(Re)connecting anti-racisms: Islamophobia and the politics of police/prison abolition in contemporary Britain

Abstract

In recent years, questions of policing, prisons and the wider criminal justice system have increasingly taken centre stage in discussions and practices of anti-racism in Britain. More specifically, the Black Lives Matter movement, the Covid-19 pandemic and the introduction of the Conservative government’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Act have all contributed to the emergence of a nascent movement for police and prison abolition. At the same time, ongoing resistance to state-sanctioned Islamophobia – the majority of which has been driven by Muslim-led organisations and communities – has focused on the securitisation of Muslims in Britain and beyond. Yet these two key strands of anti-racist work have tended to remain politically and analytically distinct. This article seeks to develop a dialogue between the theory and practice of police/prison abolition and the issue of Islamophobia in Britain, exploring the possibilities for solidarity-building in the current moment. I consider how (1) sociological theories of race, racism and racialisation, and (2) an engagement with British histories of radical anti-racism (specifically British Black Power) offer resources for revealing key connections between the policing and imprisonment of differently racialised populations and associated forms of resistance. I then explore how a more ‘joined up’ analysis might facilitate coalition-building on the ground in the current moment, before expanding the discussion beyond Britain to consider the Palestinian struggle as a model for developing international, abolitionist solidarity attuned to the relationality of race and racisms.

Introduction

In recent years, questions of policing, prisons and the wider criminal justice system have increasingly taken centre stage in discussions and practices of anti-racism in Britain. Moreover, a politics of police/prison abolition appears to be gaining momentum, with the summer of 2020 proving to be a flashpoint (Elliott-Cooper, 2021). Sparked by the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in the United States, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests marked the largest anti-racist mobilisations on record, and in a British context coalesced with the introduction of unprecedented police powers under new Covid-19 legislation. In the months that followed, the Conservative government’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (also known as the PCSC or Policing Bill) made its way through the channels of legislative approval, but not without provoking a wave of resistance which – following the BLM protests – was now readily mobilised and sought to emphasise the racism at the heart of the Bill. In both cases, anti-racist protests became sites of racist police violence (Harris et al., 2021). Then, the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer in the spring of 2021, and the brutal treatment of protestors at her vigil, once again forced a public reckoning with the fundamental nature of police and police power; a concern which has driven the work of police and prison abolitionists for decades.

At the same time, the extent of institutional and state-led Islamophobia in Britain – an issue that I argue cannot be understood outside of the events outlined above – has been exposed like never before. In early 2022, the publication of the People’s Review of Prevent demonstrated the trauma wrought in the name of ‘preventing violent extremism’ via the disastrous Prevent policy, before a series of journalistic investigations focusing on institutional Islamophobia across British schools and politics ¹ lent further empirical weight to what activists and scholars have long argued: that Islamophobia as a modality of racism has been chronically misunderstood and allowed to proliferate, and often been intentionally reproduced across the spectrum of party politics.

Against the above backdrop, this article seeks to establish a sociological dialogue between the theory and practice of police/prison abolition and the issue of Islamophobia in Britain. Resistance to structural forms of Islamophobia has focused on the extraordinary levels of securitisation and criminalisation that Muslims face as a racially minoritised group in Britain and beyond. Yet the majority of this work has been driven by Muslim-led organisations and communities, and has tended to remain politically and analytically distinct from developments in abolitionist organising. I argue that sociological understandings of race, racism and Islamophobia, can be harnessed to reveal generative connections between these seemingly disparate struggles, and to point to new ground for solidarity-building in our current moment.

I begin by outlining the theoretical underpinnings of police/prison abolition across the US and Britain, before considering the specificities of Islamophobia – and resistance to it – in Britain in recent years. Reflecting on the challenges of connecting these two terrains of anti-racist struggle, I go on to consider what sociological and historical resources might contribute to a more comprehensive and ‘joined-up’ approach to anti-racism at the current conjuncture. Finally, I shift our focus beyond Britain to consider the role of the Palestinian struggle as a model for developing international solidarity at the intersection of anti-racism, Islamophobia and police/prison abolition.

Police and prison abolition: Key principles across contexts

The abolitionist demands of recent anti-racist movements in Britain cannot be understood separately from the broader movement for prison abolition in both the UK and the US. Scholars and activists working in this tradition have long been concerned with the reliance on prisons under late racial capitalism. ² Grappling with the exponential growth of the prison estate in the late 20th century, as well as the disproportionate numbers of racially minoritised and working class people in a swelling prison population, abolitionists have highlighted how prisons play a central role in the reproduction of racial capitalism itself – a story which both dovetails and diverges across the two contexts. In the US, legacies of transatlantic slavery have combined with rampant neoliberalism to ensure that prisons offer ‘partial geographical solutions to political economic crises’ (Gilmore, 2007, p. 26). Central to this argument has been the theorising of the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) which reveals the ways in which prisons, policing and the criminal justice system – understood as highly integrated – have come to resemble and become entangled with the global Military Industrial Complex in terms of their profit-making potential (Davis, 2003; Gilmore, 2007; Kaba, 2021).

