The Anti-security Collective was formed in 2010 in Ottawa, Canada. We are committed to a radical critique of police power, taking on both the material and ideological hegemony of security under capital.

 

Influenced by the unfinished radical critiques of security that emerged in the 1960s and 70s and were pursued further by some Marxists in the early years of this century, and simultaneously frustrated by the stifling conceptual and intellectual  unassailability of security logics in the so-called post-9/11 world,  our project is devoted to providing the conceptual tools for both  an analytical and political dismantling of security.

 

The first collective project of Anti-security was the edited anthology Anti-security (2011), following our meeting in Ottawa. The volume was prefaced by a document called ‘Anti-security: A Declaration,’ that crystallized our call for political and intellectual resistance to security. The ‘Declaration’ has since been translated into several languages, helping foster an expanded international awareness of the key tenets of our project. Further meetings followed in Brighton, Genoa, Nicosia, and again in Ottawa, and a new volume called Destroy, Build Secure: Readings on Pacification (2017). These provided the foundation for Anti-sec members to undertake both collective and individual projects toward empirical and philosophical critiques of security. In 2023, we met in Maine, to complete the writing of The Security Abolition Manifesto. The Manifesto is available free on this page.

 

Today, our collective critique has reached a historic crossroads.  Anti-sec’s central tenets have gone from the radical margins to the revolutionary mainstream. Calls for abolition have galvanized a new generation of activists who have experienced first-hand the brutality of police power and the myriad forms of violence meted out by state and capital. But there is a danger that this revolutionary moment might slip away, captured and co-opted once again as yet another police reform initiative in the name of security. Yet there is another way. Our Security Abolition Manifesto sets out our position.