Mariame Kaba (born 1961) is an organizer, educator, and curator based in New York. She founded Project NIA, a grassroots organization focused on ending youth incarceration, and has been involved in abolitionist organizing for over three decades. Kaba’s work insists that abolition is not a distant ideal but a discipline of daily practice — building the institutions, relationships, and responses that make carceral systems unnecessary.
Core ideas
- Abolition as practical horizon: Kaba argues that abolition is not a utopian endpoint but an orientation that shapes present action. It means building alternatives to policing and imprisonment now — mutual aid networks, community accountability processes, conflict resolution practices — rather than waiting for a transformed society to arrive. Every act of mutual support is abolitionist work.
- Transformative justice: rather than punishment or even restorative justice (which Kaba argues can be co-opted by carceral institutions), transformative justice asks how the conditions that produced harm can be changed. It addresses violence without reproducing the state’s monopoly on legitimate force.
- “Hope is a discipline”: Kaba rejects the framing of hope as a feeling or a temperament. Hope is a practice — a decision to act as though change is possible, sustained through collective work rather than individual optimism. This formulation has become widely cited in abolitionist and organizing communities.
- Against saviorism: Kaba’s organizing model emphasizes collective capacity over individual leadership. She resists the centering of charismatic figures and insists that movements are built by ordinary people doing sustained, unglamorous work.
Notable works
- We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (2021)
- Missing Daddy (2019, children’s book)
Related
- Ruth Wilson Gilmore — fellow abolitionist theorist and organizer
- Angela Davis — whose prison abolition work laid groundwork for this tradition
- Mutual aid — the practice of reciprocal support central to abolitionist organizing