A self-ruling community is not a lawless place, you don’t need to be under government control to set up a police. An example where that is the case is Cherán, where until the 2011 uprising cartels had cut down 60,000 acres under the cover of bribed politicians and a corrupt police. In 2017 Cherán may have had the lowest homicide rate in the entire country of Mexico.

The way I see things, law enforcement and military are there to serve and protect those who are higher up in social hierarchies, as well as their wealth, even tho we are fed the story that they work for us, common people. In reality, they are a top-down structure, full of corruption, racism, sexism etc, and I really don’t feel safe around them.

So in order to answer your question, I would need to reframe it. It could be something like: how do people and areas can be protected, from other people or groups of people who are bad actors, within a society that does not have hierarchical structures (meaning that is organized in a horizontal way)?

For me, the answer is not a sweeping rigid model that will be applied everywhere, all the time. People from different places see things differently, so local solutions need to be applied. Cultures worldwide have dealt with these things. So, one solution would be to look into their examples and find ideas that would fit our community’s needs, and take it from there.

(If the questions was about the justice system, I would suggest to look into restorative justice, as well as transformative justice)

AE Marling has written Missing Mermaid which is a detective story set in a Solarpunk city. (You don’t need to read the first book, which is also a detective story set in a Solarpunk city) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/221365244-missing-mermaid

I reject the idea that law enforcement is always necessary. Laws are frequently unjust and anti-solarpunk. I don’t care about people breaking laws if the laws don’t serve the people. But let’s say all the laws are just - I also reject the idea that we need a bunch of power-hungry assholes with weapons and legal immunity to “enforce” them.

Here’s the thing - we rely on the police to do a broad range of tasks and, at least in the US, we hand them a gun to do all of those tasks. The traffic lights are down? Take your gun and go stand in the intersection. Parking tickets? You’ll need your gun for that. Homeless people on the streets? Don’t forget your gun. House broken into? Here’s a gun, try not to shoot the wrong person.

The simple answer is that we should have a different team of (trained, specialized) people for each of those scenarios. Police don’t receive training in each of those areas which means they are frequently in danger and frequently relying on violence or the threat of violence to get things done. It’s not fair to the officers and its not fair to the people they “serve.” I want to see a team who handles traffic, a team to respond to homeless people (though hopefully we’ll be on our way to finally providing housing for all), a separate team for crimes like burglary and theft, etc etc.

Here’s a resource for you (and others) to check out, they explain things much more succinctly than me: https://defundthepolice.org/alternatives-to-police-services/

As for a military - I will be completely honest, I haven’t educated myself as much on alternatives to that, but I do question your assumption that we will always need to defend ourselves. It assumes that people will always be attacking us.

A while back I started a discussion on the anarchist community looking for some similar discussion - some of the answers there might be useful:

https://slrpnk.net/post/35979981

I would say it depends how we ended up at solarpunk society in canon like there could totally be an iron grip authoritarian version haha if you take a look at what chinas doing think progress at all costs where you march to your engineered future regardless of the human cost

There’s always a set of assumptions implied by these types of questions that people tend to miss when answering them. We have to start by talking about those before we talk about anything else. The first is the implicit connection between morality and criminality. Slavery was legal. The Holocaust was legal. The current ethnic cleansing in the US, and the genocide in Gaza are both legal.

The state exists to maintain a specific order, a specific acceptable direction of violence. This is non-consentual hierarchy isn’t just bad for the people being oppressed, it changes the oppressor. Arguments against slavery mostly centered the violence carried out against people, but some talked about the ways in which enacting violence also destroyed the person committing the violence.

The whole Epstein thing isn’t some weird artifact of the current time. It’s how power works. The dynamic of powerful men sexually abusing children goes back to Rome, at least. Sexual violence and power is intimately connected, and it extends from the locus of power in the king/president/dictator/elite class through society as patriarchy, racist violence, etc. Illegitimate hierarchy, in and of itself, infects the whole society manifesting as “crimes” and “things that really should be crimes but are never actually prosecuted.”

This happens to also be connected to the military question (which I’ll come back to in a bit) by the concept of “sovereignty.” There can be no such thing as a system that can both create and modify rules and constraints itself with those rules, formally speaking. That’s basically what Kurt Gödel proved. So every “constitution” that “protects rights” is fundamentally snake oil, at best.

Sovereignty is the supreme power, that which is above the law, and it is a fundamental property of all states. “National Sovereignty” is simply a property without which a state cannot exist. There must be something above the law, and that thing tends to be the worst people. Legal systems and militaries exist to maintain that fact.

The criminal legal system is a system of violence. It does not prevent violence, or protect people. It maintains a specific type of violence and a specific direction of violence. Everything else it does is a cover. If you happen to know what a “clearance rate” is, then you know what a thin cover that is. If you understand recidivism rates, you start to realize that prisons are not simply unhelpful but that they actively harm society. They create “crime.” But why would a society use prisons if prisons create “crime”? Because prisons are tools of political violence. I’ll prove it.

