Guest Editor: Stéphanie Wahab, Portland State University

Associate Guest Editor: Rupaleem Bhuyan, University of Toronto

This special issue of Abolitionist Perspectives in Social Work invites social work and abolitionist scholars from across the world to join with Palestinian feminists and Indigenous decolonial movements in imagining and co-creating a world free of settler colonial violence and carceral practices.

While social work abolitionists have been deepening their understanding of the intertwined relationship between prisons, carcerality, and liberation, the previous 11 months of genocidal violence against Palestinians have amplified the need to further explore abolition of the “embodied social condition of captivity” (Ihmoud, 2024, p. 208) through Palestine, Palestinian lives, and Palestinian resistance.

Since the Nakba of 1948, the establishment of Israel as a Jewish nation-state authorized Israel’s necropolitical regime of Palestinian dispossession. While Israel’s use of carceral logics and practices of open and closed prisons is well documented (Ihmoud, 2024; Meari, 2014; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2014;), we invite social work abolitionists to consider the Nakba of 1948 as an analytic point of departure (Eghbariah, 2024; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2014), through which “Palestine… stands as a space from which we can expand theorization of the relationships between captivity and colonialism” (Ihmoud, p. 211).

Since its inception as a settler colonial project, the social work profession has professed to care about the well-being of all humans through principles of equality and social justice. Commitments to universal human rights, however, have always been in conflict with the profession’s pursuit of status and recognition within the imperial and settler states where social work functions. As such, social work’s failure to condemn the latest cycle of genocidal settler colonial violence Israel has wrought on the Palestinians is a dismal yet unsurprising characteristic of the profession’s implicit investment in securing its own value through allegiance with settler colonial governance.

A recent estimate of the death toll estimates upward of 186,000 Palestinians have been murdered by the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) between October 2023 and June 19, 2024 (Khatib et al., 2024). This genocide enacted through militarized and carceral means has perpetrated sociocide, infanticide, democide, scholasticide, ecoside, and femicide with the intent of erasing Palestinians in service of land theft for the replacement project known as Judaization. And yet, Palestinians continue to refuse and resist their erasure. While Gaza is considered ground zero for Israel’s brutality and impunity (Seikaly, 2024), the West Bank and Occupied East Jerusalem have experienced continued land theft, home demolitions, settler violence, and extrastate killings of children since October 7, 2023. Keeping in mind that Gaza was under an illegal military blockade for 16 years prior to October 2023, there is no easy way to summarize the devastation of the past 11 months. Funded by the United States, Canada, and European countries, Israel’s relentless bombardment of homes, hospitals, schools, universities, refugee camps, farms, and electrical and water systems has completely destroyed all infrastructure necessary for a functioning society. Considering the reality that half the population of Gaza is under 18 years old, tens of thousands of children have been slaughtered, and countless burned and maimed since Israel’s latest assault.

Sadly, social work has been historically silent about these atrocities (Shalhoub-Kevorkian et al., 2022; Suslovic et al., 2024). Some of us have previously drawn on the concept of the “Palestine exception” when addressing social work’s silence and double standards in the face of Palestinian incarceration, subjugation, dispossession, and erasure. Abolition and anti-colonial scholars, however, warn us that inclusion, as an antidote to exception, can be a tactic institutions use to “outmaneuver revolutionary opposition by incorporating it” (Qutami, 2024, quoting Bogg and Mitchell (2018), p. 308). Qutami (2024) writes, “So that in the end, what is generative by thinking of abolition and decolonization through Palestine, is that it enables a clear calling out of liberalism’s complicity in settler-colonial and racist state violence by exposing the contradiction; that which abolition and decolonization seeks not only to illuminate but to dismantle” (p. 309). Let us then be mindful that the Palestine exception frame obscures the intentional erasure and subjugation of Palestinians while masking liberalism’s complicity in racial-settler colonial violence.

This special issue seeks to ferment abolitionist thinking and practice by refusing Zionist “colonial reality bending” (Sheehi & Sheehi, 2022). We hope to deepen social work’s understanding of the relationships between militarism, settler colonialism, and the prison industrial complex. Consequently, we invite interdisciplinary contributions that recognize Palestinian resistance and liberation as part of an expansive decolonial feminist praxis fixated on transforming gendered, racial-colonial dominance (Rojas & Nader, 2022). Furthermore, we invite submissions that engage with the premise that decolonization and abolition share important logics and practices, and that Palestinian liberation must be engaged through a decolonial abolitionist praxis (Ihmoud, 2024), one that considers “Solidarity as Worldmaking” (Qutami 2024, p. 318, quoting Kelly, 2019).

Where there is Palestinian suffering and struggle for liberation, there is also sumud (steadfastness), Palestinian love, and life.

Potential Submission Topics:

• Palestine liberation and/or Palestine solidarity from an abolitionist praxis
• Possibilities for social work and Palestinian solidarity
• What social work can learn about abolition through Palestine liberation
• What social work can learn from Palestinian political captives/prisoners
• Palestine and the implications for decolonial social work praxis on Turtle Island
• Palestinian sumud as abolitionist praxis
• Social work’s role in abolition across settler colonial landscapes
• The prison industrial complex as a structure of Israel’s occupation and state violence
• Exploring what a Palestinian Feminist Praxis of love can teach social work about abolitionist practice(s)
• Exploring if/how social work can move away from identity politics to better engage with the relationship between empire and carcerality (through Palestine)
• Social work’s silence on Palestine and other “moves to innocence” (Tuck & Yang, 2012)
• Social work’s complicity with the genocide
• Social work and university encampments
• Social work and Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)
• Lessons for understanding Palestine through slavery and/or colonialism’s reliance on heteropatriarchy and racial capitalism
• Lessons from Black feminist abolitionism and solidarity with Palestine liberation

We invite original contributions that provide new and unique insights, theoretical perspectives, or empirical evidence exploring these or related topics. We welcome a range of submissions including but not limited to empirical, conceptual, theoretical, and narrative formats.

Prospective authors should submit abstracts of up to 500 words to Stéphanie Wahab, Guest Editor, at wahabs@pdx.edu by October 28, 2024. Invitations to submit a full article will be extended by December 2, 2024. Initial drafts of the selected articles will be due by March 3, 2025, and publication of the special issue is anticipated in fall 2025.