The global movement for Palestinian liberation has reignited leftist internationalism for a new generation and revitalized the movement against war, militarism, and imperialism. This revitalized internationalism faces off against a “war on terror” resurrected from the 2000s (though never really gone) into an era that the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research has called hyper-imperialism: the “exaggerated and kinetic” spasms of a U.S.-led Global North empire in economic decline, vividly likened to “a drowning billionaire who firmly believes he ought to be back on his yacht.”
The abolitionist dimensions of this struggle have been emphasized by groups such as Critical Resistance in the United States and Abolitionist Futures in the United Kingdom. The contemporary abolitionist movement has always made connections between domestic and international state violence, hence the parallels between the term prison–industrial complex and the older phrase it builds on: the military–industrial complex. Given these global circuits of violence, a transnational lens appears not as a conceptual luxury but a practical necessity for understanding local struggles.
If abolitionist analysis shows us how death-making powers are linked internationally and intersectionally, like a monster with many tentacles, how do we thread together our varied forms of resistance to fight back? INCITE!, a network of radical feminists of color founded in 2000, brought an analysis—rooted in resistance to state, community, and interpersonal gender- and sexuality-based violence—to early abolitionist critiques of policing at home and occupation abroad, as well as their intersections. In its first decade, INCITE! and others posed the question of how to prevent, repair, and address intimate-partner harm beyond the state’s criminal legal system. They found inspiration in community justice models created and practiced by Indigenous, migrant, queer, disabled, sex-working, punk, and other communities of resistance around the world—in regions spanning Central and South America; South, South East, and East Asia; sub-Saharan Africa; Oceania; and the continent many Indigenous peoples call Turtle Island (North America).
Since then, projects around the world to address interpersonal and state violence, particularly in its gendered and sexual dimensions, have increasingly constellated around the term transformative justice. While abolitionist campaigns may leverage visibility to win, the “spade work” of cultivating alternative and more equitable forms of care, justice, material life, and governance is often done in the shadows, away from public attention. How do we identify and connect these myriad transformative justice projects globally, given the reality that they are often elusive, sometimes ephemeral, wild, and scattered across different gardens?
In the summer of 2023, Interrupting Criminalization, Spring Up, and Just Practice Collaborative convened people from around the world who are practicing non-state, community-based responses to violence, particularly gendered and sexualized violence. This convening tested our hypothesis that more people are practicing what we in the United States call transformative justice than we know. Abolitionists and transformative justice practitioners often root their contemporary practices within ancestral lineages, suggesting that our current terms and practices are merely a few iterations of a much wider universe of alternative approaches to justice and ways of being otherwise. We were curious to explore the paradigms and languages that others around the world are using to build life-giving alternatives that prevent, interrupt, and heal harm, including the harms caused by the punitive death-world of prisons, policing, the military, and other iterations of state violence.
We struggled with how to define transformative justice broadly enough to capture this bright universe of projects, but also narrowly enough to ensure we were in the same constellation of stars. On the one hand, transformative justice is increasingly used as an all-encompassing term without clear meaning, so we wanted to give it some conceptual gravity and guardrails. Yet at the same time, we knew that transformative justice was also likely too narrow a framework—a term shaped by U.S. political sensibilities, aesthetics, and habits, including the professionalization of the nonprofit sphere.
A recent report that I wrote, “Transformative Justice Knows No Borders: Learning from Community-Based Responses to Harm Around the World,” summarizes the findings from that convening. Similar streams of thought emerged again and again across our sessions. A somatic practitioner in Berlin, Germany, who goes by the name Care, alongside Stas Schmiedt and Leander Roth of Spring Up, a U.S.-based collective, reminded us of the need for healing and the use of body work and nature to that end. Healing Justice Ldn and Cradle Community in the UK emphasized the necessity of ancestral lineages and using metaphorical time travel to tap their wisdom and also project it into the future. Speakers connected to organizations in India, Kurdistan, and the Philippines described traditional, community-based conflict resolution models; they also critiqued how these models often reinforce existing power structures and thus need to be transformed or overcome in order to adequately address gender and sexuality-based harms. Speakers from Ujimaa Medics, Dream Defenders, and Vision Change Win in the United States and Reaja ou Será Morta in Brazil bore witness to the creation not only of non-carceral responses to violence but also hard-fought alternative systems of care to scaffold and resource those responses.
