Abolition Feminism and Jumping Scale: Transformative Justice as a Way of Life

Abstract

Abolition feminism builds on the concept of “abolition democracy” as articulated by W.E.B. DuBois and Angela Y. Davis. They argued that in order to abolish slavery as well as institutions that furthered the afterlife of slavery, such as the prison industrial complex, it was necessary to simultaneously build a wide array of democratic institutions that would make slavery and the prison system unthinkable. In doing so, it further becomes clear that real democracy is inconsistent with slavery and the prison industrial complex. Similarly, abolition feminism signals that it is not possible to end carceral systems without a systemic gender analysis. At the same time, a liberatory feminist politic is inconsistent with an investment in carcerality. An abolitionist feminist politic is also ideally rooted in creativity and provisionality as it is primarily centered, not in just ending carceral systems, but creating systems of governance and sociality based on principles of horizontality, mutuality and relationality. At the same time, because many strands of abolition feminism tend to focus on the corporeal effects of gender violence on an individual scale, its practices are often presumed to only work on a smaller scale. This work will engage Laura Harjo’s analysis to look at how “jumping scale” can be used to connected the corporeal to a global praxis for transformation.

1. Introduction

The rise of the anti-violence movement has generally situated gender violence and its response on the corporeal level. That is, the focus of sexual violence and interpersonal violence is on the impact of violence on the body. (1) How do we keep that body safe? (2) How do we heal the body from its trauma? This individualized, corporeal focus then contributed to both a carceral and medicalized response to gender violence. First, we need police to keep individual bodies safe as gender violence becomes understood as individual rather than a collective problem of managing bodies that have been deemed vulnerable (and bodies that are not deemed vulnerable or often deemed unworthy of protection). Corporeal trauma also then becomes the site of medical intervention requiring professional treatment to enable healing. Essentially this corporeal focus implicitly understands gender violence as individualized rather than relational.

In response to these carceral and medicalized strategies for addressing gender violence developed an abolition feminist movement that called for a transformative justice strategy for addressing gender violence. Abolition feminism builds on the concept of “abolition democracy” as articulated by W.E.B. DuBois and Angela Y. Davis. They argued that in order to abolish slavery as well as institutions that furthered the afterlife of slavery, such as the prison industrial complex, it was necessary to simultaneously build a wide array of democratic institutions that would make slavery and the prison system unthinkable. In doing so, it further becomes clear that real democracy is inconsistent with slavery and the prison industrial complex ([1], p. 58; [2], p. 182). Similarly, abolition feminism signals that it is not possible to end carceral systems without a systemic gender analysis. At the same time, a liberatory feminist politic is inconsistent with an investment in carcerality. An abolitionist feminist politic is also ideally rooted in creativity and provisionality as it is primarily centered, not in just ending carceral systems, but creating systems of governance and sociality based on principles of horizontality, mutuality and relationality.

In this article, I argue that while transformative justice is a germinal framework for articulating response to gender violence, its formulations still tend to focus on gender violence as primarily corporeal and individualized rather than fully articulating corporeality in a relational manner. Consequently, transformative justice can easily lapse back into carceral and medicalized logics. Instead, I will suggest how a more global understanding of the history of transformative justice can connect the corporeal with multi-level scales of connectivity to create a different form of sociality and globality.

2. Transformative justice

Transformative justice is an abolition feminist practice that has become increasingly visible as a praxis for addressing inter-personal harm, often with a focus on gender-based violence, without relying on the criminal justice system. It operationalizes abolitionist feminism by creating processes and practices that can create communities capable of addressing harm without causing harm.¹ However, what transformative justice signifies is sharply contested. First the concept of transformative justice has emerged from disparate fields of inquiry and practice.² Within the strands of transformative justice that emerge more specifically from an abolition feminist framework, numerous questions arise: Is engaging in transformative justice inconsistent with ever calling for help from the police? Is transformative justice survivor-centered? Can transformative justice be scaled? Can it even work? My interest is less in providing a definitive account of what transformative justice is amidst these debates. As Ejeris Dixon says in a recent work on transformative justice, Beyond Survival, “There have been conversations, arguments, and even declarations of what and who is or is not transformative enough… I want to make certain that we let TJ [Transformative Justice] be free, that we do not judge TJ, put TJ into boxes or constrain TJ” ([6], p. loc 89). Rather, I want to explore the political possibilities for transformative justice with respect to one issue frequently debated—whether or not transformative justice can be built to scale.

Transformative justice is often viewed in at least some strands of this movement as developing out of a critique of restorative justice. ARestorative justice@ is an umbrella term that describes a wide range of programs which attempt to address harm—from the individual to the systemic level—from a restorative and reconciliatory rather than a punitive framework. That is, as opposed to the US criminal justice system that focuses solely on punishing a person who causes harm and removing that person from society through incarceration, restorative justice attempts to involve all parties (the person who caused harm, the person who was harmed, and community members) in determining the appropriate response to a harm in an effort to restore the community to wholeness. However, as restorative justice became popularized through being increasingly attached to the criminal justice system through diversionary programs, organizers operating from an abolition feminist perspective sought to develop a framework that did not rely on the criminal justice system. Ruth Morris was one of the first restorative justice practitioners to shift to the concept of transformative justice. She argued:

The very word restorative was unhealthy for victims. A victim’s first instinct is to want the world back as it was. Until a victim is ready to move on from this, to recognize they can transform the world positively from their pain, but they can’t restore the world as it was, their healing is blocked. Restorative justice, although intended to speak more of a Garden of Eden kind of restoration to the universe as God envisioned it, in practice encouraged victims in imagining that you can restore a past, before some trauma changed life forever. Restorative theory did not take into account the enormous structural injustices at the base of our justice systems, and the extent to which they function mainly to reinforce racism and classism. Any theory or method that ignores the racism and classism that are basic to retributive justice is missing something very vital, and will serve to reinforce that racism and classism further, by not challenging it. Related to both of these points, the idea of restoring justice implied we had had justice, and lost it. In fact, distributive justice abounds everywhere, and most offenders are, more than the average person is, victims of distributive injustice. Do we want to restore offenders to the marginalized, enraged, disempowered condition most were in just before the offence? This makes no sense at all ([5], p. 19)!

