Afterword Toward the Law of Anti-laws: Notes on Prefigurative Politics and Radical Imaginations

Mariful Alam and Irina Ceric

As we write this afterword, there are calls to disarm and abolish the police across the United States and Canada following the murder of George Floyd, yet another Black man killed by a white police officer in the United States. The call has also brought into the mainstream conversations regarding alternatives to incarceration and prisons as a solution to interpersonal violence and structural racism, a timely discussion that chapter 4 in this volume on the #MeToo movement engages with. Only a few months ago, these kinds of conversations were almost unimaginable in mainstream media and public policy debates. This rapid progression has given thinkers such as Dr. Angela Davis—a pioneer in the prison abolition movement—hope for a transformative future. When “many of us began to talk about abolishing these [policing and carceral] institutions back in the 1970s,” Davis states in a recent interview with Boston University’s WBUR radio station, “We were treated as if we were absolutely out of our minds. . . . This is the opportunity for us to begin to reimagine the meaning of [public safety]” (Mosley and Hagan 2020). It seems that now, more than ever, the contribution of socio-legal scholars to the discussion of state violence is needed. The conversation on police violence will, among other things, centre questions around possibilities of moving outside and beyond law’s power and toward transformative—not retributive—justice. In what follows, we believe a dialogue between critical legal scholarship and radical social movement organizing can be fruitful for thinking through these possibilities.

In this volume’s introduction, the editors map how legal regimes animate oppressive power relations. We build on these observations to make a bold claim: It will never be possible to separate the force of law from violence, whether that violence is metaphysical, social, or political. As Jacques Derrida famously explained, the relationship among law, violence, and justice is, and will always remain, paradoxical (1992). This tense and often contradictory relationship is clearly demonstrated in several of the chapters in this volume. Chapter 1 and chapter 2, for example, remind us that decolonization and racial justice for Indigenous peoples cannot be achieved without radically reimagining how we can deconstruct and transform settler-colonial legal regimes that are inherently designed to erode and eliminate Indigenous peoples and their sovereignty (see also Walia 2014). Similarly, chapters 3 and 4 illustrate how legal discourses, knowledge, and strategies are essential in the (re)production of racial and gendered violence and subjugation.

The chapters in this volume suggest to us that a “just world,” where subjects are free from oppressive power relations, will consequently require the imagination of communities where the state and its law cease to exist. This claim may seem “utopian,” “naive,” and “impossible” to either imagine or put into practice, but the recent events that have unfolded in relation to police violence and the compelling argument put forward in the last chapter (chapter 7)—that socio-legal scholarship must continue to find ways to benefit the marginalized and oppressed—serve as reminders that activists and academics must not give up on transformative imaginations or dreams of radical alternatives. Unfortunately, as the editors noted in the introduction, much of the discussion of social transformation and resistance in socio-legal studies centres around the question of whether and how law can be used to achieve practical change. What alternatives to law could look like—that is, how communities could organize their everyday lives and how they could address social and interpersonal conflicts outside of an apparatus of violence—is an underexplored and underdeveloped question in the field. It is here where we think socio-legal scholarship could look to elements within new social movements and the practice of prefigurative politics to generate a dialogue on radical possibilities.

Social movement scholars have extensively documented that, unlike older radical movements that were often organized hierarchically through vanguard political party structures, newer social movements are not striving to take control of the state and its legal apparatus (Holloway 2010). Instead, they are attempting to develop new forms of self-organization that can run parallel to existing forms of governance (Day 2005; Gautney 2012; Graeber 2002, 2009; Juris 2008; Maeckelbergh 2009, 2011). What uniquely distinguishes these new movements is the emphasis on employing non-violent forms of social interaction in their organizations. These practices manifest the very forms of social relationships, albeit in a miniature form, that activists hope to achieve in the longer term. Social movement scholars have conceptualized this as a form of prefigurative politics, which seeks to collapse the distinction between means and ends (Franks 2003, 145; see also Dixon 2014; Gautney 2012). The idea is as follows: by organizing direct actions and developing alternative community initiatives based on the principles of mutual aid, solidarity, and transformative justice, not only are activists practically challenging institutions and symbols of oppression, but they are also simultaneously opening space to experiment with and (re)imagine “radical models of democracy” (Juris 2008, 126).

For example, activists have long organized their own radical legal support structures to defend movements, resist criminalization, and support arrested or detained comrades. Beginning in the 1970s and then re-emerging during the alterglobalization movement, law collectives and other activist legal projects have provided legal support to thousands of activists and protesters by facilitating access to lawyers, fielding legal observers, staffing legal hotlines, and organizing court and jail support. Radical legal support organizers have provided countless workshops and trainings, from basic “Know Your Rights” sessions for protesters to impromptu solidarity trainings in police wagons and more advanced train-the-trainer workshops on organizing legal support for the movement. Such popular legal education efforts—like the legal guides, manuals, comic books, videos, websites, and other popular legal education resources developed by activist legal support providers—are resolutely political, aimed at defending and building movements for radical social change. The provision of direct support and legal assistance alongside legal information and resources is approached as a movement-building tactic, grounded in the need to counter state repression at every stage of organizing (Ceric 2020). These dual roles—popular legal education and direct support—are also evidence of a commitment to prefigurative movement praxis. In their largely involuntary engagements with law, radical legal support organizers strive toward what one activist legal support project described as “forms of individual and collective empowerment that are alien to the legal process, where we are usually objects rather than agents” (CRASS 2010).