While the prison as an institution has remained a fundamental focus of contemporary abolitionist thinking and organising, a rich body of abolitionist scholarship quickly reveals a more expansive imaginative horizon. As Angela Davis (2005) highlights, prison abolitionists in the US have long built on Du Bois’ conception of ‘abolition democracy’. In the wake of the US civil war and the legal abolition of slavery, a movement of newly liberated African Americans began to build the social conditions necessary for the full democratic participation of Black people in American society, including the building of new institutions such as schools, welfare programmes and political institutions. Tragically, the backlash to and ultimate reversal of the gains of this period of Black Reconstruction represented a shift ‘back towards slavery’, with Black people subject to lynching, Black Codes, segregation and, as Davis (2003) writes, the evolution of the modern US prison system. The idea of ‘abolition democracy’, then, represents the unrealised post-emancipation society that Black Reconstruction promised: not only the dismantling of one particularly violent system, but the creation of an entirely new society. For contemporary prison abolitionists inspired by his work, the notion of abolition speaks to the very conditions in which prisons and policing are understood to be necessary.

Crucially, Britain has its own specific histories of colonial expansion, domination and migration that have come to shape the role of prisons and policing, and equally its own genealogies of anti-racist, abolitionist struggle that this article seeks to foreground. Reflecting Du Bois’ concern with the incompleteness of abolition, Kennetta Hammond Perry (2022, p. 544) suggests that contemporary modes of Black-led abolitionist organising in Britain have helped to unsettle received ‘scripts of [white] British abolitionism’ vis-a-vis Britain’s role in transatlantic slavery (especially the ‘triangular trade’ in slaves upon which Britain’s industrial revolution was built) and to reveal its ongoing, ‘residual effects’ (p. 551) in British society. This ‘confrontation’ with liberal accounts which cauterise Britain’s role in a global system of racialised violence and exploitation also calls forth the urgent need for alternative systems for ensuring the flourishing of human life in the present. Current-day abolitionist projects demonstrate an ‘imaginative querying about what must become present’ (p. 553) even as they expose the colonial roots of contemporary British institutions, from prisons and policing to the education system. These colonial roots, however, can be traced in a multiplicity of directions, not only transatlantically. In Britain, abolitionist scholars have built on the work of their US counterparts as well as currents in the fields of critical criminology (see Scott, 2013) and cultural studies (see Hall et al., 1978/2013). More recent research has underlined the carceral dimensions of Britain’s various colonial regimes, but also how the ‘colonial boomerang’ has seen strategies and practices ‘returning’ to Britain to shape the development of prisons and policing within the colonial metropole (Brown, 2002; Chowdhury, 2021; Moore, 2014).

Contrary to accusations of utopian navel-gazing (Coyle, 2018), at the heart of abolition’s ‘imaginative querying’ is the question of practical harm reduction. As should now be clear, abolitionists argue that, ultimately, current policing and criminal justice systems cannot be reformed in the long-term. Nevertheless, abolitionists often focus on how we might take action to reduce harm in the short-term while working towards a ‘horizon of abolition’ (Kaba, 2021, p. 96). Thus, rather than reproduce a sharp distinction between reform and abolition which treats the project of abolition as ‘unrealistic’, abolitionists have long advocated for what some scholars have described as ‘non-reformist reforms’ (Kaba, 2021, p. 96): changes that ‘shrink the state’s capacity for violence’ (Berger et al., 2017, n.p.) in the here-and-now, as opposed to ‘carceral reform[s]’ which serve to strengthen and legitimise punitive state practices. In fact, Coyle (2018, p. 85) goes so far as to argue that the logic of penal abolitionism, while rooted in utopian thinking, is actually best characterised by a ‘grounded realism’. It is the logic of ‘criminal justice’ – including its endless but fruitless calls for reform – which is ‘comprehensively utopian’ in its misrepresentation and misdiagnosis of ‘what we demonstrably know to be the case about ourselves, our institutions, and our society’ (Coyle, 2018, p. 89). Thus, a thoroughly pragmatic approach to society – and specifically harm reduction – characterises abolitionist work on the ground as much as the necessary exercises in imagining radically alternative futures.

In addition, and in keeping with a long history of radical anti-racism, an abolitionist perspective presents a challenge to the state’s supposed commitment to anti-racism by revealing its punitive logic. The clearest example of this is the ascendency of the category of ‘hate crime’: an umbrella term which refers to interpersonal violence relating to race, sexual orientation, religion or faith, disability and gender identity, and which has emerged with the increasing emphasis on ‘equalities’ and the concomitant ‘equalities agenda’ in British policy-making in recent years. ‘Hate crime’ as a concept has been readily adopted by community organisations, local government, and police forces themselves, and has been buoyed by an academic body of work converging around ‘hate studies’ (see, for instance, Schweppe & Perry, 2021). Not only does the state’s emphasis on tackling hate crime provide an ostensible anti-racist alibi (Burnett, 2013), but it has helped to justify the proximity of the police to racially minoritised communities, reframing the institution as a source of support – indeed the only source of support – in the face of increasing and very real ‘everyday’ violence (Shafi & Nagdee, 2022).

