Abolitionist Ecological Security

Abstract As ecological crises deepen, many scholars have challenged dominant practices of security by developing more progressive environmental or ecological security discourses. Others, on the other hand, critique these moves by emphasizing the inherently repressive features of security discourse. This article engages this debate by proposing a more radical form of ecological security informed by the ‘abolitionist’ tradition – which I call Abolitionist Ecological Security. From this view, the problem with existing ecological security approaches is not their efforts to rethink the term ‘security’, but rather (1) their failure to foreground the political economy of racial capitalism as the structure that hegemonic security practices function to secure, and (2) their neglect of how ‘racial capitalist security assemblages’ – encompassing structures of militarism, policing, incarceration and border controls – produce ecological insecurity through their ecological impacts and violence against workers, the poor, migrants and racialized communities. Thus I argue, following the abolitionist tradition, that any genuine ecological security must necessarily be abolitionist in orientation, entailing the struggle for new worlds beyond racial capitalism and the creation of alternative security practices beyond militarism, policing and imprisonment.