Shared Horizons
The Politics and Poetics of Transnational Abolition
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Shared Horizons: The Politics and Poetics of Transnational Abolition is a living archive and digital platform where abolitionist collectives, groups, and organisations can present their work, share their visions, and further connect beyond borders.
In this current conjuncture of racialised and gendered capitalism, carceral punishment, policing, war, and bordering are some of the most flagrant technologies used to keep marginalised working class and working poor communities under control. State violence and organised abandonment go hand in hand in the management and production of mass death of especially migrant and migratised, racialised, queer, trans and disabled peoples. Ongoing liberation struggles are unfolding on a global scale towards the horizon of abolition. This is not only understood as the dismantling of specific institutions like police, prisons or borders, but centrally as an internationalist anti-fascist and anti-colonial struggle against racial capitalism and its methods in order to manifest living alternatives.
These calls and more have been taken up across various genealogies and traditions, shared and transformed beyond a singular geospecific context, in translingual, transnational, and transhistorical ways. Questions and possibilities for abolition outside of the United States and Canada—including Indigenous and sovereign territories on lands forcibly occupied by those settler nation-states—have many different valences that are often not attended to in mainstream considerations of these demands and interrelated narratives of shared struggle. Despite this, abolitionist poetics and practices continue to unfold as a necessarily transnational project.
Shared Horizons is a platform developed as a contribution to the ongoing transnational orientation that groundsin our abolitionist poetics and politics through attention to language, meaningful/sustained connection building, struggles on the ground, digital and material cultures, and radical aesthetic traditions. It is a living and multi-translated digital archive dedicated to collectives and social movements that engage in and learn from abolitionist practices and poetics on an international scale. This platform encourages movements and collectives to connect further in their building and therefore contributes to the transnational dimension of abolition.It also encourages individuals who yearn for these visions to get informed and get involved by giving a material sense of the work that has been done for those who wish to actively engage in the composition of this shared horizon.
This collaborative project is organised and initiated by Vanessa Eileen Thompson and SA Smythe based on their respective research and decades of political organising. Together, they anchor this archival project in black, queer, trans, internationalist, and feminist genealogies to articulate transdisciplinary methods towards abolitionist and anticolonial horizons.
In this current conjuncture of racialised and gendered capitalism, carceral punishment, policing, war, and bordering are some of the most flagrant technologies used to keep marginalised working class and working poor communities under control. State violence and organised abandonment go hand in hand in the management and production of mass death of especially migrant and migratised, racialised, queer, trans and disabled peoples. Ongoing liberation struggles are unfolding on a global scale towards the horizon of abolition. This is not only understood as the dismantling of specific institutions like police, prisons or borders, but centrally as an internationalist anti-fascist and anti-colonial struggle against racial capitalism and its methods in order to manifest living alternatives.
These calls and more have been taken up across various genealogies and traditions, shared and transformed beyond a singular geospecific context, in translingual, transnational, and transhistorical ways. Questions and possibilities for abolition outside of the United States and Canada—including Indigenous and sovereign territories on lands forcibly occupied by those settler nation-states—have many different valences that are often not attended to in mainstream considerations of these demands and interrelated narratives of shared struggle. Despite this, abolitionist poetics and practices continue to unfold as a necessarily transnational project.
Shared Horizons is a platform developed as a contribution to the ongoing transnational orientation that groundsin our abolitionist poetics and politics through attention to language, meaningful/sustained connection building, struggles on the ground, digital and material cultures, and radical aesthetic traditions. It is a living and multi-translated digital archive dedicated to collectives and social movements that engage in and learn from abolitionist practices and poetics on an international scale. This platform encourages movements and collectives to connect further in their building and therefore contributes to the transnational dimension of abolition.It also encourages individuals who yearn for these visions to get informed and get involved by giving a material sense of the work that has been done for those who wish to actively engage in the composition of this shared horizon.
This collaborative project is organised and initiated by Vanessa Eileen Thompson and SA Smythe based on their respective research and decades of political organising. Together, they anchor this archival project in black, queer, trans, internationalist, and feminist genealogies to articulate transdisciplinary methods towards abolitionist and anticolonial horizons.
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Since 1993, Fortress Europe's militarized policies have led to over 60,620 deaths. Frontex, the EU’s border police with a growing budget and force, plays a key role in this system. Abolish Frontex seeks to end the EU border regime, stop deportations and militarization, and promote freedom of movement.
Abolitionist Futures is a collective of activists in Britain and Ireland working toward a world without prisons, police, or punishment. They create resources, host events, and support abolitionist groups, focusing on building safe, just communities. Their work opposes all forms of oppression.