In direct contrast to this tendency, abolitionists promote principles of de-criminalisation in all aspects of social life, even where we are forced to confront and navigate interpersonal violence. Queer abolitionists have applied these arguments in relation to the accommodation of particular protections for LGBTQ+ people by the state through ‘hate crime’ legislation (Stanley et al., 2012). In this case, an abolitionist politics offers a vocabulary for moving beyond an ‘individualizing punishment lens’ (Spade in Stanley et al., 2012, p. 124) in the struggle against hetero-patriarchal violence, the existence of which in the lives of queer people is sustained by the very structures of the state, including the deeply gendering apparatus of the criminal justice system. Similarly, an abolitionist approach to racist violence moves us beyond the never-ending cycle of reform and retribution – the ‘reforming reformed reforms’ as Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007, p. 14) puts it – and focuses critical attention on the violence of the state itself.

Upon the foundations of abolitionist thinking sketched out above, a diverse range of actions and campaigns have begun to proliferate across Britain which are either explicitly abolitionist, or else draw on abolitionist principles or mobilise abolitionist tendencies and discourses. These include (but go well beyond): campaigns to prevent more police officers being placed in schools; local ‘cop watch’ and police monitoring groups; anti-(immigration)-raids networks; prisoner solidarity groups; organising towards healing-centred approaches to youth justice; and of course large mobilisations against the PCSC Bill. What we might consider as a burgeoning abolitionist politics also stretches beyond critiques of the police and criminal justice system to take aim at the carcerality and coloniality of Britain’s education system, as seen in the work of the No More Exclusions (NME) coalition (see No More Exclusions, 2022), itself a part of a wider and growing critique of the heavily racialised ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ in Britain (Graham, 2016; Perera, 2020), as well as higher education initiatives such as the Free Black University (Perry, 2022). Furthermore, scholars and activists are increasingly making connections across these different sites of carcerality and harm (Elliott-Cooper, 2021) and there is a growing recognition that the apparent distinctions between violent systems serve an ideological purpose: that is, the targeting and criminalisation of differently racialised groups in ways that situate them outside of the ‘limited protections of criminal law’ (Bhattacharyya et al., 2021, p. 37).

And yet, contemporary discussions about police, prison and border abolition in Britain rarely include a sustained engagement with the issue of state-led Islamophobia and the sprawling global apparatus that sustains it (Manzoor-Khan, 2022). While structural Islamophobia is often acknowledged and sometimes included as a kind of addendum, much less has been said about the precise mechanics of state-led Islamophobia from an explicitly abolitionist perspective (notwithstanding notable exceptions from the US such as Angela Davis’s account in her 2005 Abolition Democracy). This is not to neglect, of course, the many thinkers, writers and activists who have taken aim at questions of state-led Islamophobia via particular trajectories and traditions (which I address in the following section), but rather to point to, what seems to me, an obviously underdeveloped but potentially generative intersection. Having offered a brief introduction to the politics of police and prison abolition, I now turn to the issue of Islamophobia to begin to consider why these disconnects endure.

Islamophobia in Britain at the current conjuncture

Muslims in Britain have been aggressively targeted by the state under successive ‘counter-extremism’ and ‘counter-terrorism’ policies for the best part of two decades. There is now a consensus among many scholars and activists that the state has been fundamental in the reproduction of contemporary British Islamophobia (Abbas, 2021; Kundnani, 2014; Massoumi et al., 2017; Rashid, 2016). In this section I focus on perhaps the most prominent and notorious example: the government policy known as Prevent. However, it is important to note that the sprawling and often insidious nature of the ‘counter-terrorism’ agenda has rendered state Islamophobia in Britain somewhat hydra-headed (see Manzoor-Khan, 2022). As such, a comprehensive account of its many components is well beyond the scope of this article. As I will argue, however, even a cursory examination of Islamophobia in Britain reveals its entanglements with broader forms of policing. In addition, both state and ‘everyday’ forms of Islamophobia – which I argue are intimately connected – have been met with sustained resistance from those on the receiving end, raising questions about the extent of abolitionist currents within existing modalities of resistance as well as the generative possibilities of an abolitionist approach to tackling Islamophobia.

‘Prevent’, the UK government’s flagship ‘counter-extremism’ policy, was first developed and launched under New Labour in 2007 (Kundnani, 2009) and has been expanded under subsequent governments ever since. The central premise of Prevent is that interventions can be made by public authorities to ‘prevent’ vulnerable individuals being ‘drawn into terrorism’ (Bouattia, 2015, n.p.). The Counter-terrorism and Security Act 2015 enshrined this premise into law by legally mandating workers in ‘specified authorities, including schools, universities, prisons and the NHS’ (Bouattia, 2015, n.p.) to implement the Prevent strategy and identify ‘at risk’ individuals in their workplaces. Prevent therefore functions within a ‘pre-criminal’ space (Qureshi, 2016).

While ‘official’ statistics attest to the disproportionate impact of Prevent on Muslims, ³ this is not a case of a well-intentioned policy having Islamophobic outcomes. Rather, scholars and activists have consistently demonstrated that from its very inception Prevent has intentionally targeted Britain’s Muslim communities, most starkly in early iterations of Prevent which saw the value of area-based grants linked to Prevent correspond directly to areas in England with the largest Muslim populations (see Kundnani, 2009). This is a pattern that has continued (albeit in an increasingly opaque way) through the allocation of Prevent resources via ‘Prevent Priority Areas’ (PPAs) (Holmwood & Aitlhadj, 2022).

