The multiple genealogies of abolitionism: Undoing the detractive rights’ logics and the reform-revolution dichotomy

This chapter advances border abolitionism as a method for elaborating a critique of the border regime, focusing on the interlocking, racialised modes of mobility containment. An abolitionist perspective, the chapter argues, challenges migrants’ confinement beyond the distinction between deserving and undeserving migrants and, thus, dismantles the very logics of migration confinement and kidnapping. Abolitionism as an approach, equips us with the analytical tools for engaging in transformative political processes while undoing the binary opposition between democratising borders or removing them: indeed, the specificity of abolitionist practices consists in holding together processes of dismantling and building up. The chapter contends that it is key to multiply the genealogies of abolitionism, by de-centring US-focused framing of it. In order to do that, it draws attention to the movement against psychiatric hospitals, called Psichiatria Democratica, led by Franco Basaglia in Italy, between the late 1960s and the mid 1980s. The anti-asylums movement, as this chapter illustrates, has been of inspiration to struggles against prisons across Europe and more broadly against the confinement continuum, and it has been key for developing abolitionism beyond the reform/revolution dichotomy.