Abolitionist Geography: Disrupting ICL Through Pro-Palestine University Encampments

The invitation to consider the “critical aftermath” of international criminal law (ICL) and “what happens next?” raises, for us, the suggestion of a new possibility emerging from the ruins—not only the ruins of atrocity, but also of law's response to atrocity. Yet ICL, we suggest, is lying in wait: it remains a powerful and violent actor, poised to activate and reinforce the prominence and monopoly of carceral justice, even out of the ruins. To counteract the dominance of carceral justice, we suggest learning from the tradition of abolition geography. By this we mean engaging in an act of “reconstruction place-making,” 1 whereby we mix our labor with the world and (re)make the world by bending the “narrative arc” toward freedom. 2 More specifically, we seek to embrace an abolitionist geography by offering a conception of countercultural visions of justice, drawing from a vignette of the worldwide movement of university encampments for Palestine. With this, we contribute to deepening reflections on a counterculture of international justice rooted in epistemologies of Black feminist and abolitionist praxis. 3