Abolitionist Futures is a collaboration of community organisers and activists in Britain and Ireland who are working together to build a future without prisons, police and punishment.
We share information and resources to strengthen the network of existing and emerging abolitionist groups and allied organisations.
Our aim is to support the flourishing of a diverse, vibrant and powerful abolitionist movement in the Britain and Ireland.
It’s time to imagine and build
the world we want
Abolitionist Futures aims to:
Strengthen abolitionist networks, increase solidarity and support communication between groups organising around abolitionist principles and allied struggles.
Provide opportunities to collectively gather, strategise and discuss topics of common interest.
Share skills, tools and resources that strengthen abolitionist movement building.
Provide a platform to co-organise events, such as workshops, talks, film nights, reading groups, social gatherings that develop and increase people’s understanding of abolition.
Coordinate collective responses to pressing issues (i.e. letters, petitions, public statements, campaigns, etc.) and seek support for campaigning work.
Highlight opportunities for people to get involved in abolitionist groups, campaigns and organising.
We organise in the Britain and Ireland but want to strengthen links internationally.
Our organising principles:
We organise with a vision for an abolitionist future. This means we recognise the harms done by policing, prisons, immigration detention, surveillance and other forms of punishment. We are working to build safe, healthy and flourishing communities for everyone.
We are committed to challenging and undoing oppression, particularly racism, sexism, ableism, classism, transphobia, homophobia, islamophobia, antisemitism and xenophobia and how these intersect. We pay attention to issues of power and privilege in how we organise.
We recognise that undoing oppression – whether on an individual, community or structural level – is an ongoing practice and will support each other to do that work.
We support each other’s learning, recognising that we will make mistakes and are committed to learning from them to make our movements stronger.
We reflect together and challenge and support each other to strengthen our movements collectively.
We respect a diversity of tactics and movement building strategies.
We recognise and appreciate the work of all those who contribute to abolitionist struggle and aim to support and lift up that work.
Abolitionist Futures History
Abolitionist Futures grew out a gathering of abolitionist and allied groups who co-organised the International Conference on Penal Abolition in London in 2018. The conference was titled Abolitionist Futures and drew 400 participants from around the world. Given the energy and momentum of the conference, many of the groups involved in organising the conference wanted to continue doing work together, so Abolitionist Futures has continued as an organising group since then.
In the lead-up to the conference, we organised an ‘introduction to abolition’ reading group, which was very popular. So after the conference, we decided to keep running it. Since then we’ve been running regular reading groups and supporting other groups to run their own reading groups locally. We’ve also been hosting book clubs, speaker series and workshop events, producing abolitionist resources and doing political education and networking work.
You can read more about the 2018 Abolitionist Futures Conference here.
You can also read more about UK Abolitionist History here.