Not surprisingly, practitioners of transformative justice are wary of co-optation and incorporation into institutions and often focus on local praxis. For instance, nationally renowned transformative justice practitioner Shira Hassan argues that transformative justice cannot be scaled because to scale it would be to institutionalize it and transformative justice would thus devolve back into restorative justice [7]. Others, such as Ejeris Dixon, acknowledge that while TJ is not currently building to scale, eventually the goal is to “start small, build to scale, and allow ourselves to learn from both our successes and our failure” ([8], p. loc 303). In general, whether or not practitioners believe transformative justice can be built to scale, they often emphasize working at the local level first.

Some strands of the transformative justice movement also formed out of the realization that “community-based” approaches toward addressing harm often relied upon a romanticized notion of community that was not sexist, homophobic or otherwise problematic—or that “community” even existed to begin with. As restorative justice became associated with the social service delivery or as an “alternative” within the criminal justice system, transformative justice became articulated as a political organizing project geared toward creating communities of mutual accountability. The work of abolition feminists emerges amidst the contradictions of gender violence and harm that was perpetrated in the very movements that were trying to transform society. Consequently, the center of attention of some strands of abolition feminism has been the corporeal scale of gender violence. Many abolition feminists called for a shift of building to scale to building deeper and healthier relations among organizers on the local level as a result of this more individualized and corporeal focus [9]. This shift did not signify a lack of interest in ending systemic oppression; rather, local organizing became imagined as the site where systemic oppression could be most effectively addressed. As Adrienne Marie Brown frames it, “I love the idea of shifting from ‘mile wide inch deep’ movements to ‘inch wide mile deep’ movements that schism the existing paradigm” (ibid, 16). Doing the deep work necessary to transform communities structured under the logics of racial, gender and colonial violence as well as to create a space for traumatized bodies to heal seemed to work against the possibility then of bringing transformative justice to scale.

Another reason for the focus on the very local scale is the continuing focus of the corporeality of gender violence. Many strands of the transformative justice movement correctly noted that social justice struggles often collapsed because of the continuing impacts of unaddressed trauma within communities impacted by violence. Individuals acting out of unaddressed trauma had difficulty working collectively without bitter conflict. Thus, it was important that corporeal healing be integrated into social justice organizing itself. But then this focus on “self-care” and “healing” often displaced the importance of collective organizing, particularly at a larger scale. Certainly as Herbert Marcuse demonstrated, a focus on the body and pleasure can an important site to unveil the death-dealing structures of white supremacy, genocide, patriarchy and capitalism [10]. Creating a society that is pleasurable would necessarily create a society that is more just. But while many strands of the transformative justice movement have in fact focused on “pleasure activism” [11], how this pleasure on the corporeal scale is connected to dismantling global structures of oppression is not always operationalized. Pleasure activism is easier to imagine on the corporeal or local level rather than on a global level.

In this article, I wish to employ Laura Harjo’s Indigenous feminist methodology of “jumping scale” to suggest different political possibilities for articulating the relationship between transformative justice, the body and its healing from trauma and scale. Harjo’s work suggests that instead of articulating the relationship among the corporeal, the local and scale as unidirectional (starting small and building to scale) antagonistic (inch deep/mile wide vs. mile deep/inch wide), jumping scale suggests the possibility of a mile-wide/mile-deep approach that simultaneously resists incorporation into statist policies. Essentially, such an approach involves reconceptualizing transformative justice as more than a set of local processes, but as a way of life.

3. Jumping scale

Jumping scale according to Laura Harjo is a manner in which Indigenous transformation happens through traversing through different scales across time and space.³ She contends that transformation happens through a relational praxis through individual body, local and global scales. At the same these scales are also translated temporally through the ancestral knowledge and Indigenous futurities. What connects these traversals across scales is that they are built through relationality. They are never simply about gaining number nor leaving the body behind or ignoring the local to achieve the global. But rather they all exist in relationship to each other.

The Mvskoke individual living in the city without access to practices such as stomp dance or traditional games still perpetuates other Mvskoke values and practices; they still enact Mvskoke community even if it is at the scale of a single person and their body. Scale works with emergence geographies to help understand the spatial imaginary of relationality and kinship that operates in the Mvskoke community in ways that draw upon a network of spatiotemporal locations ([12], p. 11).

Mariame Kaba notes that transformative justice cannot be seen as a simply an alternative practice to incarceration.

It’s not actually the alternative… It is an ideology, a framework, a political vision, a practice… it’s simply a way to shift and transform our relationships to allow us to build the conditions under which we will no longer need prisons. Part of the problem of positing a quote “alternative” to the PIC is that it’s impossible. What is the alternative to oppression ([13], p. loc 3939)?

Similarly, Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues that the current abolitionist focus on the “prison industrial complex,” originally termed in order note the expansive nature of the carceral system, has instead truncated abolitionist politics. Thus if, transformative justice is not an “alternative,” what is it? Gilmore calls for abolitionist geographies that recognize that “freedom is a place” and that abolition requires not simply the dismantling of prisons, but the transformation of place [14]. But transformation of place can only happen through jumping scale because all places exist in relationship to teach other. Harjo’s articulation of jumping scale coordinates not only the local, but the individual body level to the global. Her articulations are consonant with an abolitionist feminist praxis that understands that global movements for social change are undermined when they are structured by individual practices of gender violence. As transformative justice practitioner Mia Mingus has argued, the abuse in our world begins with the fact that we have an abusive relationship with ourselves [15].

