Abolishing State Violence: A World Beyond Bombs, Borders, and Cages

by Ray Acheson

Abolishing State Violence provides brilliant and accessible insights and analysis about some of the key structures of violence in our world today, as well as the ongoing activism for their abolition.

The chapters of this book connect various movements for social justice, providing ideas for how activists can support and build on each other's analysis and strategy. It shows that there are many, mutually supportive, abolition movements, each enhanced by a shared understanding of the relationships among various structures of violence and a shared framework for challenging them on the basis of their roots in patriarchy, racism, militarism, settler colonialism, and capitalism.

The book argues that abolition is transformative. It is about defunding, demilitarizing, disbanding, and divesting from current structures of violence, but also about imagining new ways to organize and care for each other and our planet, and about building new systems and cultures to sustain ourselves in a more equitable, free, and peaceful way. It shows that change is possible.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Social Justice

300 pages, Paperback

Published July 26, 2022

Reviews

[Baron Turner · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like this is a book I will return to a lot in order to guide my work. It's definitely a heavy book, and while it doesn't give a lot of tips on specific actions people can take to address the problems introduced in this book, it does give a good introduction to the problems that it covers. Anything it attempts to introduce, it does so well.

[carson lott · Rating 2 out of 5]

An embarrassingly bad polemic/wannabe woke bible that is too poorly argued to have much value. Great ideas, very bad execution.