As responses to repression and criminalization, the capacity-building and movement defence praxes of activist legal support organizers demonstrate the counter-hegemonic and prefigurative potential of radical legal work. Especially when carried out by non-lawyers, this work points toward a mode of movement lawyering from below, a mutual aid project that does not take the legitimacy of the legal system as a given and recognizes that repression can breed resistance as well as demobilization (Ceric 2020). The work of radical legal support organizers in shaping post-arrest experiences into mobilizing ones and the broader pedagogical interventions it builds on are evidence of a distinct orientation toward law and the state, one that engages with the law as it is without fully conceding its legitimacy or acknowledging it as the boundary of emancipatory possibilities (2020). This example points to a form of prefiguration that aims to advance analyses of the criminalization of dissent that go beyond frames of liberal constitutionalism to theorize and actually construct alternate notions of justice, accountability, and redress, both within our own movements, communities, and/or organizations and in terms of challenging the state on its own terrain. The work of radical legal support organizers is one example of prefiguration, which socio-legal scholars could draw on to begin a dialogue between critical legal scholarship and social movement organizing in order to sketch imaginations and alternative possibilities to law and state violence.

Another example comes from migrant justice activists, such as the No One is Illegal networks operating across North America and Europe that have successfully implemented initiatives to turn their local municipalities into sanctuary cities. A sanctuary city is a space where the municipal government, its local police forces, and all in-city public services pledge to neither deny undocumented immigrants access to social services nor report their immigration status to the federal government to ensure their safety and protection. Although seemingly paradoxical, sanctuary cities are an example of how alterglobalization activists organize their revolution both within and also outside of the confinements of law and state power. More importantly, sanctuary cities reflect the vision of open borders not merely as a policy goal but also as a move toward abolishing the violence of borders and law all together (see Squire and Bagelman 2014).

Similarly, anti-carceral and Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC) feminist organizations such as INCITE! and Philly Stands Up in the United States are offering practical visions on how to organize against interpersonal and sexual violence within their communities without relying on the police or criminal justice system. INCITE!, for example, offers tools and intervention strategies based on transformative justice and community accountability, a process in which “a group of friends, a family, a church, a workplace, an apartment complex, a neighborhood” can work together to address a community “member’s abusive behavior” by “creating a process for them to account for their actions and transform their behavior” (INCITE! n.d.). INCITE! also seeks to develop ways to provide safety and support “to community members who are violently targeted that respects their self-determination” (ibid.; see also INCITE! 2016; Law 2014).

Like INCITE!, Philly Stands Up is another collective of feminist activists working in Philadelphia “to confront sexual assault” in various communities by using “a transformative justice framework” (Philly Stands Up n.d.). The collective directly intervenes and works with both perpetrators and survivors to resolve conflicts and harms using community-based strategies without relying on the criminal justice system. As the collective’s mandate states, in dealing with perpetrators, the group seeks to “recognize and change [their] behavior, rather than ostracizing and allowing future assaults elsewhere.” Furthermore, they support “their healing process, and challenge them on their behavior in order to prevent future assaults” (Philly Stands Up n.d.). As Esteban Lance Kelly (2011–12) writes, the group’s belief is that the violence of prison systems cannot solve issues that require transforming socio-economic conditions. On the contrary, prisons reinforce cycles of sexual violence, as it systemically targets low-income and working-class communities of colour, particularly Black and Brown communities, and destabilizes families in the process (Kelly 2011–12, 50; see also Law 2014). By practicing a community-oriented approach, the group creates a “culture of care” that opens space for individuals to develop skills and knowledge that offers not only an image of what a world without the violence of the state and prisons could look like but also a practical approach in challenging sexual violence and social harm (ibid., 51).

In chapter 4 of this volume, the authors highlight how carceral and criminal justice solutions to interpersonal conflicts and sexual violence has merely led to a prison-industrial complex that has disproportionately targeted poor Black, Indigenous, and other people of colour. The initiatives and models used by groups such as INCITE! and Philly Stands Up offer other opportunities for socio-legal scholars to engage in dialogues reimagining what justice could look like and how we can think through ways to address and respond to interpersonal community conflicts without having to perpetuate or rely on state violence (see also Gaarder 2009).

The examples noted above are only a few out of many examples in which activists are creatively and democratically organizing. All this is not to suggest that the visions and models discussed above should be understood as essentializing blueprints and schematics. They are not without their own sets of contradictions and limitations. Radical legal support can often wind up recreating the very top-down professionalized and service-oriented models it set out to challenge, and a lack of intergenerational movement infrastructure means that this sort of organizing is often crisis-driven and reactive. The long-term maintenance of sanctuary cities requires constant vigilance against both state and non-state incursion as forms of securitization evolve and often privatize. Despite the rapid diffusion of abolitionist critiques, communities attempting to address sexual violence without resorting to force must grapple with complex procedural and practical questions (such as, What do you when someone refuses to participate in an accountability process?) that often prove divisive and exhausting in practice. All these examples are subject to critiques of scale: (How) Can hyper local and/or culturally marginal projects challenge the hegemony of state law and market forces? Can insurgent legalities take root outside of activist (sub)cultures? Finally, and fundamentally, none of these examples speak to the possibilities posed by decolonization and the potential reordering of settler-colonial legal regimes prefigured by assertions and enactments of Indigenous sovereignty and jurisdiction.

Despite the limitations, the various examples discussed above reveal that human possibilities and resilience are not fixed. Not only do these examples of collective actions and acts of solidarity, even if small in scale, offer visions of a future in which our communities can organize themselves and address social harms in ways that are humane and just, without relying on the repression of the state and its laws, but they also reveal practical examples of resistance and emancipation. The intersection of socio-legal studies and grassroots organizing initiatives would strengthen efforts to abolish systems of domination and repressive power and enable us to think through ways in which we can live in a better world.