Collected Work
For over 25 years, the CPCP has convened scholars and organizers committed to producing knowledge for collective liberation. The writings collected here showcase the breadth, rigor, and political imagination of CPCP fellows’ work, from critical analysis to strategies for social change.
Filter by seminar theme to see work developed in that year and click “more” to access each piece.
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Abolitionist Lessons from the Prison Belts
In a six-part series, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, Judah Schept, Craig Gilmore, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore look at how organizers can adapt lessons learned in twenty-five years of abolitionist organizing to their own political terrains, with examples from Appalachia, California, and Louisiana. Each piece considers how to face up to a different challenge of developing our understanding of a particular context: grasping the complexity of the state, forging joint consciousness with environmental justice organizers, mapping local power structures, scanning for opportunities for solidarity, following the money through changing financial mechanisms, and preparing our organizing for the next crisis
“You Can’t Reform Away a War: On Creative Aggression”
In this chapter, Craig Gilmore and Ruth Wilson Gilmore consider the broader global context of attempts to build “cop cities” the world over. The wide-ranging conversation touches on the relationships between forms of repression, lawfare and criminalization, crises of accumulation and legitimation, the politics of critical analysis, and adaptive and inventive simultaneous struggles across space over land access and use.
After Stories: Transnational Intimacies of Postwar El Salvador
This book follows the trajectories—geographic, temporal, storied—of several extended Salvadoran families. Traveling back and forth in time and across borders, Silber narrates the everyday unfolding of diasporic lives rich with acts of labor, love, and renewed calls for memory, truth, and accountability in El Salvador's long postwar. Through a retrospective and intimate ethnographic method that examines archives of memories and troubles the categories that have come to stand for "El Salvador" such as alarming violent numbers, Silber considers the lives of young Salvadorans who were brought up in an everyday radical politics and then migrated to the United States after more than a decade of peace and democracy. She reflects on this generation of migrants—the 1.5 insurgent generation born to forgotten former rank-and-file militants—as well as their intergenerational, transnational families to unpack the assumptions and typical ways of knowing in postwar ethnography. As the 1.5 generation sustains their radical political project across borders, circulates the products of their migrant labor through remittances, and engages in collective social care for the debilitated bodies of their loved ones, they transform and depart from expectations of the wounded postwar that offer us hope for the making of more just global futures.
The Road: An Ethnography of (Im)mobility, Space, and Cross-Border Infrastructures in the Balkans
This book is an ethnographic and historical study of the main Albania-Greece highway. Highways are part of an explicit cultural-material nexus that includes houses, urban architecture and vehicles. Complex socio-political phenomena such as EU border security, nationalist politics, post-Cold War capitalism and financial crises all leave their mark in the concrete. This book explores anew classical anthropological and sociological categories of analysis in direct reference to infrastructure, providing unique insights into the political and cultural processes that took place across Europe after the Cold War. More specifically, it sheds light on political and economic relationships in the Balkans during the socialist post-Cold War period, focusing especially on Albania, one of the most under-researched countries in the region.
Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter
Combining firsthand accounts from activists with the research of scholars and reflections from artists, Policing the Planet traces the global spread of the broken-windows policing strategy, first established in New York City under Police Commissioner William Bratton. It’s a doctrine that has vastly broadened police power the world over—to deadly effect. With contributions from #BlackLivesMatter cofounder Patrisse Cullors, Ferguson activist and Law Professor Justin Hansford, Director of New York–based Communities United for Police Reform Joo-Hyun Kang, poet Martín Espada, and journalist Anjali Kamat, as well as articles from leading scholars Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Robin D. G. Kelley, Naomi Murakawa, Vijay Prashad, and more, Policing the Planet describes ongoing struggles from New York to Baltimore to Los Angeles, London, San Juan, San Salvador, and beyond.