The Journey Ahead: The Second Iteration of AGAPE
After a brief false start in September 2024, the Against Global Apartheid & Planetary Ecocide (AGAPE) Seminar & Studio, is set to relaunch in January 2025, reenergized and ready to deepen its engagement with radical resistance and (re-)creative world-building. This dispatch outlines the outcomes of the first iteration, charts the course for the second, and calls on collaborators to help shape the journey ahead.
While the first iteration succeeded in building an engaged community of inquiry, it also revealed the importance of co-creative facilitation. The next phase will expand this collaborative approach, inviting participants to take on leadership roles and actively shape the seminar’s direction.
For this next phase, I am seeking co-hosts and co-facilitators to help lead each session. Co-hosting and co-facilitating is an opportunity to engage more deeply with the material, shape the conversation, and contribute to AGAPE’s collectivist ethos.
As a co-host or co-facilitator, your responsibilities will include:
Planning the Session: Join me for a preparatory meeting to discuss the session’s theme, propose background readings, craft guiding questions, develop a structure, and schedule the session date.
Leading the Discussion: Facilitate part of the conversation during the session, ensuring it remains dynamic, focused, and generous.
Documenting Insights: Collaborate on drafting the session summary, capturing key ideas and reflections to benefit the broader AGAPE community.
I am seeking at least two co-hosts/co-facilitators per session to ensure a diversity of perspectives and shared workload.
If you are interested in serving as a co-host or co-facilitator, please email muindi@thefyrthyr.org with the session(s) you would like to co-host and co-facilitate. In your email, kindly share your interest in the session’s theme and how you envision contributing to the discussion. Your message doesn’t need to be formal or exhaustive—just be thoughtful. Please note that co-hosts/co-facilitators for the first session must be confirmed by December 15th.
Join us as we relaunch AGAPE in January 2025—embracing the ethos of marronage (“aquilombar-se”), fostering confluences, and charting pathways toward liberation.
The Journey So Far: The First Iteration of AGAPE
Introduction: The Virus of Empire
For more than six millennia, patriarchal imperialism has plagued the world with its attendant maladies: war, conquest, enslavement, degradation, and environmental devastation. Over the past six centuries, these forces have become turbocharged by racist and capitalist techniques and technologies of power, plunging our planet into what can only be described as a terminal social and ecological death spiral.
We live in the age of Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide, marked by the deathly double fracture at the heart of patriarchal imperialism and racial capitalism. On the one hand, a racial fracture divides the “superior races” who dominate and devastate from the “inferior races” of the dominated and devastated. On the other hand, an environmental fracture separates the “civilized” realms of human culture from the “environment,” where a nature deemed raw and untapped clings to existence.
These fractures are maintained by systems of repression—policing, bordering, and the violence they enact—to perpetuate the privileges of the powerful. Against this grim reality, the Against Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide (AGAPE) research group has convened to imagine and organize radical resistance. This text is a synthesis of AGAPE’s inquiries thus far.
Global Apartheid & Planetary Ecocide: A Deathly Double Fracture
Global Apartheid
Global Apartheid describes the murderous regimes that preserve and advance the privileges of the “superior races” and the “talented tenths”—those “exceptional specimens” of the “inferior races” who violently distinguish themselves from their peers by mimicking their oppressors. This system divides the world into a privileged “Green Zone” and a deprived “Grey Zone.”
As detailed in the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report, USD millionaires constitute one in every twenty people in the Green Zone—a cluster of affluent states including the United States, the Schengen Area of Western Europe, and wealthy regions of the Pacific Rim. By contrast, in the Grey Zone, only one in five hundred people holds comparable wealth. The disparity is stark: in 2015 alone, the Green Zone extracted $10.8 trillion worth of raw materials, labor, and energy from the Grey Zone—enough to eradicate extreme poverty seventy times over. This massive theft underwrites the comforts of the privileged while devastating the lands and lives of the marginalized.
Planetary Ecocide
The second fracture, Planetary Ecocide, names the systematic devastation of Earth’s ecosystems in service to human excess. Concealed by narratives of “sustainable extraction” and “managed depletion,” this process sacrifices entire ecosystems to feed the Green Zone’s insatiable consumption. Colonizers frame these sacrifices as bulwarks against natural disasters, yet, as Bertolt Brecht reminds us, they refuse to recognize the violence of the engineered dams and banks that confine the rivers even as they decry the violence of rivers overflowing.