Prevent has been adapted over a number of years in response to its dismal reputation. For some, Prevent has become a ‘toxic brand’ in need of better managing and marketing (Dodd, 2019), while for others the supposed remedy has been a matter of tweaking what and who gets targeted under the policy. In both instances, there is a sustained commitment to what we might identify, drawing on the discussion in the previous section, as reformist or carceral reforms (Berger et al., 2017; Kaba, 2021), most notable in an increasing emphasis on targeting ‘far-right extremism’. ⁴

Unsurprisingly, Prevent has been met with various waves of resistance. Students and educators have led campaigns in higher education under the slogans ‘students not suspects’ and ‘educators not informants’ (McVeigh, 2015), while medical practitioners have highlighted the harmful effects of Prevent in the healthcare sector (Aked, 2020). The latest iteration of organised resistance to Prevent has come in the form of a widely coordinated effort to boycott, and provide an alternative to, a government review of the policy. William Shawcross, an individual who has played a key role in neo-conservative Islamophobic think-tanks (Holmwood & Aitlhadj, 2022), was appointed by the government to lead the review which was promised on account of ongoing critiques of the policy. In March 2021 and in response to the selection of Shawcross, hundreds of Muslim-led organisations alongside academics, community organisers and supporters released a statement committing to boycotting the review and establishing an alternative forum for assessing the policy. The results of the People’s Review of Prevent, published in February 2022, are sobering. Most notably, the report documents the profound harms of Prevent – despite it being framed as a form of safeguarding – including the ‘disproportionate impact of Prevent on children and young people’ who together make up the majority of referrals to Prevent, with a third of all referrals coming from schools (Holmwood & Aitlhadj, 2022, p. 3). Ultimately, the Review calls for Prevent to be scrapped in its entirety. We might view such a demand in and of itself as a ‘non-reformist reform’ (Kaba, 2021, p. 96), yet a number of challenges seem to constrain its broader abolitionist potential.

Indeed, as Manzoor-Khan (2022) notes, Muslims who adopt a critical approach to Prevent expose themselves to very public accusations of supporting or facilitating political violence. This was illustrated most recently when right-wing think-tank Policy Exchange published a high profile report denouncing a series of Muslim organisations and individual activists with a history of critiquing Prevent as ‘enabling terrorism’ (Jenkins et al., 2022, p. 6). Crucially for the discussion in this article, the Policy Exchange report takes aim at organisations and activists, including the People’s Review of Prevent, who have called for Prevent to be completely abolished, and terms like ‘abolish’ and ‘abolition’ – ultimately framed, of course, as a threat to national security – appear throughout the report. Thus, Muslim activists face an impossible double bind: accept the status quo that sustains British state Islamophobia in the present moment, or face public trial by the assumptions that underpin it.

Furthermore, and in sharp contrast to the consensus among many scholars and activists regarding the centrality of the state to the reproduction of Islamophobia, popular discussions of Islamophobia are often dominated by a focus on its interactional or ‘street level’ expressions (Mondon & Winter, 2017). This is facilitated, as I highlighted earlier, by a reliance on the concept of ‘hate crime’ in mainstream anti-racist discourse more broadly. Most recently, the notion of Islamophobic hate crime has been incorporated into calls for a new ‘Index of Islamophobia’ to better support the conviction and prosecution of perpetrators (Bi, 2022). To be clear, Islamophobic abuse and violence is a grave reality for many Muslims living in Britain. Yet what we might call ‘everyday’ Islamophobia, whether more or less explicit, does not function on a separate plane from its more structural or ‘liberal’ articulations (Mondon & Winter, 2017). Alongside sociological accounts, an abolitionist perspective points towards how everyday Islamophobia (just like everyday sexism, homophobia or transphobia), far from being an individualised phenomenon, is intimately connected to state-sanctioned practices of policing, surveillance, securitisation and imprisonment. Thus, any response to everyday Islamophobia which sees solutions in the criminal justice system as it currently exists remains incompatible with a politics of abolition.

On the other hand, Islamophobia remains an often-misunderstood phenomenon amongst many parts of the left in Britain, and Muslim activists themselves report experiencing exclusion and Islamophobia in left spaces and networks (Harris, 2022). A particular consequence of this has been that, to paraphrase one Muslim activist, the vast majority of the analysis and organising around Prevent has been led by Muslim activists and communities (Harris, 2022). There are important distinctions to be made, however, between the work of police and prison abolitionists and other strands of leftist organising and discourse. If anything, the latest wave of abolitionist politics in Britain has happened in spite of the reactionary position of much of the labour movement on questions of policing and migration (Bhattacharyya et al., 2021). But this fragmentation of the broader left over some of the key questions of our time, along with the increasing threat of criminalisation, may well explain the silos that endure in forms of organising, or at least how these forms are articulated even where political interests are closely aligned. Thus, discussions of Islamophobia and abolition remain fragmented, and cultures of abolitionist politics appear uneven. Connecting up these issues conceptually and practically is an urgent task, one in which sociological work might play a humble role.

(Re)connecting anti-racist struggles: Sociological and historical resources

A number of scholars have highlighted the under-theorisation of the connections between Islamophobia and other forms of racism. While there have been attempts to recognise and redress this in relation to Islamophobia and Antisemitism (see for example Meer, 2013), Jas Nijjar (2022, p. 454) notes that the ‘relationality’ of anti-Black racism and Islamophobia (or what he calls anti-Muslim racism) has been ‘under-explored in academic work’. As Nijjar (2022) highlights in an account of the ‘racial warfare’ at the heart of the policing of Black and Muslim populations, much of this under-theorisation concerns the ways in which particular groups are understood to be subject to the perils of race, while others are not. This raises the question: how can we connect anti-racist struggles if Islamophobia is understood as constitutively different from other forms of racism – or even, as is often the case – not really racism at all?

