Monthly Archives: September 2021

A World Without Police & Anticolonial Eruptions Events

The Anti-Racism, Equity and Justice (AREJ) Organizing Team is honored to promote and encourage you to attend Professor Ciccariello-Maher’s talk titled A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete. The event will take place on Thursday, September 23rd at 5:30 pm in Rockefeller Hall 300 and via the Zoom link below:

https://vassar.zoom.us/j/99114237506

Description of Talk: In his abolitionist manifesto, Ciccariello-Maher examines how a society built around policing and that presumes their necessity, sees the police as a one-size-fits-all solution for every social problem: poverty, mental health, a lack of opportunity, or inadequate afterschool or sports programs. Going beyond a diagnosis of the problem, Ciccariello-Maher turns to the long history of abolition and the uprising against the police in the summer of 2020 that cast police abolition into the mainstream imagination to explore what doing so might actually look like. With insights from communities in North American cities, as well as some in Latin America that provide models for protecting and caring for one another without the intervention from the police, this lecture outlines some of the tools communities use to build a world without police and beyond the prison industrial complex.

About the Speaker: George Ciccariello-Maher is visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vassar College. He is the author of We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution (2013), Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela (2016). Decolonizing Dialectics ( 2017), A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete (2021), and Anticolonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance (2021). He is also a co-editor of the Duke University Press book series Radical Américas and his dispatches have appeared in The Nation, Jacobin, Salon, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, MR Zine, ZNet, Venezuela Analysis, Alternet, Warscapes Magazine, History Workshop Online, MediaLeft, The SF Bayview, and Wiretap Magazine.