Welcome to Abolition Week 2024.

This year, our focus is on empire, its endless expansion, and the carceral technologies that enable it. We have invited incarcerated and other system-affected writers to explore how the combined forces of Western imperialism and plantation heritage produce carceral logics around the world, creating the conditions that fuel genocide in the US South, Palestine, and other parts of the world.

Our close connection to the South allows us to hone in on the many ways in which prisons and anti-black sentiment are integral to white supremacist capitalist imperialism at the heart of the empire. So we are always interested in the things that connect us, the bonds that hold us together in solidarity in the shadow of that dark heart.

We read how the rotting corpses in the streets of Sudan have changed the migratory patterns of eagles, and we must remember that during the transatlantic slave trade, sharks changed their migratory routes, following ships and feasting on the flesh of stolen Africans thrown overboard. We condemn the inclusion of Israeli police officers in the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program to train US police officers in the same tactics used against Palestinians on the other side of the world, and we recall that Georgia is also home to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) – once known as the School of the Americas – where Latin American dictators, soldiers and police officers are trained to crush resistance to US imperialism in their countries through human rights violations. We witness organized efforts to roll back child labor laws throughout the United States – especially in the South. In Alabama and Mississippi, children are caught working for hours on dangerous machines. And we must not forget the many thousands of children in the Congo who are working in “modern slavery” mining cobalt to produce the lithium-ion batteries for our devices.

The aftermath of slavery and Indigenous genocide can be seen in deadly exchange programs and conditions of torture, not only in the shared counterinsurgency tactics of global police forces and military institutions, but also in the shared cultures of oppression necessary for capital accumulation and thus imperial expansion. Book bans, the repeal of LGBTQIA+ rights, police violence, anti-protest policies on college campuses and in surrounding communities, abortion bans, the erosion of public health infrastructure, and increasing environmental degradation all have their roots in past eras that, when they come to light, remind us that the sun never sets on imperial violence.

Because of these and many other connections, the contributions in this series consciously resist the logic of borders—and, by extension, containment—as the authors grapple with the endless nature of empire and its malignant violence.

As always, this Abolition Week asks and answers the question “Why abolition?” by looking at some of the conditions of detention. In this year’s opening essay, a strong-willed journalist confronts the specter of Guantanamo Bay. But the specter of Guantanamo Bay is not a specter at all; it is an open wound and an open secret of state-sanctioned post-9/11 horrors. A later personal essay examines the felony murder law currently in place in 48 states, and an imprisoned author forces us to consider whether it is a legal form of genocide.

Empire gorges itself, unfurling its many limbs to invade, displace, enslave, exploit, and ravage—leaving a trail of broken bodies, ecological disasters, and psychic wounds in its wake. With this understanding, we have assembled a collection that indicts the US and Israel as two fangs in the mouth of a settler-colonial monster; traces the roots of the exploitation of Canadian migrant workers to the transatlantic slave trade; highlights Kashmiri and Palestinian solidarity and resistance while noting environmental devastation in both regions; and considers the ongoing impact of Western settler-colonial violence and exploitation on the people and lands of Chile.

Agents and figureheads of empire insulate themselves from criticism and accountability by criminalizing its dissidents. Two articles this week show how clear this is in the RICO indictments against Cop City protesters and in the policing and attacks on students protesting their institution’s complicity in the Palestinian genocide.

Through analyses of politics, popular culture, the prison system, policing and everyday life, this year’s collection presents works that connect the dots from one end of the world to the other, pulling at the frayed edges of empire and drawing attention to its crumbling foundations. For, like all empires before it, this one too will toll its death knell.

This is the week of abolition: the empire must die.