On the morning of May 26th, people in the US and beyond woke up to the horrifying images of George Floyd’s brutal neck-crushing by a Minneapolis police officer. Although the method of his murder was particularly horrific, the report was not exceptional: his name joins a long, disgraceful list of the police’s victims of colour, men, women, non-binary persons, workers, parents, and youth. And like the protests that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, people took to the streets to demand change.

But if calls for reform, accountability, and justice were the overwhelming message five years ago, the interim period – marked by police acquittals, authoritarian regimes in the US and beyond, and the pandemic’s exposure of racial and other structural injustices – means the resounding message today is for a far more radical democratic politics: abolish the police, stop state violence.

Antipode has been working to support the kind of work that helps us to advance such radical, hopeful futures for decades. As Ruth Gilmore states in the recent short film we released about her work, “abolition geographies are always a presence everywhere … Solidarity and radical dependency … [are] possible in a material, deliberate, consciousness-exploding way”. We stand in solidarity with abolition and transformative justice struggles across the world and pledge to use Antipode space and resources to support them.

The Editorial Collective
8th June 2020