Together, Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide comprise what Malcolm Ferdinand calls the “double fracture”: the colonial division between racialized humanity and an exploited nature.
Policing, Borders, & the Infrastructure of Empire
Policing: From Colonies to Metropoles
Policing is central to the maintenance of Empire. As Julian Go’s Policing Empires demonstrates, colonial powers developed militarized police forces to suppress rebellion and maintain order in the colonies. These methods have since been “boomeranged” back to the imperial metropoles. Go writes, “What happens in the colonies doesn’t stay in the colonies,” as techniques perfected in colonial spaces are now used to surveil and brutalize racialized communities in metropolitan centers.
Modern policing in the Global North bears the unmistakable imprint of its colonial origins. Militarized police forces employ tactics designed to control populations seen as unruly—be they the racialized poor in urban centers or migrants at national borders. This violence is not incidental but structural, ensuring that wealth and privilege flow unimpeded from the Grey Zone to the Green Zone.
Borders: Elastic Regimes of Exclusion
Borders, too, are instruments of Empire, enforcing the racialized spatial hierarchies of Global Apartheid. As Harsha Walia explains in Border and Rule, borders are not fixed lines; they are elastic regimes of control. “The magical line [of the border] can exist anywhere,” Walia writes, extending far beyond territorial boundaries to govern migrants “wherever they are.”
In the Global North, borders are externalized through practices like offshore detention, where asylum seekers are intercepted and confined far from the states they seek to enter. Borders are also internalized within national territories, where policing turns neighborhoods into sites of exclusion and criminalization. These bordering regimes ensure that the labor power and resources of the Grey Zone remain accessible while its people remain confined.
Statelessness: The Grey Zone of Citizenship
Borders do more than divide; they actively create statelessness, stripping individuals of legal, social, and political belonging. This condition extends beyond refugees to encompass racialized and colonized peoples within nations, who face systemic exclusion even while holding formal citizenship or documented status. As Harsha Walia observes, borders are elastic, functioning not only at geographic peripheries but also within national interiors, enforcing exclusion wherever Empire sees fit.
Statelessness exists on a continuum: from refugees entirely denied citizenship, to racialized citizens subjected to systemic disenfranchisement through voter suppression, housing segregation, and over-policing, to residents of “failed states” in the Grey Zone deemed “ungovernable” or “badly governed.” These mechanisms carve out Grey Zones of exclusion within the privileged Green Zone while sustaining pockets of privilege—Green Zones—within the larger deprivation of the Grey Zone. Statelessness is not an anomaly but a calculated strategy of Global Apartheid, confining marginalized groups to perpetual precarity.
Coloniality & the Persistence of Empire
Empire thrives on coloniality: the lingering systems, structures, and ideologies left behind in the wake colonization. As Denise Ferreira da Silva explains, Empire sustains itself by upholding demographic determinability (rigid racial hierarchies), geographic separability (the enforced segregation of spaces), and historiographic sequentiality (the idea of progress as a linear, one-size-fits-all narrative). These mechanisms are reinforced through policing and bordering, which determine who is recognized, where they are allowed to exist, and how freely they may move.
Radical resistance calls for dismantling this “Ordered World” of coloniality and creating “Entangled Worlds,” where relationships are defined by confluence and conviviality. This vision requires embracing demographic indeterminacy, which rejects rigid racial classifications; geographic non-locality, which challenges the idea that belonging is confined to static, bordered spaces; and historiographic non-eventuality, which reframes progress not as a single, linear story but as a rich, (inter-/intra-)connected tapestry of evolving realities that coexist, interweave, and challenge Empire’s imposed order..
Marronage & Maroon Infrastructures
Marronage as Escape and Resistance
Marronage—the practice of escaping and resisting systems of domination—offers a historical prototype for liberation. Maroons, or fugitive slaves, established autonomous communities in so-called inhospitable terrains like swamps and mountains, and later, the urban jungles transformed by the great migrations that followed in the wake of emancipations worldwide. These landscapes, dismissed by colonizers as wild, unruly, or derelict, became sanctuaries of freedom and sites of creative resistance.
