How do we stop depending on violent systems to make us safe?

Police, militaries, and prisons were not created to make people safe. They were created to protect wealth and property through force. They were created because the only way to maintain an unjust distribution of resources is with violence.

When have you felt safe? What conditions came together to create that sense of safety? For many of us, our imagining and experiences of safety do not include images of armed officers and barbed-wired walls. Safety is the care and support of our families, friends, and communities; it is a nurturing environment in which it is okay to feel all the joy and pain and contradictions of life; it is access to health, food and water, and beauty.

War, policing, and prisons are built on an assumption that people are disposable. Solidarity economies are built on the opposite assumption: that life is inherently sacred, and we can’t throw anyone away. This means we need other ways to resolve conflict and keep our communities safe.

In a world where there is enough to go around, why are we plagued by conflicts over land, water, and power? Many conflicts have at their roots a small number of massively wealthy and powerful people who stand to benefit at the expense of everyone else involved. Millions fight and die for their causes. Could these same millions change the structures of power and find different solutions to our problems? War, policing, surveillance, and incarceration are all tools for expanding and maintaining empires, large or small, by dominating people and pitting them against one another.

So how do we bring about other ways of keeping our communities safe?

There is no one answer. We’re talking about building a different culture, where we actually believe that the lives of everyone around us matter. Even if they have different values. Even if they have different ways of existing in the world. Even if they have caused harm. There are no shortcuts to this culture shift. Our task is the long, hard work of building communities rooted in care and respect for our common humanity. In this, abolitionist movements are leading the way to a world beyond police, prisons, and incarceration. We can learn so much from the long histories of these movements about how to transform conflict, and how to end and heal from violent systems, in our households, neighborhoods, and nations.

The root causes of much of the violence in our world today lie in an economic and political system that needs people to be poor. Solutions that restore economic control and ownership to our communities have the power to attack these roots, and ultimately make a safer world for all of us.