So that transformative justice can jump scale spatially we must also jump scale temporally. By traversing temporalities to ascertain the multiple genealogies of transformative justice, we can expand transformative justice’s possible futurities.

4. Traversing time

“Futurity is the invocation of many temporalities and spatialities to form an imaginary that is constructed from energy, kinship, community knowledge collective power, and geographies” ([12], p. 11)

Harjo describes her vision of Indigenous futurities in which communities can jump scale across time and place in order to spatialize the future. This happens through a process of what she describes as kin-space-tie envelopes that enable us to “understand social relations within the processes of globalization, such as political, cultural, and economic impacts connected to an area or geography” ([12], p. 28) But rather than chronological time being the glue in these envelopes, it is our relationships throughout time and space that provide an imaginary for the world we want to live in. “Futurity is a practice that invokes our ancestors’ and relatives’ unactivated possibilities in our present lived moment, and it imagines future possibilities” ([12], p. 34).

To explore how transformative justice can spatialize the future, I will first traverse time by exploring some of the multiple genealogies that helped give rise to the transformative justice movement. My intent is not so much to replace a “bad” genealogical account of transformative justice with a correct one. Rather, I seek to demonstrate other political possibilities for transformative justice that emerge when we multiply transformative justice’s genealogies, particularly by exploring a variegated history of the abolition feminist politics that gave rise to transformative justice. In particular, transformative justice emerged not just out of abolition feminist’s critique of carcerality, but its commitment to building systems of governance and living based on principles of horizontality, mutuality and relationality. Genealogical accounts of transformative justice tend to focus on its emergence out of what Mimi Kim describes as the “carceral creep” [16] within the anti-violence movement [17, 18, 19]. However, it equally emerged through an Indigenous critique of settler colonialism, feminist critiques of revolutionary movements in Latin America and critiques of the nation-state governance systems. From these multiple genealogies emerged multiple visions of what transformative justice could be.

At least one strand of the transformative justice movement developed through organizations working with an abolition feminist analysis.⁴ This strand is most popularly known through the statement made by Generation Five, an organization focused on ending child sexual abuse without investing in carceral systems. While Generation Five no longer exists, individuals from Generation Five have brought this politic to a number of organizations including Generative Somatics and the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective. The Generation Five statement itself, however, was also the product of collaboration with a number of individuals and organizations, including Incite! Women of Color Against Violence⁵ and Critical Resistance. In this essay, I wish to focus on the development of abolition feminist thought that emerged out of Incite! to build on the genealogies of transformative justice to assess what this genealogy might have to say about the scaling of transformative justice.

4.1 History of Incite!

Incite! emerged out of the both the anti-violence movement and the critical resistance movement.⁶ Co-founders of Incite! had been involved in anti-violence organizing for many years. The idea of Incite! in particular emerged when some of the co-founders had been engaged in a frustrating board meeting of the National Coalition Against Sexual Assault where some board members had proposed that Hillary Clinton be invited as a keynote speaker to the next national conference. This choice was illustrative of what the eventual co-founders of Incite! perceived to be as two trends in the anti-violence movement: (1) issues faced by women of color were at the margins of the anti-violence movement and (2) this movement was primarily concerned with professionalization, respectability and social service provision instead of building a political movement to actually end violence. At the same time, co-founders were also fatigued with being part of the “women of color caucus” of their various national and state anti-violence organizations in which they provided continual critique of white-dominated movements to no effect. Thus, at this board meeting, these eventual co-founders of Incite! began writing the names of people who could begin a women of color anti-violence organization that was committed to grassroots organizing rather than primarily to social service delivery. Many years later, these individuals listed on this napkin eventually converged in Santa Cruz for the first Color of Violence conference held in April 2000.

The founding of Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex was also a formative part of the genealogy of Incite! Critical Resistance formed nationally to advance abolitionism. Some of the co-founders of Incite! had also been involved in co-organizing the first Critical Resistance conference held in Berkeley in 1999. As the anti-violence movement became increasingly connected to the criminal justice system, it became virtually impossible to critique criminalization within mainstream anti-violence organizations. The Violence Against Women Act of 1994 (or VAWA), despite being part of a repressive anti-crime bill, was heralded as “feminist” legislation. Any attempts to critique VAWA were immediately denounced as anti-survivor. However, the emergence of critical resistance began to provide a framework by which those in the anti-violence movement could critique its investment in criminalization.

At the time of the founding conference of Incite!, the “Color of Violence” in 2000, the founders did not know what the solution to carceral feminism was. But it sought to create a space to figure out what the possibilities might be. In that spirit, the Color of Violence was organized to bring abolitionists in conversation with anti-violence advocates who did not necessarily have an abolitionist perspective. Through this conversation, anti-violence advocates were challenged to rethink their unquestioned reliance on criminal legal solutions. At the same time, they also challenged abolitionists to develop more thoroughgoing gender analysis in their work. This continuing conversation culminated in a statement produced by Incite! and critical resistance on gender violence and the prison industrial complex, which can be understood as an abolition feminist call to develop non-statist approaches to ending gender violence.⁷

Incite! organizing operated at the intersections of addressing healing at the bodily level while simultaneously addressing global structures of violence. On the one hand, it was intervening in the tendency in more patriarchal social justice movements to create little space for healing or for addressing interpersonal violence within these movements. They were aware of interpersonal dynamics that resulted from organizations inability to address impact of trauma on peoples’ bodies quickly led to organizational dysfunctionality and disintegration. At the same time, it was wary of the social service model for addressing corporeal trauma that did challenge the global conditions that created trauma in the first place.