Policies such as Prevent are clearly discriminatory and construct the Muslim population as a ‘suspect community’ (Kundnani, 2009, p. 10); but many scholars of Islamophobia have gone further, pushing us to consider the precise relationship between Islamophobia, race and racism. Indeed, debates concerning the ‘expansion of the race concept’ (Meer, 2018, p. 1165) have focused on racialisation as a way of conceiving how populations that unsettle colour-coded categories of race are also attributed with naturalised characteristics, typically through signifiers of cultural rather than biological difference. Building on seminal sociological work which foregrounds the role of racialisation in sustaining structural racism (Bonilla-Silva, 1997), scholars across various geographical contexts have focused on how the process of racialisation applies to Muslim populations. That is, the ways in which displays of ‘Muslimness’ – hijab, beards, religious dress, but also skin colour – are read off the putative Muslim body and combine with non-visual cues such as names to ‘fix’ Muslims as a distinct group (Garner & Selod, 2015). In Britain, this can be witnessed in the playing out of street-level Islamophobia in which ‘visible’ Muslims are disproportionately targeted, in Islamophobic discourses spanning the political spectrum, and in the literal demand of counter-extremism policies that members of the public (including Muslims themselves) identify signs of ‘radicalisation’ (Abbas, 2019; Mondon & Winter, 2017).

Such a pattern, of course, gives us the best clue as to the mutually constitutive relationship between everyday Islamophobia and government policy. But it also acts as a reminder that any ‘bodies’ can (in theory) be subject to the forces of racialisation, which is, as Robert Miles (2011, p. 2019) summarises, ‘a concept that is inherently about process . . . that opens the door to understanding the complexities of who gets racialized when and for what purpose, and how that changes through time’ (see also Bonilla-Silva, 1997). Hence, as Nijjar (2022) argues, the racialisation of Muslims as fundamentally incompatible with and antithetical to ‘western civilisation’ resembles the association of Blackness with criminality, incivility and disorder, with both Islamophobia and anti-Black racism helping to sustain conditions of ‘racialised police warfare’ in Britain (Nijjar, 2022, p. 449). Such an understanding takes us beyond the liberal framing of the police as a benign, domestic public service and instead reveals the role of the police as ‘[overseeing] the militarised regulation of racialised populations regarded as jeopardising the hallmarks of Euro-modernity’ (Nijjar, 2022, p. 445). As Nijjar suggests, this helps to make sense of why exactly anti-Black and anti-Muslim state racisms in Britain function in similar ways through the institution of the police.

Crucially, an account of race that anchors itself ontologically in the concept of racialisation foregrounds the tendency of race to ‘move’ and adapt according to certain conditions (Bonilla-Silva, 1997) as well as its relationality; that is, the understanding that when it comes to race and its attendant racisms, ‘ideas and practices from one place interact with conditions and expressions tried and tested elsewhere’ (Goldberg, 2009, p. 1273).

And yet, contemporary expressions of anti-racism are often dominated by hermetically sealed, essentialist accounts of race. Bhattacharyya and colleagues (2021) caution against the ways in which such accounts are sustained by the mechanics (and economics) of social media, limiting the scope for nuanced debate around race and racism. This is not to say that interactions on Twitter and the like are representative of the abolitionist work happening on the ground, however. In fact, scholars and activists have often pointed to how the latter necessarily offers a more complex insight into questions of race, racism and anti-racist solidarity, primarily because those subjected to state violence themselves exceed and unsettle established racialised categories. See, for instance, Adam Elliott-Cooper’s (2021) account of those leading the United Families and Friends Campaign (UFFC) against deaths in police custody, or Luke de Noronha’s (2022, p. 174) identification of what he calls an ‘anti-raceism’ amongst those subjected to deportation. Nevertheless, as scholars and activists have observed, received wisdom around race and racism that foregrounds ‘the purity of experience’ filters down to affect anti-racist practices and the possibilities for coalition-building (Bhattacharyya et al., 2021, p. 98; Olaloku-Teriba, 2018; Taylor, 2016).

In this context, an expansive sociological account of racialisation can offer useful tools for countering essentialist understandings of race which are so often presented under the guise of radicality. Moreover, a sociological account of racialisation reveals the adaptability and multiplicity of racism within a quickly evolving criminal justice system – something which any project of police/prison abolition must contend with.

There are historical resources, too, which can enrich the above sociological accounts. In contributing to a dialogue between abolition and Islamophobia, sociologists would be remiss not to engage with Britain’s own, but often-neglected, histories of anti-racist struggle. Radical currents of anti-racism swept the UK from the late 1960s until the early 1980s, the most influential of which was British Black Power, an umbrella term for a movement which included a plethora of organisations and activist groups. Crucially, British Black Power was in part characterised by its commitment to political blackness, in which Black was a political rather than phenotypical signifier, pointing to a collective experience of racist oppression under British colonial rule and subsequently within Britain itself. Thus, political blackness underlined a global, anti-imperialist outlook as much as a politics of solidarity amongst non-white people within Britain (Narayan, 2019). At least for a period, and notwithstanding serious cleavages around gender and sexuality, British Black Power sustained the kinds of multiethnic anti-racist coalitions that have become almost unthinkable today. The Asian Youth Movement (AYM), for example, saw second-generation South Asian young people embrace a politically Black identity to join forces with other communities in the fight against the racism of the streets and the British state (Ramamurthy, 2013).

