Abolitionist disaster response is a current of disaster response that links survival in crisis to struggles against prisons, policing, cages, and other coercive institutions [@climatejusticeprison2018; @madrabout2025; @madrprinciples2020].
Within emergent disaster response, the term matters because disasters do not suspend carceral violence. They often intensify it. Mutual Aid Disaster Relief has explicitly tied climate justice to prison abolition, advocated for incarcerated prisoners during disasters, and framed liberatory disaster response as part of wider struggles against systems of domination [@climatejusticeprison2018; @madrabout2025].
Abolitionist disaster response therefore asks not only how to deliver relief, but how to organize survival without reproducing the coercive institutions that endanger people before, during, and after disaster.
Related terms
- Abolition - the broader political orientation this current draws on
- Collective Liberation - the wider horizon within which abolitionist disaster response is situated
- Community Defense - a related current focused on protection outside police-centered models