While developing their abolition feminist critiques of carcerality, however, Incite! members did not know how it would be possible to end inter-personal gender violence without relying on the criminal justice system. Thus, Incite! started organizing activist institutes to figure out what could be other possibilities. Ideas that developed from these institutes were distributed so that local groups could experiment with them.⁸ Numerous formations, connected and not connected with Incite!, developed that began experimenting with different processes and strategies. Mimi Kim then used this work from Incite! to develop creative interventions, from which emerged the immortal 600+ Creative Interventions Toolkit that is a foundational text for many transformative justice practitioners today.⁹

Given this genealogy, it is not a surprise that transformative justice became equated with local processes. Through years of experimentation, many practitioners learned that such processes could actually be successful, but they had to be thoughtful and time intensive. Such local processes tended to come into place AFTER harm had occurred, and their contextually-based nature made them difficult to imagine being scaled.

However, it is also important to note that these practices that emerged from Incite! were influenced not just by those who emerged out of the anti-violence movement. Sista II Sista began collaborating with Incite! soon after its formation and had a transformative effect on Incite!‘s political vision. It influenced Incite!’s abolition feminist analysis to not just focus on ending carceral systems, but in creating systems of governance and living based on principles of horizontality, mutuality and relationality. Many organizers in Sista II Sista were focused less on the critiquing carceral feminism and more on addressing gender violence within revolutionary movements. Thus, their implementation of transformative justice was always premised on it building to scale. Through Sista II Sista, Incite! became involved in the World Social Forum and became more directly engaged in transnational mass movements for social change. These exchanges shifted the focus of Incite! from simply thinking of transformative justice as a process for addressing harm after it occurred to stopping harm from happening in the first place. They also provided more of a transnational perspective on what transformative justice could look like.

Incite!‘s engagement with Indigenous feminist organizing (which contributed to its co-founding of the Boarding School Healing Project)¹⁰ lead to the analysis that the prison industrial complex is the arm of a nation-state form of governance that is based on violence, domination and control. Abolishing the prison industrial complex thus requires challenging the presumed inevitability of a nation-state form of governance. One of Incite!‘s training modules for instance, framed gender violence as existing the intersections of capitalism and colonization and a commitment to decolonization was evidenced in Incite!‘s principles of unity and its initial organizing packets.¹¹

In addition, Incite! linked gender violence not only to carcerality but to global systems of violence. It organized against the War in Afghanistan because many mainstream anti-violence organizations were supporting with the rationale that the war would liberate women from the Taliban. While Incite! was developing local responses to violence, it was just as involved in organizing against global systems of violence by working with Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) and other transnational groups. It also collaborated nationally with RJ911 which was a national coalition of racial justice organizations opposing the war on terror. An example of this synthesis could be found in Sista II Sista’s Weapons of Mass Resistance which was a simultaneous campaign against imperialism, military recruitment and police violence. Its campaign slogan was: “From Brooklyn to Baghdad: We Want You Out.”¹² All of these influences exposed Incite! members to different models of organizing in which personal transformation was directly linked to global transformation.

5. Traversing space

Laura Harjo notes that jumping scale means that local community works must operate through multiple temporal and spatial frameworks, from the local to the global: “Scale is produced through relationality and through social processes that transcend…terrestrial realm and geographic positions” ([12], p. 44). Indeed, many movements, particularly those (although not exclusively) that are Indigenous-led, seem to operate through such a framework. One movement that had a strong influence on the development of Incite! was the Movement of Landless People (known as Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurail Sem Terra or MST). At the time of Incite!’s foundation, this movement was based in networks of families which claim territory that is owned privately, but is not being used. The families set up tents and fences and defend the land, which is called an “occupation.” If they managed to gain control of the land, then they form a settlement in which they build houses and more permanent structures. At the time Incite! was forming, 300,000 families had been involved in these occupations. Families rather than individuals take part in this resistance. About 20 families form a nucleus, which is coordinated by one man and one woman. The nuclei are then organized into the following sectors: (1) production/cooperation/employment, (2) education/trading; (3) education, (4) gender, (5) communication, (6) human rights, (7) health and (8) culture. Both men and women participate in the gender sector. This sector is responsible for ensuring women are involved in all decision-making positions and are equally represented in public life. Security teams are mixed gender. The gender team trains security to deal with domestic violence. Obviously, since the MST is not a legal organization and, thus, cannot utilize the state to address domestic violence, it must develop accountability structures from within.

All issues are discussed communally. As time progresses, participants report that domestic violence decreases because interpersonal relationships are communal and transparent. Also, because women engage in “physical” roles, such as being involved in security, women become less likely to be seen as “easy targets” for violence; the women also think of themselves differently. This strategy effectively connected bodily transformation with structural transformation. By changing the governance structure and engaging women in enforcing security, women’s bodies ontologically shifted from being necessarily vulnerable to violence to capable of powerful action. In addition, sectors and leadership roles rotate so that there is less of a fixed, hierarchical leadership. Hierarchical leadership tends to promote power differentials and hence abuse. This leadership model, thus, helps prevent the conditions of abuse from happening in the first place. In addition, issues among families are dealt with very openly and transparently since abuse tends to proliferate in secrecy. Members of MST reported to Incite! in various meetings that while their communities were not perfect, they noticed that the longer they lived under these structures, the less violence happened in the first place. From these exchanges, Incite! members learned that transformative justice practices needed to focus not only on intervening when violence happens, but on creating communities where violence becomes unthinkable. In addition, because this structure connected corporeal transformation with communal transformation, then individuals become transformed as well.

