Background
The structural crisis of capitalism in its neoliberal form has created a legitimacy crisis for the capitalist rulers, making the use of force a permanent strategy for maintaining their dominance.
Along with the physical violence of war and repression, endemic structural violence has created devastating outcomes for African/Black people in the United States including outrageous rates of illnesses and deaths due to inadequate healthcare, global South-level infant and maternal mortality rates, mass incarceration, and environmental racism, to name a few.
For the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP), the war waged against the working class within the United States mirrors the war waged on African/Black people, other nationally oppressed peoples, workers and farmers. Therefore, these phenomena must be seen as two sides of the same oppressive structure.
Our Campaign
“No Compromise, No Retreat: Defeat the War Against African/Black People in the U.S. and Abroad” is the key programmatic work of the Alliance. The campaign represents a broad strategic and tactical framework. It responds to the changing dynamics of the moment while providing a common collective direction for the 1) peace, 2) People(s)-Centered Human Rights, and 3) anti-imperialist educational and organizing work of Alliance members.
The campaign also provides a broad framework of resistance and coordination for non-Alliance social forces that are working on multiple, interlocking issues that potentially can facilitate U.S.-wide concentration and coordination of African/Black resistance forces. The work of the campaign is seen as an integral element of the effort to build Black Left Unity and broader radical anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and peace movements.
Specifically, this campaign works toward the following objectives and demands:
1. Demilitarize the United States by eliminating the programs that facilitate arming and colonial training of police forces and law enforcement, and provide cover for abuses and killings of African/Black, colonized, and working class peoples and neighborhoods.
*Abolish the Department of Defense 1033 program and all military equipment transfers/purchases to police departments.
*End the Deadly Exchange: Stop Israeli training of U.S. police and law enforcement and end all collaborations with, and support of, forces of zionist occupation.
Eliminate local and federal “anti-crime” and surveillance programs that target and criminalize African/Black peoples and all colonized peoples, the working classes, and poor communities.
Bring U.S. accountability for systematic police violence against African/Black and other colonized peoples and the working class.
2. Dismantle the militarized infrastructure of the U.S.-led imperialism and the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination, domestically and globally.
*Stop Cop Cities: End the development and construction of ‘Cop Cities’ throughout the country and re-prioritize funds towards the people(s)-centered human rights and needs of our African/Black, colonized, working class, and poor peoples and communities.
Close the 900+ U.S. foreign military bases and installations, dismantle U.S. military command structures around the world, and end U.S. occupation of the lands of sovereign nations, indigenous peoples, and colonial possessions.
3. Assert the sovereignty, dignity, and right to self-determination of African/Black peoples and all peoples and nations globally by ending violations of our people(s)-centered human rights.
*End economic warfare on our people and neighborhoods: Defend African/Black, working class and poor people, and our neighborhoods by confronting the economic attacks, including neoliberal austerity policies; privatization and expropriation of land and human needs; and capitalist exploitation of our labor, resources, and people.
*Shut down ICE and address the imperialist root causes of forced/coerced migration: End the criminalization of migration and dehumanization of migrating peoples; defend against the violations of sovereignty that create the conditions for coerced or forced displacement and migration.
End illegal U.S. sanctions and stop U.S. subversion and foreign political interventions.
Expose and confront the climate and environmental war on our peoples and lands, by prioritizing the dismantling of its root causes in the structures of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy U.S.-led militarism and imperialist conflict
4. Support National Policy imperatives that reduce militarize power and advance people(s)-centered human rights.
Reduce U.S. military budget by 50% as a first step and transfer spending to the people(s)-centered human-rights needs of the U.S. public.
Uphold international norms that commit nations and peoples to respect human rights and center peace by demanding passage of Congressional resolutions that commit the United States to uphold international law and the U.N. Charter.
Require the U.S. Congress to pass legislation and/or resolutions to support the global abolition of nuclear weapons, such as seen with the U.N. Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons.
Our Programs & Campaigns
This broader campaign also includes specific subsections and campaigns that related to the work of the alliance:
This work emerges out of the efforts of the Coalition Against U.S. Foreign Military Bases, an organization BAP was instrumental in building that is committed to closing the estimated 800 to 1,000 U.S. military bases established outside the United States. We have developed the U.S. Out of Africa Network (USOAN) as the organizing arm of the U.S. Out of Africa: Shut Down AFRICOM campaign.
Since 2023, BAP, along with key partner organizations, has lead a collective effort to activate the popular movements in our region in support of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) 2014 call to make the Americas region a “Zone of Peace.” This campaign is informed by the Black Radical Peace Tradition, with its focus on the structures and interests that generate war and state violence—colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism and all forms of imperialism—the fight for a Zone of Peace, which includes the U.S./ NATO Out of The Americas Network, is an attempt to expel all of these nefarious forces from our region: zoneofpeace.org
North/South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights:“MOVE THE GAMES”.
Boycott the World Cup, Boycott the U.S and Israel. U.S. officials have chosen to operate outside the bounds of law and basic morality — from supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza and illegal settlement expansion in the West Bank, to launching a direct military strike on Venezuela and kidnapping President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, to escalating repression against migrants and racialized communities inside the U.S. itself that has even led to murder. These are not isolated policies, but interconnected expressions of an empire that uses violence in the U.S. and abroad to enforce its dominance. The Anti Fascist Football Coalition, comprised of key organizations in the countries hosting the World Cup 2026 (Canada, Mexico, US), are collaborating to implement shared objectives, strategies, and tactics in two phases to Boycott the World Cup and Boycott the U.S. https://bit.ly/EndorseNow
Climate, Environment, and Militarism
This working group and its efforts are focused on understanding ‘climate and environmental liberation’ in the framework of people(s)-centered human rights, and connecting to BAP’s work of defeating the war against African/Black people in the U.S. and abroad. Instead of working to resolve these injustices, the state’s response is militarized control to expand domination: AFRICOM; SOUTHCOM; NATO expansion; the genocide in, and occupation of, Palestine; as well as the rise of domestic militarism (from “Cop Cities” to AI/Cloud Computing-driven data centers). Only by linking these struggles can we move toward realizing collective self-determination, human dignity, and right relationship with the Earth and its systems.
Key Resources
Map of U.S. Militarization in Our Americas: A map and guide to explore local-regional-national-global militarization
National Co-Coordinator, Austin Cole, on No Compromise, No Retreat
Why We Focus on Militarization
The United States settler state was established by war and violent theft of Indigenous land, and importation of enslaved Africans who were forced to provide free labor using systematic, unspeakable physical violence.
These and other forms of violence are also the methods by which the U.S. capitalist state maintains its dominance globally using military interventions to control the labor, land and mineral wealth of the vast majority of the world’s peoples.
Contradictions of the global capitalist order have translated into more reliance on repression and military aggressiveness on the part of the U.S. ruling class. The rationale and objective of increased militarism is to maintain the hegemony of the white supremacist, Pan-European, capitalist/colonialist, patriarchal order.
The U.S. state has centered militarism as the central element of its strategy, with escalating and never-ending military interventions and unconventional warfare in form of economic warfare. Yet using the military option, the state needs to generate popular support or at least the public’s acquiescence and as a consequence that need represents a strategic vulnerability.
BAP organizes in response to the ways U.S. military aggression globally correlates to oppression of our stateside. This includes the Department of Defense 1033 Program that transfers military equipment to police departments, Israel’s role in the training of U.S. police forces, ICE’s detention and deportation practices, and the U.S. criminal injustice system designed to punish and enslave us.
Banner photo credit: Charlie Riedel/AP