For Maroons, survival depended on blending into the surround rather than securing spaces against it. This ethos challenges Empire’s obsession with control, offering a model for resistance that is fluid, adaptive, and relational, transforming exclusion into opportunity.
Building Maroon Infrastructures
Maroon Infrastructures are assemblages that enable practices of recognition, recollection, resistance, and repair. They challenge the logics of Empire by fostering communions with the surround. The (re-)construction of such infrastructures furthers and is furthered by endeavors that:
Recognize allies in wild, unruly, and derelict natures and cultures;
Recollect ways of living that resist patriarchal imperialism and racial capitalism;
Resist the extractive and exclusionary practices of Empire; and
Repair the damage done by colonial violence, not as a matter of restoration but re-creation.
Historical examples, such as the Underground Railroad, illuminate how Maroon Infrastructures can disrupt Empire’s control. Today, the task is to design new Maroon Infrastructures that defy borders, evade policing, and simultaneously foster cultural liberation and natural regeneration.
The Journey Ahead: The Second Iteration of AGAPE
The second iteration of the Against Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide (AGAPE) research group will focus on understanding and resisting the mechanisms that uphold Empire’s violent structures. Through monthly virtual seminars and collaborative studios, participants will examine the tools of repression—“guns and bombs,” “smoke and mirrors,” “policies and procedures,” “prisons and fortresses,” and “carrots and sticks”—that sustain Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide. Building on the first iteration’s emphasis on recognizing the horrors of Empire, the second phase shifts toward preparing to confront it.
Each session will focus on a distinct category of violence, providing an in-depth analysis of its function within the imperial system:
Session 1. “Guns and Bombs” – Physical Violence
Empire relies on physical violence to maintain control, deploying militarized force to threaten, brutalize, and kill rebels while flattening sites of rebellion. This session will explore the history and persistence of militarized repression, drawing on texts like Frantz Fanon’s On Violence and Julian Go’s Policing Empires. Together, we will strategize ways to confront and defend ourselves against such brutality.
Session 2. “Smoke and Mirrors” – Cultural Violence
Through cultural violence, Empire obscures realities and mystifies histories of resistance, distorting narratives to suppress rebellion. This session will uncover the role of culture in perpetuating oppression, with guidance from texts like Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Rizvana Bradley’s Anteaesthetics. How can counter-cultural modes of knowledge production and wisdom keeping disrupt these distortions?
Session 3. “Policies and Procedures” – Institutional Violence
Empire uses institutional violence to surveil, administer, and control lives, often through bureaucratic means that appear neutral. Policies and procedures identify and suppress potential rebels, policing livelihoods in insidious ways. Drawing on Kris Manjapra’s Colonialism in Global Perspective and Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, this session will examine how these systems operate and how we might elude their control.
Session 4. “Prisons and Fortresses” – Carceral Violence
Carceral systems are designed to confine and exclude, imprisoning some rebels while barring others from access. From border regimes to mass incarceration, these structures uphold and enforce the divisions of Global Apartheid. Guided by Harsha Walia’s Border & Rule and Orisanmi Burton’s Tip of the Spear, we will explore strategies for dismantling these barriers, breaching walls, and smuggling liberatory forces and resources into and out of prisons and fortresses.
Session 5. “Carrots and Sticks” – Behavioral Violence
Behavioral violence incentivizes compliance and discourages rebellion through rewards and punishments. These tactics manipulate behavior, fostering complicity with Empire’s agenda. Inspired by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons and All Incomplete, this session will explore practices that nurture solidarity and resistance in the face of such manipulation.
Session 6. Entangling Resistance
The final session will weave together insights from previous discussions, examining how these forms of violence interconnect to sustain Empire. In this session we will focus on the design of Maroon Infrastructures—assemblages that foster rebellion, repair, and confluence. Texts like AbdouMaliq Simone’s The Surrounds and Malcolm Ferdinand’s Decolonial Ecology will guide this forward-looking conversation.
If you are interested in serving as a co-host or co-facilitator, please email muindi@thefyrthyr.org with the session you would like to co-host and co-facilitate. In your email, kindly share your interest in the session’s theme and how you envision contributing to the discussion.
