Abstract
To be an abolitionist in 2026 is to hold the urgency of the project to dismantle the prison industrial complex in one hand, and the weight of the current crisis ordinariness (Berlant, 2011) in the other. Although the years that followed the global uprising of 2020 brought abolition into public discourse (for example, see Kaba, 2020), in recent years this horizon of possibility has narrowed. In the UK, protests have been met with intensified state repression (Blowe, 2025; Renton, 2024), meanwhile fascism reigns supreme in the United States, with many of the modest defund the police reforms finding themselves reversed (Ebbinghaus et al., 2025; Terwiel et al., 2026). In Europe, the politics of crime and migration have combined to produce a carceral expansionism that crosses ideological lines, and globally, the punitive state shows few signs of contracting (Loick and Thompson, 2026; Ruggiero and Ryan, 2013). In this context, it would be easy to give into futility, mistaking the hostility of the present moment as evidence of abolition's impossibility. It is here that David Scott and Emma Bell's Envisioning Abolition makes its crucial intervention, pulling readers away from ‘immediatism’ and an ‘overfocus on the present’ (p. 3) towards the traditions of the 18th to early 20th centuries; echoing as they do Jose Esteban Muñoz's (2009) demand to undertake a backwards glance to enact a future vision.
This focus ensures Envisioning Abolition is a useful addition to a growing body of abolitionist scholarship, reminding us that abolition is, and has long been, a realist project (Terwiel, 2025). Although the editors observe that ‘new advocates of penal abolitionism seem unaware of its recent and its more ancient history’ (p. 1) – a statement that is not entirely accurate (for example, see Abolitionist Futures, no date) – it is nonetheless true that the past remains underutilised in contemporary scholarship and perhaps also organising. Envisioning Abolition seeks to remedy this, making a compelling case that understanding both what has and has not worked in earlier abolitionist movements is not an academic exercise but a political necessity. Central to this is its sustained engagement with socialist and anarchist thought – or red and black traditions – that runs through much of the collection. This functions as the text's central organising principle, striving to take seriously these intellectual and political inheritances as resources for abolitionist practice today for, as the editors argue, ‘penal abolitionism needs to proudly don the colours of both red and black’ (p. 26).
The collection itself spans a wide range of perspectives, with each chapter offering a history of a particular thinker within what the editors describe as the ‘abolitionist rhizome’ (Scott, 2025). Several chapters grapple with what has long driven abolitionist commitment, such as encounters with the death penalty, displacement, and the daily violence of incarceration. In doing so, the book's theoretical argument remains grounded in an injustice that generates not despair but action. The attention given to cultural depictions of prison abolition is also noteworthy, highlighting a recognition that the imagination is also a vital site of struggle (ackhurst, 2024; Benjamin, 2019; Crockett Thomas, 2025).
The text's most generative contributions, however, are those which sit with figures who did not always get it right. The treatment of Alexander Berkman in Chapter 16 is one such example. As Søren Hough – the chapter's author – reminds us, although his work occasionally ‘leans too far into simplistic analysis and solutions’ and ‘falls short of modern abolitionist theory’, this is not reason to set him aside (p. 303). Instead, as Hough argues, ‘we can learn from both Berkman's ideas and his flaws to produce a new synthesis of anarchist and abolitionist ideas’ (p. 303). It is this refusal to demand perfection from the past that gives the collection much of its force. Federico Testa's chapter on Jean-Marie Guyau's work on sanction (Chapter 8) is similarly useful, bringing a language of generosity to debates that so often remain locked within the moral justification of legal punishment (p. 149, p. 156), and speaking productively to more recent work, such as that of Carvalho and Chamberlin (Chamberlen and Carvalho, 2022) on the ways in which a felt sense of injustice fuels punitive desire. That a backwards glance can illuminate such enduring questions with this kind of precision is, in itself, a compelling argument for the collection's methodology. Penny Weiss’ chapter on Emma Goldman (Chapter 15) stands as perhaps the collection's most powerful contribution. Goldman, we are told, came to her abolitionism through an ‘unasked-for education’ in the carceral state, and Weiss showcases her forceful hopefulness through reminding us of her challenge to those who would invoke human nature to justify punishment: ‘how can anyone speak of [human nature] today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed[?]’ (Goldman, 1969: 62 cited p. 294). It is a provocation that must, as Weiss suggests, continue to ‘enlighten and ignite’ (p. 277).
There are, of course, areas where Envisioning Abolition could have extended its focus, scope and analysis. The editors themselves reflect on the volume's attention to white male thinkers (p. xii), and this is a limitation that is felt throughout. This is especially noteworthy given the strength of the chapter on Goldman. As a reader, I was left questioning whether a more searching approach might have unearthed other lesser-known thinkers of equal importance, especially given the collection's own willingness to include figures, like Pietro Gori, who were not obvious abolitionists (p. 227). Furthermore, although the collection's focus on anarchist thought is useful, there are moments when the argument edges towards a position in which doing away with the state entirely becomes the only intellectually serious one (p. 169). In doing so, the editors and contributors at times risk marginalising a significant body of formative abolitionist work concerned with reimagining, rather than solely dismantling, state structures (Cooper et al., 2019; Gilmore, 2007). This tension is most apparent in Chapter 9's treatment of Kropotkin, where the author suggests that Angela Davis's (2003: 113) abolitionist imagination is ‘limited to radical transformations within the existing justice system’. Many readers may find this characterisation reductive, and one that sits uneasily with the collection's own later acknowledgement of the plurality of the abolitionist project (p. 189).
Through the lens of Anna Terwiel's (2025) recently published Prison Abolition for Realists, I would suggest that arguments such as this risk tipping into as a paranoid type of abolition; this being a mode of abolitionist politics so preoccupied with critique that it struggles to remain generative. Pertinently, Terwiel's (2025) work offers a useful counterpoint to this framework through the conceptualisation of agonistic abolition, an approach to prison abolition rooted in realism, pluralism and action. In thinking with this concept, I wonder if at times the collection's unyielding focus on the red and black means it risks ignoring other perspectives and orientations within the abolitionist project. Yet it is worth stressing that the project as a whole is most certainly characterised more by agonism than paranoia, and the hope it instils across its pages ensures that Envisioning Abolition remains a formative book. Indeed, in a world frequently moved to a place of pessimism – or even cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011) – by the relentlessness of the awfulness of the neoliberal present, the significance of this intervention cannot be overstated.