These new life-giving systems also need a stable relationship to land, as Kurdish, Indian, and Indigenous comrades on Turtle Island (North America) were able to identify. Issues and identities intertwined—we heard from sex worker activists and from queer and trans perspectives, and learned about non-carceral approaches to child sexual abuse and youth criminalization, knowing there can often be overlap between these experiences. Lastly, multiple speakers surfaced the challenges of working with persons who cause harm, and ReSpec and A Call for Change Helpline offered technologically enabled, globally available solutions for accountability, such as one-on-one confidential phone support or monthly virtual drop-in meetings for people who have caused harm and want to change their abusive or harmful behaviors.
The term justice is central to transformative justice, and it has a dual meaning. More narrowly understood, individual and interpersonal justice describe responses to harm or wrong. The case studies in the report explore non-state responses to sexual and domestic violence in the Philippines, Kurdistan, and India, and support for incarcerated trans people and women in Argentina (many of whom are also survivors of intimate violence). However, under each of these responses to interpersonal violence lies a vast network of care infrastructures necessary to enable such responses, like the mycelial networks of fungi under the soil that enable plants and trees to thrive. In this way, justice’s more expansive meaning—as social justice—comes into view.
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Each case study surfaces a response strategy to gendered violence, as well as a new way of structuring communities and the society at large that enables this response in the first place. Scaffolding the YoNoFui collective’s poetry workshops with incarcerated women and queer people in Buenos Aires are the solidarity economies built by the landless and unemployed movement of piqueteras and piqueteros in Argentina. These economies are gendered by the feminist strike movement against machismo and femicide, which aims to build solidarity and care across both the public, masculinized formal economy and the private, feminized informal economy of care labor. In Rojava, the community houses where women facing violence can find refuge, empowerment, and political education on Kurdish feminism (or Jinealojî) are rooted in democratic confederalist political structures built by the revolutionaries of the Kurdish freedom movement. Through informal community support for domestic violence survivors in Manila, we see the horizon of new forms of relating to others and “structures of feeling” built by the ABOLISYON! collective in the Philippines. These styles of organizing emphasize decentralized and informal relationship-building over the bureaucratic party structures typical of carceral political systems. The use of healing circles to address child sexual abuse is rooted in a legacy of marginalized groups surviving and outsmarting the law.
In almost every case, we heard not only about the new but also about the old: traditional, community-based justice systems. These were typically seen as having an ambivalent lineage, both an inspiration to draw upon but often also falling short when it came to gender, caste, race, and more. Many of these systems were community-based but not necessarily transformative, reinforcing entrenched systems of power and social capital.
For example, images of legendary Kurdish women guerillas and revolutionaries adorn the walls of the Mala Jin, the “women’s houses” across northern Syria where women can bring conflicts or violence they are facing for dialogue and mediation. Women seeking divorces, resisting polygamy, or experiencing domestic violence can come to one of over sixty-six (as of 2021) Mala Jin houses spread across the autonomous Kurdish region of Rojava. Here, family and gender-based conflicts are resolved through a restorative justice model, part of a wider framework that requires mediation at a community level before accessing adversarial courts. “These structures of solving communal conflict have always existed in Kurdistan,” scholar Nazan Üstündağ explained. “But they were male based and consisted of tribal and religious leaders. But now we have women making this model feminist, and we have also made them accessible to all women.”
