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As Brazilian president Bolsonaro did everything in his power to sabotage efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19, protestors took to the streets holding signs that read "Our brother, George Floyd," seeking to connect the police murder of George Floyd to the racist violence of Brazilian police who kill in the favelas with impunity. In 2019, 1,800 people were killed by police in Rio de Janeiro alone, almost twice the rate of police killings in all of the United States (Gutierrez 2020). The police murder of George Floyd over an alleged $20 counterfeit bill amid a raging global pandemic resonated with millions of oppressed people all over the world, from the favelas of Brazil to the streets of Nigeria. In the United States, the George Floyd rebellion unleashed one of the most militant uprisings since the 1960s, forsaking previous demands of police reform and taking concrete steps towards abolishing the police-tearing down carceral infrastructures that prop up the brutal racial social order. William Robinson's book "The Global Police State" couldn't have come at a better time. Policing and the COVID-19 pandemic have forced us to face head on the question of crisis. Robinson has provided us with an important text that makes a powerful case for understanding how the contradictions and crises of the capitalist world-economy are pushing

While managing the working class has been a central concern of capitalist ruling classes throughout history, contemporary restructuring in the face of slowed growth, declining profit rates, climate change and environmental degradation makes the question of maintaining social order, and hence of policing, more important than ever before. We decided to focus this special issue on the various modalities of policing to secure, maintain, and reproduce existing racialized class structures at this moment of world-systemic crisis. In this introduction, we try to situate the urgency of understanding the relationship between policing, pacification, and legitimacy in the larger context of the capitalist world-economy in crisis. We then turn to a summary of the contributions to highlight the main themes that emerge in this Special Issue. Just two months into a global health pandemic, the world watched as a white police officer slowly choked to death a working class Black man over an alleged $20 counterfeit bill outside of a Minneapolis corner store. George Floyd's death sparked militant protests throughout the United States not seen since the urban rebellions of the 1960s. Taking direction action, the Black-led and

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The spectacle of racist state violence in the middle of a global pandemic was the spark that ignited one of the largest Black led and multiracial protest movements in recent history. The George Floyd rebellion propelled abolitionist politics from the margins to the mainstream of American political life. In the span of a few months, abolitionism supplanted liberal visions of reforming the carceral state. While important academic work continues to highlight the social and historical context that produced such widespread resistance to the American punishment regime, very little attention has been paid to how and why abolitionism gained such mainstream acceptance. We argue that the successful mainstreaming of the twenty-first century abolitionist response to the crisis of the carceral state is due to generational and intergenerational experiences of mostly Black and Brown organizers fighting against policing and incarceration. As new abolitionism forces reckonings with the carceral state and its major institutions, through important shifts, methodologies, and newly imagined forms of freedom, these movements necessitate new questions in the study of punishment: What are the tensions and contradictions that twenty-first century abolitionists are contending with as they build intergenerational movements against policing and prisons? How does the abolitionist legacy inform the work that we do as scholars and activists? How does the carceral reckoning realign political education and struggle?