A collection of essays from the Stop Cop City movement on the fight for police abolition and for a liveable planet for all, with gripping reporting from activists on the ground and rousing articles from renowned radical academics
The Stop Cop City movement is a decentralized effort to stop the construction of a $120 million police training facility and the destruction of 170 acres of the Weelaunee Forest outside of Atlanta, Georgia. This is the first collection of essays bringing together organizers and activists who have been involved in the years-long struggle to Stop Cop City. Connecting movements for environmental justice, police abolition, and Indigenous sovereignty, this expansive collection highlights the strategy, tactics, and ideologies that transformed a local collective action into a powerful international movement.
Featuring the voices of forest defenders, environmental justice advocates, political prisoners, Indigenous activists, abolitionists, educators, legal scholars, and academics, these wide-ranging essays explore the history of the intersectional movement, the diverse tactics embraced by activists, tributes to Tortuguita, the 26-year-old queer Indigenous forest defender murdered by Georgia State Patrol troopers, and the intense police and legal repression faced by organizers. Making critical connections between oppression and resistance at home and abroad, the movement to Stop Cop City has expanded to a fight against a Cop World.
-
"No Cop City, No Cop World is a story about organizers in motion who battled and continue to fight for their community against politicians, police, and organized capital. You will leave with more questions than when you began. This is the mark of an excellent book. The lessons from Stop Cop City should inform our current organizing efforts everywhere. The book underscores that criminalization is the indispensable fuel of fascism. It’s timely, necessary, and required reading.” —Mariame Kaba, organizer and coauthor of Let This Radicalize You
“No Cop City, No Cop World is no David vs Goliath story. Rather, it is about waking a sleeping giant—a united coalition of grassroots social movements—to challenge a corporate-backed, ecocidal police state. Together, these powerful essays on the struggle in Atlanta offer vital lessons for how to resist the many cop cities on the horizon. The lesson is clear: only a people united, moved by visions of abolition and militant action, can stop a Cop World.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“No Cop City, No Cop World is a bold and uncompromising call to action. Blending powerful storytelling with incisive strategy, the authors bring Angela Davis’s chilling warning to life: “If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night.’ Through the lens of Atlanta, they offer a glimpse into the global rise of policing as a response to the anxieties and unrest of late-stage capitalism. This book is a rare and exquisite fusion of unflinching diagnosis and visionary prescription, a sharp tool for cutting through the noise as we resist and reimagine the carceral status quo.”
—Ruha Benjamin, author of Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want and Imagination: A Manifesto
“Few books will give you a better sense of our times. Or of the love, kindness, joy, music, dancing, intellectual expertise, and irrepressible determination that form the backbone of the social movements resisting authoritarian repression. Share this book with someone in your life, discuss its profound lessons, absorb its spirit together, and take its teachings out into the world.”
—Alec Karakatsanis, founder of Civil Rights Corps and author of Usual Cruelty and Copaganda
“In this time of unbridled police domination, when, as Antonio Gramsci put it, the old is dying and the new struggles to be born, No Cop City, No Cop World provides us with a methodology of struggle, a praxis of revolutionary optimism, and a blueprint for what is to be done. The diverse and powerful voices represented in this volume warn us about the real-time dangers of police and policing—and guide us on the necessity of organizing against these and other forms of state and imperialist violence. This is a book for those who not only demand freedom, liberation, sovereignty, and self-determination but who are also willing, against all odds, to fight for it.”
—Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly, associate professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University and author of Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States
“In the Weelaunee forest as in the Atlanta city hall, the future is being made. Across the petitions, protests, direct actions, and encampments to stop cop city, the future is already here. The fight to Stop Cop City is among the most urgent, most riveting movements of our time. No Cop City, No Cop World brings together some of the sharpest insights from the frontlines of the abolitionist movement, be they forest defenders or community organizers, lawyers or media workers. Like the movement it chronicles, this book shows abolition to be a proliferation of strategies in pursuit of something called freedom. It takes all of us, dear reader, including you.”
—Dan Berger, author of Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family's Journey
“No Cop City, No Cop World encapsulates precisely what is historic and crucial about the Stop Cop City movement and its place at the radical intersection of abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, Black liberation, Indigenous, territorial, and climate struggle. The text, like the movement, refuses to treat these fights—and the oppression they face—in isolation. The essays collected here, from scholars and frontline organizers, reflect Stop Cop City’s insistence on tactical and strategic diversity. These are lessons we must take forward if we are to forge a No Cop World.”
—Natasha Lennard, author of Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life
“Over the past few years, the Stop Cop City movement has shaped how people across the country think about policing and power. No Cop City, No Cop World traces the story of this fight from principles to practice, and dares to ask what true justice and safety look like. This book is not just about one movement—it’s about all movements that center the people over punishment. It’s a fascinating book about hope, about the fight for justice, and about a better future—not just for Atlanta, but for the world. I loved every second of it.”
—Josie Duffy Rice, writer, journalist, and host of the Unreformed podcast
“Our world is a world of police, and every city is a cop city. But this reality is neither inevitable nor eternal, and the turn to cop cities is a testament to the desperate fragility of police power. They expect resistance, and we will give them that and more. This book provides an essential map of the terrain and a strategy for the battles on the horizon.”
—Geo Maher, author of A World Without Police and coordinator, W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction