Abolition and Decolonial Peace: Undoing the World as We Know It

This talk explores abolition as a necessary framework for reimagining peace beyond war, borders, and state-sanctioned violence. The first part critiques traditional approaches to peace, exposing their colonial foundations and entanglement with racial capitalism, which render peace inseparable from state security and militarized control. I take migrant solidarity movements and resistance to policing and militarism as a lens to reframe border abolition and migrant resistance as forms of peace work—ones that do not seek to stabilize the state but instead confront what Nelson Maldonado-Torres calls the ‘endless war of coloniality.’ Abolition, I argue, requires dismantling the racialized infrastructures of security, labour exploitation, and global capitalism that sustain militarized borders and carceral logics. In dialogue with decolonial thought, this talk asks how abolition can open space for a different vision of peace—one rooted in freedom of movement, collective care, and the refusal of racialized violence.