GER-OACU Seminar: Racial Capitalism, Borders and Migration. Abolition and Decolonial Peace: Undoing the World as We Know It

by | Apr 17, 2025 | Seminar

From the Grup d´Estudis sobre Reciprocitat (Reciprocity Study Group), we invite you to the seminar series Racial Capitalism, Borders and Migrations.
Forth session.

 

 

GER-OACU Seminar: Racial Capitalism, Borders and Migration

 

April 30 at 12h noon in the Anthropology Laboratory (Laboratori d’Antropologia), Faculty of Geography and History.

 

 

Abolition and Decolonial Peace: Undoing the World as We Know It

Mahdis Azarmandi from Canterbury University

This talk explores abolition as a necessary framework for reimagining peace beyond war, borders, and state-sanctioned violence. The first part critiques traditional approaches to peace, exposing their colonial foundations and entanglement with racial capitalism, which render peace inseparable from state security and militarized control. I take migrant solidarity movements and resistance to policing and militarism as a lens to reframe border abolition and migrant resistance as forms of peace work—ones that do not seek to stabilize the state but instead confront what Nelson Maldonado-Torres calls the ‘endless war of coloniality.’ Abolition, I argue, requires dismantling the racialized infrastructures of security, labour exploitation, and global capitalism that sustain militarized borders and carceral logics. In dialogue with decolonial thought, this talk asks how abolition can open space for a different vision of peace—one rooted in freedom of movement, collective care, and the refusal of racialized violence.

 

 

Mahdis Azarmandi currently works at the University of Canterbury, in the Faculty of Education, School of Social and Cultural Studies in Education, where their teaching and research bridge the fields of peace studies and social justice in education. Their educational research explores how race, gender, and disability shape educational policies and practices, focusing on the intersectional impacts of these factors. Azarmandi is committed to decolonizing educational frameworks and promoting social justice through critical analysis of institutional structures. Their interdisciplinary work also addresses the politics of memorialization and the role of colonial monuments in perpetuating historical violence.