Abolition Geography Quotes

“Where life is precious, life is precious.”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation

“It is plausible to argue that these three points have sedimented weight, not as remnant ideology, but rather as ballast for common-sense notions of everyday dangers and alternatives to them. In particular, I believe they help to explain the promotion and acceptance of expanded punishment and the attendant apparatuses of criminal justice in the contemporary period, according to the following scheme. First, the legitimate domestic US state is the national security, or defense, or warfare state. Second, the local world is, and has always been, a very dangerous place: indeed, at the very moment when the nation is basking in foreign victory, the domestic turns hostile. Finally, the key to safety is aggression.”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation

“In other words, one need not be a nationalist, nor imagine self-determination to be fixed in modern definitions of states and sovereignty, to conclude that, at the end of the day, freedom is a place.
How do we find the place of freedom? More precisely, how do we make such a place over and over again?”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation