On a wet October evening, activists from across London gathered at the Crown and Anchor Tavern on the Strand. They discussed their campaign to abolish the police, an institution they considered “inefficient, oppressive, and expensive”.
This could have been last year – but in fact, it was 1830. The activists were opposed to the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829, which had introduced a formal police force in London for the first time. The UK’s incipient border regime soon came under fire too. In 1858, the popular Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper lamented that “the Passport Nuisance is still the subject of complaints in the daily papers”, a complaint that continued well into the 20th century.
Calls to abolish institutions whose existence we often take for granted are as old as the institutions themselves. Today, such demands are experiencing a resurgence. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, activists have not only drawn attention to the excesses of policing, but questioned whether policing itself is inherently violent, oppressive and racist. Elsewhere, writers like Sophie Lewis and M. E. O’Brien are making bold arguments against traditional notions of family, asking us to imagine other forms of collective care. And some advocates for migrants’ rights, faced with increasingly brutal border policies, urge us to imagine a world beyond borders.