Of course, the transformative potential of such a broad-based, anti-imperialist, anti-racist movement was plain to see. From 1981, following the uprisings that swept cities across the country, the British state moved towards a concerted ‘strategy of containment and incorporation’ (Shafi & Nagdee, 2022, p. 42). This involved violent police repression as part of a shift towards a broader politics of ‘law and order’, which not only targeted movements directly but also emerged as a way of ‘managing’ the broader crisis of authority that had unravelled through the post-war period (Hall et al., 1978/2013). Alongside more coercive measures, state multiculturalism saw the introduction of new funding regimes which apportioned resources according to different ‘ethnic’ communities, breaking up networks and coalitions in the process. Thus, British anti-racism was transformed from a multiethnic, militant, grassroots movement ‘from below’ to a state-sanctioned exercise with an emphasis on managing ‘cultural difference’ (Kundnani, 2007; Shafi & Nagdee, 2022).

Whilst political blackness has now been rendered broadly ‘unintelligible’, this period of intense anti-racist struggle still contains valuable sociological and political lessons. Significantly, as I develop further in the final section, an expansive vision of police/prison abolition requires a similar sense of the relationality of racisms within and across borders that British Black Power encapsulated. We should also note that scholarship on race and ethnicity in Britain has not escaped these shifts. As Claire Alexander (2018) argues, sociological accounts of British Asian and African-Caribbean populations over the last few decades reflect the fragmentation of the politically Black subject, and the proliferation of new subdisciplines has further entrenched the disconnects in theorising racism across differently racialised positions. Following Alexander and recent contributions from other British sociologists, I contend that these histories of anti-racist struggle offer resources not only for contemporary anti-racist action, but also for thinking sociologically (see Bhattacharyya et al., 2020; Meghji, 2023; Narayan, 2019). Uncovering these histories and exploring what they mean for anti-racism (and anti-racist sociology) in the current moment is a task that sociologists should take seriously, whilst recognising that sociological knowledge is also, and has always been, produced by social movements (Meghji, 2023).

Similarly, connecting these histories with the burgeoning abolitionist politics playing out in Britain today raises a series of sociologically pertinent questions: what are the genealogies of contemporary currents in abolitionist organising in Britain? To what extent are they related to the rise and fall of Black radicalism in Britain? In what ways do they borrow, supplement or substitute concepts that have emerged elsewhere, such as in the US? These are questions that go well beyond the scope of this article, but they nevertheless point to the need to reconnect anti-racist currents past and present, bringing together theory, histories and current praxis to reveal the intimacies of seemingly atomised struggles.

Coalition-building for today: Britain and beyond

In addition to offering conceptual tools for resisting state-sanctioned violence, connecting Islamophobia and abolition via sociological enquiry promises new (and renewed) ground for anti-racist organising in the current moment. I have hinted at some of these possibilities already, but here I want to expand the discussion and geographical scope by drawing on some more concrete examples in Britain and beyond.

One of the most obvious areas of overlap in terms of Islamophobia and contemporary abolitionist politics is in relation to the harmful impact of current systems on children and young people. The experiences of children and young people have arguably been central to some of the most sustained critiques of Prevent, underlined in the recent People’s Review of Prevent (Holmwood & Aitlhadj, 2022) but also in accounts which have sought to highlight the targeting of family life by other arms of the ‘counter-terrorist’ state. Kapoor (2018), for example, reveals the ways in which social care services have been wielded to unjustly remove children from families under the guise of protecting them from ‘radicalisation’, often when Muslim men in families have been targeted under counter-terrorism legislation and mothers consequently treated as guilty by association.

The targeting of children and young people has elsewhere been the focus of sustained abolitionist work in relation to the British school system. At times this work has concentrated on preventing increases in, and calling for the removal of, police officers stationed in schools, as in the Manchester-based No Police in Schools campaign (Connelly et al., 2020), while the No More Exclusions (NME) coalition has campaigned to end school exclusions which disproportionately affect young racially minoritised people and Black boys in particular (No More Exclusions, 2022). Such campaigns have been influenced by the concept of the school-to-prison pipeline; that is, the constellation of disciplinary mechanisms in the school system (including detentions, exclusions, ‘zero tolerance’ policies and ‘alternative provision’) which disproportionately affect Black and brown young people, mirroring the racism of – and preparing young people for – the criminal justice system (Graham, 2016). The pipeline metaphor ‘provides a visual representation of the ways in which education and criminal justice policies interact with each other to exclude, marginalise and ultimately criminalise young black people’ (Perera, 2020, p. 17). Importantly, such campaigns have achieved modest but significant victories in recent years. Manchester City Council withdrew all school-based police officers in the city following the No Police in Schools campaign and the support for it from local National Education Union (NEU) branches (King, 2021), while a motion calling for an end to police in all schools following the ‘Child Q’ ⁵ case won overwhelming support at the 2022 NEU national conference (Adams, 2022).