In conversations with members of Incite!, members of the MST distinguished their organizing model from community-based models in the United States in that, unlike the United States-based organizations, the MST does not strive to create what they termed hippy commune zones. They note that the system can handle any number of localized alternative groups as long as those groups do not grow. Rather, whenever, an occupation becomes relatively stable, some families leave that area to start a new one. This philosophy seemed to be mirrored in the development of the factory movement in Argentina of which Incite! members were also in dialog. These organizers reported to members of Incite that when workers took over factories, they immediately began to connect with other factories to collectivize resources on a larger scale. Thus, rather than organize from a “deep vs. wide” philosophy, their approach was of organizing deep AND wide. This philosophy is illustrative of Harjo’s concept of jumping scales. That is, if we understand that we all our related, then deeper relationships on the corporeal and local levels are furthered when organizers deepen their relations with all of creation on the global scale. Otherwise, one can end up promoting exclusivist and cliquish organizational projects that might benefit a local group but be harmful for other communities. Incite! exchanges with organizers in Chiapas further demonstrated that it was possible to do this deep relational work on a larger scale if one engaged in process that promoted horizontal participation. They suggested that building the infrastructure took time, but once the infrastructure is built, it was possible to coordinate egalitarian mass action rapidly.

On the one hand, Incite learned from these movements the importance of building the world we want to live in now on the local level. But members also learned that these world-making projects have to build to a sufficient scale so that they could begin to squeeze out the current system and thus clearly demonstrate that another world is possible. Incite! also learned that it was in fact possible to operate communities on a larger scale that operated on principles of horizontality and reciprocity.

Incite! members also were informed by the organizing strategies of Masum, a women’s organization in Pune, India, which addresses violence through accountability strategies that do not rely on the state. The members of Masum actively intervene themselves in cases of domestic violence by using such non-violent tactics as singing outside the home of the person committing violence until that person ended the abuse. Masum organizers reported they have been able to work on this issue without community backlash because Masum simultaneously provides needed community services such as micro credit, health care, education, etc. After many years, this group has come to be seen as a needed community institution and, thus, has the power to intervene in cases of gender violence where their interventions might otherwise be resisted. Incite! learned that interventions in violence are more successful when they are not segmented from the rest of life. That is, in the United States, organizing is often fractured into an issue-based approach. Because gender violence is segmented from the rest of life, it proliferates. However, the approach of Masum was not to organize around a particular issue but to create a different way of life. Because these transformative processes and structures connect the body and its needs to governance systems these new systems become internalized on the bodily level to create new beings capable of living in more just systems. This provided another transformative justice of jumping scale that addressing a particular issue is more effective when it works on a multi-relational scale with all other issues simultaneously.

Finally, Incite! was also informed by the work of Sista II Sista. Sista II Sista focused on deep local organizing to address violence against girls in the neighborhood committed both by the police and other members of the community. Sista II Sista created a video project documenting police harassment after one girl was killed and a second was sexually assaulted and killed by the police. In addition, it created a community accountability program, called ASisters Liberated Ground@ to organize its members to monitor violence in the community without relying upon the police. One of the ways it increased its base of support was by recruiting young women to attend freedom schools that provide political education from an integrated mind–body–spirit framework that then trains girls to become activists on their own behalf. It also started a day-care cooperative that attracts women who need daycare services, but then provides training so they can become organizers as well. At the same time, as mentioned previously, they also worked on a global scale, connecting their efforts to grassroots movements globally, particularly in Latin America. They engaged in various fair-trade projects as well political and intellectual exchange. The work of Sista II Sista demonstrates how organizing deep and wide were not at tension with each other but are mutually supportive. It further demonstrated that organizing strategies that connect the body to the larger systems in which it inhabits creates new socialities based on more justice-centered logics.

Incite!’s experience with movements globally helped it consider a different relationship to the processes of “co-optation.” Incite! initially began in many ways in fear of co-optation because it was critical of how the federal government had co-opted the anti-violence movement with federal dollars until eventually this movement was operating essentially as an arm of the state. This fear of co-optation contributes to a fear of jumping scale because this becomes equated with institutionalization and hence co-optation. We see similar tendencies in the United State in debates about voting where electoral politics is seen as essential for some organizers, while seen as reformist and a distraction from revolutionary politics by others.

However, when Incite! participated in the World Social Forum, its exchange with revolutionary movements revealed a different possibility for understanding the dynamics of cooptation. There, movements seem to have no problem with engaging in electoral politics or other practices that might be deemed in the United States as reformist. They operated on a dual power organizing model, which is a strategy of taking power by making power. Making power involves building the world you want to live in now, while at the same time resisting and challenging the power structures we currently have by taking power. Of course, such models exist in the United States but generally the “taking power” part of operations is often much stronger than the making power operations. Making power involves developing an infrastructure of horizontal governance that can involve hundreds of thousands of people. Consequently, engagement with the system can soon become the totality of one’s organizing efforts, thus increasing the fear of co-optation. But transnational movements have been able to develop organizing processes in which their level of “making power” is as equally strong as their “taking power.” Having this strong “making power” infrastructure seems to enable these movements more easily engage in taking power initiatives that could be seen as reformist as means to jump scale without being invested in institutional reform per se.

Large-scale organizing that engages institutional reform requires what Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA) describes as a “jazzy” approach [21]. Organizations do not necessarily have to fear institutionalization just because more mainstream institutions adopt one’s language or proposed policies and practices because that can be a sign that a movement is actually transforming the common sense. However, movements must be aware of shifting terrain and adjust strategies accordingly. As Shira Hassan notes: “A purity politic happens when we think that transformative justice has a formula that you are supposed to follow every single time” ([7], p. loc 3612) In addition, a lesson Incite members learned from these exchanges with transnational movements is to rethink whether operating at a smaller scale necessarily equates with a “more pure” and less co-opted politic. In fact, these movements suggested that remaining at a purely local scale is equally a part of institutionalization and co-optation: the system promotes a flourishing of alternative small organizing projects that fulfill our quest to be “alternative” as long as these projects do not coalesce to change the system.