The stateless Kurdish people are spread across four nation-states in the Middle East. While resistance to forced assimilation into these nation-states’ dominant cultures has been ongoing, the movement cohered into a formal organization with the founding of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in 1978. Founded by Abdullah Öcalan and others, this party waged guerilla warfare against Turkey to seek national independence and build a secular, socialist state for the people of Kurdistan. But Öcalan later shifted from a focus on centralized nation-state sovereignty to a vision of grassroots-distributed social ecologies made up of democratically self-governed communities and cooperative economies in a concept he called “democratic confederalism.” In her writing on the Kurdish women’s movement, Dilar Dirik connects the turn away from the nation-state to Kurdish feminism, describing the nation-state and visions of taking state power as masculinist. By framing women as the “first colony,” the Kurdish women’s movement links genocide and femicide, and unites struggles for decolonization with ending patriarchy in an ideology called Jineolojî. (Jin is Kurdish for woman.)
The revolution and counterrevolution in Syria in the early 2010s created an opening for Kurdish forces to establish liberated zones in three cantons in an area of northern Syria known as Rojava. Here, the political and social systems of governance envisaged by democratic confederalism have been realized through concentric rings of assemblies that represent neighborhoods, districts, and whole cities. In addition, there are assemblies for specific communities—youth, women, religious communities, and the like—and justice-based councils such as the Women’s Justice Council and the Social Justice Council. Participation and leadership by women is guaranteed by quotas and the requirement that every leadership role be doubled—one man, one woman. As Kurdish scholar Emre Şahin has shared, “Women actively participate in mixed-gender political, economic, military, and civil society organizations while simultaneously operating their women-only versions of every such organization,” with the women-only organizations often having veto power over the mixed-gender organizations.
This story, as well as the other case studies, highlight locally rooted frameworks through which we might approach the concept of what we in the Global North have called abolition and transformative justice. For our Kurdish comrades, the relevant terms of debate might be autonomy, self-defense, and dignity. In Argentina, we might use the poetry of the feminist strike to combat the language of machismo, and put alternative justices in the plural to show a diversity of ways to respond to violence. From the point of view of our Indian speakers, the story could be about annihilating caste while preserving the wisdom of caste-oppressed groups that navigate around criminalization to survive. And among our friends in the Philippines, whatever the conversation is, it should be one held informally, with militant joy among comrades, over a dinner party. What other entry points to non-carceral care and justice can we find if we blur the boundaries of U.S. concepts?
For abolitionist projects that confront the state to divert its resources, occupy its seats of governance, or try to bring it down, the nation-state framework seems relevant and necessary because campaigns respond to the unique contours and conditions of specific state offices or powers. Transformative justice projects, however, focus on society underneath, and beyond, the state; they tend to be hyperlocal, asserting the community rather than the state as the site for care, justice, and democratic self-governance. These groups tend to be less structured and more informal, since they build on kitchen-table networks of mutual aid held by marginalized people who often do not have access to—or see their work reflected in—formal organizations. And for whom informality also helps them to evade state capture.
As such, transformative justice projects may be better reflected by the term transnational than international, if we can reclaim the expression from corporate business lingo and its dreams of borderless capital (and bordered human beings). Indeed, more recent global social movements, such as today’s no-border movement, have tended toward rhizomatic, local cells of resistance, networking transnationally across borders, not as representatives of a nation-state context.
A Transformative Justice Transnational could take many shapes, and the imagery offered at the conference for our cross-border connections featured “emergent strategy”–style shapes from the natural world, like mycelium and roots, as a way of building these living webs of coordination at a larger scale without centralization. In the report, I also offer the imagery of typically gendered activities like weaving, stitching, and knitting—connections that bring together different threads into shared patterns through embodied practice. Others spoke of our work as a set of experiments, grounded in peer learning and storytelling but not aiming for universalizable models or abstracted best practices. Rather than building organization, our aim was to build specific forms of subjectivity or embodiment: rehearsing the new forms of relating we are trying to create in the world. Vulnerability and other resources for these new ways of being are made available by the experience of surviving violence—a broken openness that makes space to plant the new.
This essay was adapted from “Transformative Justice Knows No Borders: Learning from Community-Based Responses to Harm Around the World” by Melanie Brazzell with support from the organizing team of the Practicing for an Abolitionist World conference.
Image: Arun Geetha Viswanathan/Unsplash
