Building a future in place: Bridging abolition ecology and critical development studies

Abstract

This article examines the present conjuncture of state violence and environmental-economic crisis through the prism of global racial capitalism. Bridging recent scholarship in abolition ecology and critical development studies, we engage the tension between the uniqueness and interconnectedness of place within the context of global freedom struggles. We argue that building a future in place begins with an extraverted sense of place as ecologically significant, interconnected, and shaped by deep relational histories. We advance a conjunctural approach to building transnational and relational abolition ecologies that center difference as the constitutive grounds from which solidarity grows. We build from work in abolition ecology to critically engage contemporary conditions of unfreedom and how the possibilities for freedom materialize through the terrain of the phenomenal world. We build further from conjunctural approaches in critical development theory to highlight generative pathways for comparative and relational analysis of discrete sites of environmental injustice that are linked through the conduits of global racial capitalism. Drawing on ethnographic engagement with protest and social mobilization across Southeast and Southwest Asia, we show how the work of building more liberatory futures is a dynamic process of paring away the extractive relations that hollow out the possibilities for a future in place, while also building the grounds of survival through everyday acts that reverse flows of power and repair the space of life in the wake of dispossession. This relational sensibility expands the work of abolition as a global unfolding that does not collapse difference but constitutively builds across the fractures that de/stabilize the post-colonial and carceral state. Beyond Southeast Asia and Southwest Asia, this article contributes to scholarship on relational comparison and the work of building freedom as a place.