Organized abandonment is Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s term, developed in Golden Gulag (2007) (cite: Gilmore, 2007) and extended in Abolition Geography (2022) (cite: Gilmore, 2022), for the institutional processes through which specific communities are systematically deprived of resources, services, and protection. The concept names not neglect but deliberate policy: how infrastructure becomes the mechanism through which disposability is built.
Gilmore developed the concept studying California’s prison expansion in the 1980s and 1990s. She showed how surplus state capital, surplus land, surplus labor, and surplus state capacity were reorganized through carceral infrastructure. Rural communities that had lost agricultural economies received prisons. Urban communities that had lost industrial economies lost their populations to those prisons. The result was a geography of organized abandonment: investment flowed toward cages while schools, hospitals, housing, and transit were defunded. Each withdrawal made the next more plausible.
The word “organized” does the critical work. Abandonment is not the absence of governance but one of its products. It requires zoning decisions, budget allocations, contract negotiations, and inter-agency coordination. The state does not simply fail to act — it acts to withdraw, and this withdrawal follows institutional logics that can be traced, mapped, and contested.
In emsenn’s “Citing for containment,” Gilmore’s framework contrasts with Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics: where necropolitics can become atmospheric — a description of conditions rather than causes — organized abandonment names the concrete administrative processes through which disposability is produced. It insists on specificity: which contracts, which agencies, which budget lines.
Related terms
- Ruth Wilson Gilmore — who develops the concept
- Racial capitalism — the system organized abandonment serves
- Economies of abandonment — Povinelli’s complementary framework
- Necropolitics — the politics of death that organized abandonment enacts
- Late liberalism — the governance regime within which organized abandonment operates
- Settler colonialism — the structure that organized abandonment sustains