Refusing police power: resistances and ambivalences to state violence

In this forum, we take popular critiques from the majority world as our starting point for critically interrogating assumptions that police power and state violence are or should be the basis of ‘normal’ statecraft or ‘good order’. We ruminate on questions about policing’s actually-existing and future legitimacy through a transnational frame by foregrounding various refusals of it. In doing so, the forum raises new questions about how people imagine and work toward abolitionist futures in practice across diverse histories and geographic contexts.