The insight of Incite! organizers as well as others who have been organizing transnationally informed the development of Generation Five’s foundational statement on transformative justice since they had been part of the collaborative process that gave rise to this statement. This analysis of the need for transformative justice to jump scale is clear in many sections of the statement. “Transformative Justice must respond to the need to transform the violent conditions and dynamics of our lives—such as racism, colonization, patriarchy, and heterosexism—in order to achieve justice at every level” (Generation [22], p. 4) Because it was the product of a consultation with people not just rooted primarily in the anti-violence movement but in leftist and transnational movements, the statement situates transformative justice as integral to revolutionary politics.

While Leftist and social justice movements in the U.S. continue to pose significant ongoing challenges to the power and primacy of the State, we have failed to offer real alternatives to replace, dismantle, or transform it. Ultimately, we will not be successful in mobilizing masses of people to transform current political, economic, and social apparatuses if we do not have a concrete vision for the future. The goal of dismantling oppressive structures is shortsighted, and perhaps impossible, if we are not also prepared to build alternatives. This is not merely a rhetorical failure or a failure of analysis; it is a failure of practice. As this paper will argue in detail, the lack of liberatory approaches to violence actually undermines the entire project of social justice on both ideological and practical levels (Generation [22], p. 8).

Informed by Indigenous theories of decolonization, this statement explains that the goal of transformative justice practices is to build to sufficient scale in order to transform the state itself.

Built on this foundation, we envision alternative institutions of justice that would invest larger segments of the public as they became increasingly viable. This might be maintained through the building of an interconnected system of alternative institutions that, theoretically, could one day transform the State itself. In the same way that we challenge the Left to view individual transformation and social justice as fundamentally connected, we challenge the sexual and domestic violence sectors to expand their work to include transforming the conditions that allow violence to occur and to explicitly challenge State violence (Generation [22], p. 24).

Thus, while the transformative justice processes today that have emerged out of genealogical strands often emphasize the individualized body as well as the local, these strands historically also connected local transformative justice process with global transformation.

6. Jumping scale through transformative justice

These multiple strands and genealogies of transformative justice through time and space suggest some possibilities for developing a multi-scalar transformative justice. In this section, I will point to some of these possibilities as well some contemporary examples that speak to what these possibilities could be in practice.

6.1 Building deep by building wide

One lesson learned from transnational transformative justice movements is not whether we build deep OR wide, but that we might more effectively build deep when we simultaneously build wide. In the United States, it is often presumed that we should build local models first and then as they are successful, we may try to expand them. However, these local models are not easy to build. Even when they are generally “successful” they can often be so draining and time-consuming that people involved in them burn out. As a result, local efforts do not multiply. Thus, learning from transnational movements, it may be the case that for local efforts to be more successful, they need to simultaneously connect with global efforts to provide needed resources, infrastructure and support so that they become sustainable. In particular, jumping scale allows movements to produce new scales of action that are not necessarily circumscribed by the state.

Often in my organizing experience, I have found that a local team will often run into an issue or a stumbling block. However, it is often not the same stumbling block that another local group hits, and generally another local group has often figured out a solution to another local group’s problem. But by having all groups connected to each other, it is easier to figure out solutions to local problems as well as spread the work so that the process becomes less draining and time-consuming for all involved.

One such model of this possibility is CAT-911, which is a network of community action teams creating alternatives to 911 throughout southern California.¹³ What is noteworthy about this system is that while it is focused on building very local responses, these local teams are also building together regionally. They have a Web site that has a forum where they can exchange ideas, troubleshoot issues and provide mutual support. They have regional trainings and other gatherings to multiply the effects of their work. One could imagine multiple regional hubs of transformative justice projects and processes that can then network nationally or internationally.

6.2 Transformative justice as a way of life

Jumping scale also suggests that has much transformative justice organizing needs to focus on building creative structures of governance BEFORE violence happens, not just addressing the effects of harm afterwards. As Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan note, transformative justice processes are often about mediating between a process that is long enough to be meaningful, but not so long as to take over one’s life or the life of an organization [23]. On the one hand, processes that take a long time become hard to replicate on a larger scale because they are so time-consuming. However, processes must take years in order to effect the massive transformation required to stop being people from engaging in abuse. As a result, people often critique transformative justice as a failure.

However, as the work of Kaba and Hassan suggest, the fault is less about the failure of transformative justice processes per se as it is a misunderstanding of what a transformative justice process can do. A “process” will always be simultaneously too short and not long enough but that does not mean a process cannot be effective for what it is set up to do. But processes must be understood as part of a larger infrastructure that creates a transformative justice way of life. Here lessons learned transnationally can help suggest a way forward. As discussed previously, other movements focus more on creating different governance structures in which people become less violent in the first place. This is also an important lesson learned from Indigenous decolonization structures. As many Native organizers note, gender violence was often relatively rare prior to colonization. There were processes to address gender violence when it happened. But the most significant thing was that the social structures in Native communities stopped gender violence from happening in the first place [24, 25]. When there are social systems in which there is transparency, horizontality and collectivity, it becomes increasingly difficult to abuse. The relatively rare times it does happen can then more satisfactorily addressed through a process because the process is supported by a transformative justice way of life.

An example in the United States that speaks to this possibility includes the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective. Part of this infrastructure involves individuals developing “pods” or a collection of individuals that would get support if either one has caused harm or one has harmed someone. The pod is then a network of individuals who know each other and are prepared to act collectively. A person can have multiple pods for different purposes. However, the idea of it is that each person in that pod would also be encouraged to develop their own pod as well as to share the idea of pod-making with others. People can check in regularly with each other so that support systems are ready to act when something goes wrong.¹⁴

This approach echoes some of the apparatus developed previously by Friends Are Reaching Out (FAR OUT) in Seattle.¹⁵ The premise of this model is that when people are abused, they become isolated. The domestic violence movement further isolates them through the shelter system, where they cannot tell their friends where they are. In addition, the domestic violence movement does not work with the people who could most likely hold perpetrators accountable B their friends. FAR Out = s model was based on developing friendship groups to make regular commitments to stay in contact with each other. In addition, these groups develop processes to talk openly about relationships. One way abuse continues is that we tend to keep our sexual relationships private. By talking about them more openly, it is easier for friends to hold us accountable.

