Abolition feminism and international law: Critiques of carcerality meet environmental justice

This article draws on the work of North American Black feminist activists and scholars, particularly Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis, alongside other anti-carceral and abolitionist perspectives, to ask what happens when abolition feminism perspectives are brought to international law to study legal responses to the current ecological and climate breakdown. Building upon recent abolition feminist literature and activism against what Braz and Gilmore term the 'three Ps', referring to 'police, pollution, and prisons', we aim to illuminate and address the connection between transnational criminalisation, capitalism, patriarchal structures, and environmental exploitation. Our argument is that abolition feminism can inspire different legal engagements with the ongoing environmental catastrophe and its uneven racialised and gendered impacts. We identify three key features of abolition feminist thought that are particularly poignant in this regard. The first is abolition feminism's use of intersectionality, not merely as a tool for better inclusion, but as a way of understanding the interlocking nature of multiple forms of oppression. The second is the 'both/and' approach, which embraces what appear as contradictory legal strategies to pursue longer-term political goals. The third is abolition feminism's critique of the violent nature of racial capitalism that calls for the need to repel the state's coercive apparatus, while exposing the role that corporations play in fostering extractivism. Whereas the complicity of the international legal order in producing ecological privileges and vulnerabilities has been discussed in the literature, in this article we contend that abolition feminism can offer fresh intellectual tools to develop both a generative critique of international legal approaches to the socio-ecological collapse, particularly those that reproduce a carceral logic, and compelling visions of more liveable societies.