Introduction: On Abolition, State Capture and Atrophy

Summary

Between 2010 and 2011, public squares from Morocco to Bahrain witnessed millions of people huddled together chanting in unison: ‘The people. Want. To topple the system’ [Al-sha’b. yourid. Isqat al-nizam]. Despite the specificities of each country that witnessed protest movements during the Arab Spring, the famous slogan came to be the sonar symbol of the historic protests across the MENA region. By proclaiming the nizam (system or regime) as public enemy, the masses of the Arab Spring expressed their perceived, felt and experienced challenge of maintaining a functional distinction between government policy and state institutions, or state officials and state institutions. The term ‘regime’, as the go-to word choice as translation for nizam, garnered popularity and common usage in literature and public vernacular to denote both government and state precisely for expressing the difficulty of contesting governments without having to challenge the state, or contesting public officials without having to challenge the public institutions they occupy. For protestors, meaningful political change seemed to require more than a mere change of government personnel.

More recently in the United States and in response to the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and a long line of innocent African-American individuals murdered at the hands of law enforcement officers, the Black Lives Matter protests similarly expressed that meaningful change requires more than mere change of law enforcement officers. Demands such as ‘defund the police’ redefined social justice in the United States in abolitionist terms to address systemic flaws rather than merely demand holding specific law enforcement officers guilty of police brutality accountable for abuse of power. Protestors across the Middle East, North Africa and North America over the past decade voiced that so long as oppression is systemic, change in personnel will not yield a meaningful outcome. It is in this context that abolitionist platforms received a growing public appeal and rallying capacity internationally.

The idea of abolition, within its nineteenth-century classical as well as derivate contemporary repertoires of abolitionist slogans voiced over the past fifteen years, fundamentally rejects the notion of the state as an unquestioned field of power to be taken as a given. From an abolitionist perspective, the modern state is the product of hierarchical and unavoidably oppressive relations of power, and not the end point of human collective progress or the product of an evolutionary political process.