The connections between Prevent and the school-to-prison pipeline are more than analogous, however. Recent years have seen a dramatic rise in the number of Muslim people (and especially young Muslim men) in British prisons, with Muslims making up 15% of Britain’s prison population but only 5% of the general population (Lammy, 2017). Additional research has revealed the extent of Islamophobia across the criminal justice system, from encounters with the police to the experiences of Muslims in prison (Maslaha, 2016, 2020). Notwithstanding the fact that the Prevent duty applies within prisons themselves, it is difficult to determine, through the very limited data, the trajectories of those now in prison; in other words, to what extent the wider ‘counter-terrorism’ agenda has contributed to the criminalisation of those in prison. Nevertheless, even a recognition of the disproportionate growth of Muslims in prison pushes us to consider the relationship between state Islamophobia and the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’, including the ‘entanglement of SBPOs [school-based police officers] with Prevent’ (Connelly et al., 2020, p. 28).

Elsewhere, the policing of Muslims in Britain over the last two decades, and in particular the policing of political dissent through Prevent, has provided a blueprint for the now ratified Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Bill (now the PCSC Act 2022), which has been the focus of much of the recent abolitionist organising in Britain, including the ‘Kill the Bill’ (KTB) mobilisations. While much of the criticism of the Bill focused on its crackdown on the right to protest, anti-racist organisations have emphasised the disproportionate impact of the sweeping legislation on racially minoritised communities, including enhanced stop and search powers, harsher sentencing laws, and the criminalising of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) sites. Many also viewed the Bill as an extension and expansion of the Covid-related police powers that were rushed through parliament with little scrutiny and which had a specific and disproportionate impact on racially minoritised communities (Harris et al., 2021). The KTB mobilisations, and the subsequent and ongoing KTB coalition, sought to recognise the potential impact of the Bill across a whole range of communities already at the sharp end of police violence. In doing so, activists argued that the movement ‘revitalised radical solidarity, the notion that an injury to one is an injury to all’ (McBean, 2022, n.p.). But there may still be opportunities to expand this particular strand of anti-racist, abolitionist organising as we face the realities of the now-ratified PCSC Act coming into effect across England and Wales.

As Manzoor-Khan argues, the ‘extraordinarily draconian’ proposals set out in the then-Bill ‘grow out of the expansion of policing dissent that has been justified by Islamophobia for two decades’ (Manzoor-Khan, 2022, p. 98). More specifically, the language and mechanisms of Prevent and its deleterious impact on civil liberties are mirrored in a new statutory duty ‘to prevent and tackle serious violence’ included in the Bill, which resonates just as much with the racialised profiling of ‘at risk’ individuals targeted by the gang matrix (Liberty, 2021, p. 9). This genealogy of the policing of dissent in Britain, along with the intersections of the policing of differently racially minoritised communities, is an obvious but under-recognised fact, obscured by some of the colour-blind arguments that focus on the impact of the Bill/Act on protests as well as – as I argue in this article – the broader disconnects in anti-racist work. The radical, abolitionist solidarity that powered the KTB movement might be strengthened even further, then, by the experiences and expertise of those who have been at the forefront of resistance to state Islamophobia in recent years.

However, as should now be clear, we can go beyond simply recognising that one modality of racialised policing is a precursor to another. Tracing the co-constitution of racisms through policing and carcerality moves us towards a more global analysis and, as such, a more internationalist approach to abolition. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2016, p. 187) makes this case in their discussion of the often under-recognised connections between domestic Islamophobia, foreign policy and anti-Black racism in the US when they point to a ‘racist feedback loop, in which domestic and foreign policies feed and reinforce each other’. And Goldberg’s (2009, 2015) account of the relationality of ‘postracial’ anti-Black, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian/anti-Gazan racisms points us in a similar direction. Reflecting on the discursive and material connections between the militarisation of Ferguson and Gaza, Goldberg (2015, p. 137) claims that the postracial tendencies of today’s state racisms create ‘reinforcing projections of black animals and Muslim terrorists [italics my own]’ that require similar forms of violent state repression.

These transnational connections in material conditions have also attracted sustained attention from prison abolitionists. Angela Davis (2016, p. 21), for example, explains how abolitionist activists in the US have ‘been trying to find ways to talk about Palestine so that people who are attracted to a campaign to dismantle prisons in the US will also think about the need to end the occupation in Palestine’. This is, for Davis, part of ‘[insisting] on the intersectionality of movements’ (p. 21). Prison abolitionists have recognised this ‘intersectionality’ in the exporting of policing practices, counter-insurgency tactics and surveillance technologies from Israel to the US (Goldberg, 2015; RAIA & Jewish Voice for Peace, 2018), as well as the rich histories of prisoner resistance that connect incarcerated people everywhere (Ghabin, 2022). The uniquely oppressive conditions of life in Gaza (Goldberg, 2015) further illustrate why Palestine and the Palestinian struggle has occupied a particular place in the abolitionist imaginary. The reputation and promise of Palestine for liberation struggles in other parts of the world was captured by the late, great Edward Said (1992, p. 125):

Resistance gets content and muscle from Palestine; more usefully, resistance gets detail and a positively new approach to the microphysics of oppression from Palestine. If we think of Palestine as having the function of both a place to be returned to and of an entirely new place, a vision partially of a restored past and of a novel future, perhaps even a historical disaster transformed into hope for a different future, we will understand the word’s meaning better.

