Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores everyday abolition in Kenya and South Africa. We argue that everyday abolition is more than just police resistance. It refers to messy, productive practices of dispute resolution and justice, which seek to build new futures in the midst of contemporary injustice.

Paper long abstract:

Police abolition is a dual project: On the one hand, abolitionists argue that the police as an institution cannot be rescued through reform because it is inherently flawed. On the other hand, they believe that another, better world is possible: a world that can be incrementally built as the injustices of the current world are dismantled.

In our paper, we seek to contextualise the idea of police abolition in Africa, focusing on Kenya and South Africa. Our primary interest is not in exploring how the term ‘police abolition’ has travelled across the globe from US activist-academics. Instead, we are interested in the work of ‘everyday abolition’ (Lamble 2021). What might this look like on the ground?

Drawing on examples from Kenya and South Africa, we make three key propositions. First, that ‘everyday abolition’ is a project of positive action. As such, it means more than just police resistance: participants must be seeking to build new alternatives. Second, ‘everyday abolition’ is a messy project because it seeks to create new realities from within the world as it stands. Therefore, participants in everyday abolition may not act in ways that are completely disengaged from the criminal justice system. Practices and projects of everyday abolition may include sporadic recourse to policing services or the strategic repurposing of policing resources. Finally, the futures that are sought by everyday abolitionists must follow a distinct logics from state policing - they cannot simply be projects of mimicry. That said, the futures that are pursued through everyday abolition may be piecemeal, sedimentary, contradictory, and flawed.