martin Saar In my presentation, I will develop four points—four perspectives on how to read these rather diverse texts by Friedrich Pollock, Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor W. Adorno, in order to shed some light on the question… Continue Reading