Essentially, this pod infrastructure would ideally grow until everyone is in a pod that would reverse that isolation created by capitalism that seems to make the prison industrial complex a necessity. But it also suggests that mutual accountability is not just something that we engage in at the point of emergency but that it becomes a way of life to be thinking and acting together collectively on the personal level. This is essential because a local process will not squeeze out the prison industrial complex or denaturalize its assumed necessity. But a new way of life will do that. Furthermore, corporeal transformation must synergize with global transformation.

6.3 Rethinking co-optation

Learning from the multiple genealogies of transformative justice may also require us to rethink its relationship to institutionalization and co-optation. One reason transformative justice practitioners are reluctant to think about jumping scale is that scale is often equated with institutionalization and co-optation. If we try to engage in transformative justice in settings like schools for instance, this will just lead to transformative justice being watered down into ways that no longer really challenge the system.¹⁶ Certainly, we can see this process happening everywhere. For instance, in 2013, the L.A. school board mandated restorative justice programs in all schools as a result of organizers trying to stop the “school-to-prison pipeline.”¹⁷ But the programs that were often implemented tended to focus on transforming students into mini-police officers without addressing the hierarchical manner in which education exists.¹⁸ Essentially the restorative justice programs tended to assume it was always the students that were the problem rather than the teachers or school administration. In one school I happened to witness how restorative justice became equated with having students go in a circle and tell other students about their favorite ice cream flavor. Thus, the lesson learned from experiences like this is just to avoid such efforts to expand the reach of transformative justice.

However, the experiences learned from transnational justice movements perhaps shift our relationship to this lesson learned. At one World Social Forum gathering, workshop participants troubled the presumed relationship between co-optation and scale by suggesting that keeping practices small and more “pure” is also another example of co-optation.

This process is illustrated in the diagram above. As represented by Sista II Sista co-founder, Paula X Rojas, the idea is that the current system has most people driving along the highway of colonialism and capitalism in gas-guzzling cars destroying the world. However, some people, particularly those who live in the seat of empire in the United States, do not wish to do this. So, the system supports us to build out alternative highways where we can live in a more “pure” alternative system. We feel so better about ourselves, that we ignore the fact that we are driving in circles on our alternative highway while the highway of colonialism is still continuing on, destroying the world. Thus, co-optation can happen through institutionalization, but it can also happen by diverting our energies into small “pure” projects that essentially provide escape hatches for a few from the overall system. In addition, ultimately if transformative justice remains localized, it will then actually enable the proliferation of the prison industrial complex by providing temporary escapes from it rather than squeezing it out of existence. Transformative justice has to jump scale in order to squeeze out the prison industrial complex and its presumed inevitability.

Jumping scale suggests a different relationship between co-optation and space by connecting spaces together such that institutions are engaged as they are embedded with other spaces and structures. The issue may be less avoiding large or “impure” spaces but transforming our relationship to those spaces. For example, in the previously mentioned example of the co-optation of restorative justice programs in Los Angeles schools, it was also the case that this co-optation was furthered by educational activists not adapting their strategies once the demand for restorative justice programs in schools was won. When there was a relative vacuum in determining what the programs could be and activists had a time-sensitive opportunity to organize and develop the agenda, they did not take this opportunity. Rather, once “victory” was achieved, schools were left to determine what restorative justice would look like without major input from transformative justice organizers. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore notes, organizers organize for victory, but they do not organize for the day after victory when the landscape changes and new strategies are required.

By contrast, organizers in other transnational movements often have a more flexible relationship with strategies and hence seem to have less a fear of co-optation because co-optation seem to be taken for granted. For instance, as the same time I would hear organizers in the United States argue that we should not get involved in electoral politics, I would hear organizers from revolutionary movements in Latin America argue that of course they were going to engage in electoral politics. However, unlike movements in the United States that seem to rest once their “candidate” wins, these organizers did not invest in the candidates themselves. If the candidate furthered their aims, they would support that candidate, but they had no allegiance beyond that. They were constantly organizing for the day after victory.

Our relationship to broader movements can be transformed by jumping scale. That is, focusing on building the world we want now is necessary to avoid being absorbed into a reactive politics. However, as Paula X Rojas notes, while we build another world, our engagement with larger systems can be transformed from a politics of reaction to a politics of theater. Jumping scale sheds light on the problematic assumption identified by Shira Hassan and Ejeris Dixon that transformative justice requires that one never engages in the criminal legal system. If we focus on abolition as a positive project, then it is primarily not just about avoiding the criminal justice system, but changing the world so that the current system becomes unthinkable. Jumping scale, as Harjo demonstrates, also requires a different spatio-temporal understanding of what it means to change the world. This change requires new relationalities from the individual’s relationship to self, to how we understand kinship, ancestral relationships, future generations, etc., all the way up to modes of production, the state, the relationships of ecosystems, etc. These all represent different ontologies, but those ontologies are necessarily grounded in material space as well as ideology and social relations. Thus, in the meantime, we may need to use the system to deal with everyday emergencies. But if we are grounded in creating a different world, then our short-term strategies can be more effectively used as theater, as a mean to share to the world would another system could look like.¹⁹