It is this promise of renewal – an ‘entirely new place’, a ‘novel future’ – which surely resonates with abolitionists as much as the desperate similarities of securitisation and carcerality on the ground. Both have led to some of the most extraordinary examples of solidarity across cultural, national and racialised difference. The historic solidarity between Irish and Palestinian political prisoners saw detained Palestinians smuggle out letters of support for Irish hunger strikers following the death of Bobby Sands (Aljamal, 2021), while Angela Davis reports being sustained by letters of support from Palestinian political prisoners during her own period of incarceration in the 1970s (Bailey, 2015). More recently, we can trace the ‘multidirectional solidarity’ (Bailey, 2015, p. 1018) to emerge from Black Lives Matter uprisings and the ongoing Palestinian struggle, with activists not only offering mutual statements of solidarity and support but organising international delegations and sharing practical strategies of resistance across borders (Davis, 2016; Goldberg, 2015; Olaloku-Teriba, 2020; Roediger, 2017). Palestinians even took to Twitter to share ‘practical advice on how to deal with tear gas inhalation’ (Bailey, 2015, p. 1018): an antidote, if there ever was one, to the reductionist effects of social media on anti-racist movement building. These actions are part of a much longer tradition of Black–Palestinian transnational solidarity which, as Robin D. G. Kelley (2019, p. 73) argues, has been held together by a revolutionary vision of ‘worldmaking’ rather than a ‘politics of analogy or identity’.

How is the struggle for Palestinian liberation relevant to a discussion of state Islamophobia and the politics of police/prison abolition in Britain? Palestine offers a model for expanding the interests and focus of abolitionist work based on a relational understanding of racisms and their attendant structures, as well as a historic precedent for building international solidarity around questions of abolition. Most obviously, British colonial rule in Palestine during the British Mandate tied the fate of Palestinians indelibly to the actions of the British state. Furthermore, the contemporary occupation of Palestine sees the coalescing of Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism, British imperialism, settler-colonialism, as well as the kind of ‘racialised police warfare’ that Nijjar (2022, p. 449) describes in a British context. Unsurprisingly, then, the question of Palestine is often where different strands of anti-racist work in Britain intersect. Practically speaking, Palestinian liberation might also offer fresh ground for a bringing together of activists working on questions of state Islamophobia and police/prison abolition.

Nevertheless, and as I highlighted in the previous section, solidarity is always fragile, often differently paced, and never a foregone conclusion. Activists and academics must contend with ‘an erratic pattern of ways in which solidarity actually comes and fails to come into the world’ (Roediger, 2017, p. 163). In this way, Annie Olaloku-Teriba (2020) has argued that a more recent attachment to a depoliticised and fixed notion of Blackness has just as often obscured the rich histories of solidarity between those fighting for Black liberation and the Palestinian struggle, ensuring that solidarity with Palestine has become a point of contention (as well as an example of solidarity in action) in recent Black Lives Matter uprisings in both Britain and the US (see also Kelley, 2019). Against this context, invocations of ‘Muslim Lives Matter’ and ‘Palestinian Lives Matter’ in various settings have indeed elicited mixed responses. But, by centring sociological concepts of race and racisms along with histories of British anti-racism in our analysis, we can interpret such claims as pointing towards connection and relationality rather than competition or comparativism, inviting an expansion of anti-racist struggle through abolition.

Conclusion

In this article I have sought to develop a dialogue between an emerging politics of police/prison abolition and the question of Islamophobia and concurrent resistance to it in contemporary Britain. Nascent abolitionist formations build on decades of activism and scholarship from various radical traditions, offering opportunities for reconfiguring mainstream anti-racism’s relationship to policing and the wider criminal justice system, including liberal approaches to tackling both interpersonal and state-led Islamophobia. At the same time, an engagement with the complexities of Islamophobia can enrich abolitionist understandings of race and racism at the current conjuncture.

However, sustaining a multidirectional, anti-racist abolitionist politics – the type that might also incorporate an analysis of Islamophobia – requires some theoretical vigilance as well as some ‘joining up’ of anti-racist struggles that have diverged over the last 40 years. A rich body of sociological theory can be drawn on to unsettle popular conceptions of race and reveal the co-constitution of the policing and imprisonment of differently racialised populations across contexts. But sociologists should also engage with historical currents of anti-racism in Britain, specifically British Black Power, the fragmentation of which the discipline has tended to mirror rather than critically assess. These histories also contain critical resources for making sense of race and racism, as well as a more expansive vision of anti-racism, and raise pertinent questions for further sociological research concerning their relationship to contemporary abolitionist politics in Britain.

Reflecting the global outlook of such radical traditions, I have tried to foreground an account of race that recognises the conceptual and material interconnectedness of multiple racisms that affect, for instance, Black people in the US, Palestinians living under occupation, and Muslims in Britain (and indeed elsewhere). From this vantage point, we can begin to ask: if systems of ‘counter-terrorism’, criminal justice and military occupation are actually sources of widescale suffering and harm, how else might we imagine and build flourishing and safety? My hope is that this article encourages some further conceptual and practical connections as part of the vast amount of work already taking place, and adds to the calls for abolitionism to be the ‘compass’ (Scott, 2013) that orients anti-racist resistance today.