Divestment and Its Terrain: Abolition, the State, and Racial Capitalism

This article examines divest/invest as a contested tactic within abolitionist struggle. It traces its genealogy across anti-apartheid, Palestinian, Indigenous, and ecological movements, and asks what changes when divestment is routed through state fiscal machinery in contemporary defund campaigns. Defund is part of a broader divest/invest strategy to shrink the power of policing while building infrastructures of community-based safety. Divestment can delegitimize carceral institutions across material, ideological, and cultural registers, and redirect resources, but its institutionalization risks turning abolitionist rupture into administrative reform. I argue that divestment's strategic value emerges from the political terrain into which it is deployed. Contemporary divest/invest comes into focus when held against Black radical, abolition communist, and Indigenous refusal lineages of building communities, institutions, and ways of life beyond the state's carceral reach. Divestment names what to refuse, while these traditions imagine what to build.