One such example that complicates the relationship between “reform” and transformation is the organization survived and punished. This is an organization that develops support campaigns for survivors who have been criminalized as a result of resisting gender-based violence.²⁰ Their work could be seen as a reformist strategy that does not challenge the prison industrial complex but only who is in the prison industrial complex, thus creating a dichotomy between people who deserve and those who do not deserve to be in prison. However, survived and punished frames its campaigns from an abolition feminist analysis:

For many survivors, the experiences of domestic violence, rape, and other forms of gender violence are bound up with systems of incarceration and police violence. Nearly 60% of people in women’s prisons nationwide, and as many as 94% of some women’s prison populations, have a history of physical or sexual abuse before being incarcerated. Survivor defense committees are critical because they help to secure freedom for criminalized survivors. They can transform not only the lives of criminalized survivors but also those who come to their defense. They are an exercise in building collective power and care against staggering odds. Effective defense campaigns provide thousands of people with opportunities to demonstrate care for criminalized individuals through various tactics (including letter writing, financial support, prison visits, and more). They connect people in a heartfelt, direct way that teaches specific lessons about the brutality of prisons and their role in reinforcing gender violence. This direct connection can change minds and hearts, helping people to (hopefully) develop more radical and expansive politics. In the end, a practice of abolitionist care underscores that our fates are intertwined and our liberation is interconnected. As such, defense campaigns guided by an ethic and practice of care can be powerful strategies to lead us towards abolition [30].

Survived and punished further rejects the deserving vs. non-deserving dichotomies by organizing around criminalized survivors that are not “perfect victims.” In fact, one of their gatherings was entitled, “No Perfect Victims.” By rejecting this dichotomy, they challenge the mainstream anti-violence movement’s reluctance to support criminalized survivors of sexual and domestic violence.²¹ Their work thus synthesizes meeting the immediate needs of people who need to be freed from prison today with abolishing prisons tomorrow.

6.4 Ontological transformation

For us to have a world structured by transformative justice, we will be not only transforming places but transforming peoples in the process. This transformation requires not just political and social shifts, but ontological shifts at the corporeal level. Certainly, one of most significant contributions of abolition feminism is that we are always struggling for community liberation with the realization that the communities we seek to liberate are themselves oppressive. Furthermore, we ourselves are the oppressive people within our communities that require transformation. We have been so shaped by white supremacy, colonialism and heteropatriarchy that even our imagination about what the world could be is structured by these logics. We would not recognize our future selves in a world of transformative justice. As Riverside CAT-911 states in its orientation material:

Addressing carcerality includes addressing carceral logics within our own organizing. There is always the tendency to want to expunge “bad” or the “wrong” people in our movements. For instance, there is a tendency to focus on police officers as the problem rather than policing itself. This then leads to movements engaging in all sort of policing behaviors they excuse because they are the “right” people.

Riverside CAT-911 begins with the assumption that we are the wrong people. We recognize our ability to harm others and to engage carceral behavior as much as anyone else. We thus strive to build a movement that is not organized around the “right” people, but better processes and structures that enable us to collectively become better people. [31]

Building on José Esteban Muñoz, transformative justice is always on the horizon, a world for which we lack the vocabulary to describe [32, 33]. Consequently, we engage transformative justice strategies with flexibility and humility because we do not ultimately know for sure what will be required to transform ourselves ontologically. Thus, maybe some of the questions that proliferate in transformative justice movements, such as which strategies are acceptable and when, need to remain open questions and subject to debate as we learn from our mistakes. Thus, transformative justice necessarily requires a relational strategy between the corporeal and the global that recognizes that bodily transformation and global transformation are inextricably linked.

In addition, an abolition feminist analytic that attends to the ontological shifts enabled by transformative justice can be employed to address white supremacist and/or police violence. Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes note that we need to stop thinking about transformative justice as the response to harm perpetrated by the powerful [34]. However, how does transformative justice work for cases when the perpetrator is not part of one’s community? When the person causing harm is a police officer? Or is engaging in white supremacist violence? How does a community enable accountability when the person causing harm denies the legitimacy of that community? The Los Angeles Incite! chapter in collaboration with LA COIL, CURB and Youth Justice Coalition held a workshop and strategy session to imagine what transformative justice might look like in cases of police and white supremacist violence. Many different strategies were developed, but a theme that emerged from these discussions is that community-based strategies require people to be in community with you. If transformative justice is based on principles of non-disposability, then have our transformative justice processes unwittingly developed a politics of mass disposability by presuming that everyone who perpetrates state or white supremacist violence as outside the realm of possible community?²² Some of the ideas that emerged from this workshop constellated around the theme that transformative justice must become a process of making relatives, of creating community with those deemed to be perpetually outside of it so that accountability can happen. Of course, organizers fear doing so because they are concerned that such work will enable co-optation. But as Laura Harjo suggests, jumping scale is less about building a mass movement or gaining institutional support and more about creating what Los Angeles-based organizer Luz Elena Henao describes as the connective tissue necessary to create relationships that can transform the world.²³

7. Conclusion

If the criminal justice system is fundamentally a logic of anti-relationality based on disposability, then transformative justice is a project of relationship-building. But that relationship-building requires jumping scales to transform relationships globally and bodily simultaneously. Otherwise, we essentially replicate the logic of criminal justice systems by creating communities in which only those relationships within a community matter. An abolition feminist analysis necessarily requires us to develop movements that jump scale by addressing violence at the individual, community and global levels. Jumping scale emphasizes locating violence in multi-relational fashion—individual violence within the community that failed to prevent it, the carceral/settler state that destroys relationality and employs individualism, and the global capitalist, white supremacist and genocidal logics that structure these relationships. Employing an Indigenous abolition feminist framework of jumping scale enables us to attend to all of these levels of violence so that we can build transformative justice deep and wide simultaneously so that we become different people not fundamentally constituted through trauma as we build a world that creates less trauma.