Restorative justice is one of the myriad of systems that exists as an alternative to punitive criminal legal systems like those in the US. It is far more effective at reducing anti-social behavior, and has been widely studied. This works, it works well, even for violent crime. Some places even do use it for non-violent crime like petty vandalism. It’s cheaper than punitive measures and it works, why is it not being used now?

You know what else reduces “criminal” behavior? Free breakfast programs, free child care, lead abatement, the list goes on. All of these programs are cheaper than prison. In terms of return on investment, the criminal legal system is an absurd waste of money. It doesn’t fulfill it’s stated goal at all, and there are actually efficient and tested things that do. But what does this system do? Well, it maintains the political system by heaping so much trauma on vulnerable people that it’s hard to organize, and it kidnaps and isolates political organizers. The purpose of a system is what it does. The criminal legal system is a tool of political repression.

So then, what do you replace the cops with? If you got rid of cancer, what would you replace the cancer with? You don’t. You’re cured of cancer. The treatment, that is, building this society, is the process of systematically challenging these hierarchies and dismantling them. The foundation of a solarpunk society is built on systems that address the causes of anti-social behavior - that help people heal from abuse, that help people see their internal biases, that help people hold themselves and others accountable for their actions, that help people grow into the types of people who can live in a solarpunk society.

But what about defense? Now we’re back to talking about sovereignty. You can’t have sovereignty without hierarchy, and you can’t “conquer” a people without sovereignty. This is kind of the whole point (as I understand it, the book is still on my reading list) behind James Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed. In order for governments to conquer people, they have to first create a government to conquer. This has been the pattern for thousands of years. In Indonesia, the Dutch (VOC) systematically built governments among indigenous people and then turned those people against each other in order to control them. The England took 400 years to conquer the Irish because they had to force them to have a government first. Compare that to the Blitzkrieg taking over unwilling people in days by simply seizing the seat of power, or Russia taking over the US government without even declaring war.

Centralized governments are actually a vulnerability, not a strength. Decentralization actually gives you a pretty significant natural advantage. This advantage grows even more when you shift to irregular warfare. The US, with the most powerful military in the world, still has no good way to manage asymmetric warfare. And they never will. Because it’s actually impossible. Cybernetically speaking, a decentralized asymmetric actor has greater variety than a centralized one. Any entity that can leverage that advantage will always beat centralized power. That’s not even a new insight, Machiavelli even talked about this. Basically, if you want to rule a population that doesn’t want to be ruled you essentially have to commit genocide (thus the Russian approach to Crimea, the English approach to Northern Ireland, the Israeli approach to Palestine, and the American approach to Turtle Island).

Even then it’s simply a matter of time. Colonial societies are permanently at war with themselves. Entropy takes care of all empires, on a long enough time scale. And that’s kind of the reality of it. Hierarchy is a high energy system. It is always working against entropy. Given enough time, entropy always wins. Decentralization just takes less energy.

We are living through a brief period where agricultural abundance cascaded into fossil fuel abundance, during a relatively calm and stable climate. Hierarchy is ending that stability and abundance. I don’t expect hierarchical systems to be the biggest things to worry about, because I don’t think they can actually survive in the world they are creating.

But, they can create a lot of havoc before they collapse (like the Nazis did). So a solarpunk society should be able to use decentralized tactics to speed up that collapse as much as possible. That looks like drones and tunnels attacking oil infrastructure and other logistics.

A lot of colonial American power structures fit the intent of what you’re describing. For law enforcement, the local government would usually designate someone to be the head of law enforcement for day to day activities and there would be a communal drawing of manpower from the local community if the need arose. For the military, you had local militias which had elected officers and would vote on strategic actions if time permitted.

You’re likely going to see a lot of people here completely reject these forms of local communal government because communal doesn’t mean equal. For instance, the enforcement of slavery was a communal action in the South; free whites gladly assisted in the capture of escaped slaves.

It would be like an earthship community, or an amish community. It relies on a legitimate government outside of it to provide actual protection from outside lawlessness. A solar punk commune couldnt exist in a wartorn country, it would become a refuge for those seeking shelter and nourishment. Imo a better thought experiment would be how can we build passive structures on lines of communication outside of cities that can provide potable water or shade from the sun. “Johhny Appleseed” John Chapman style of how can we help provide for everyone instead of how can we build a gated community to keep the barbarians out.

The more favorable implementations I have read about typically take the form of community patrol groups. Members of the group rotate in and out, and when something goes wrong they step in to de-escalate whatever situation is going on. For more serious problems, those boil down to a community wide decision on what to do with the perpetrators.

As for military, there’s a few paths. In real life, the most ideal but least likely would be a world wide revolution that sees the end of hierarchy applied globally. At that point there would be no need for any military.

Next most likely would probably be a more dedicated form of the community patrol groups, with various populations pitching in with what they can and where they can.

Third is a geographical separation that leads to no need for a military. The best example of this is Annares in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Annares and Urras are sister planets/moons. Annares is an anarchist utopia and Urras an archist nightmare. Theoretically any nation state on Urras could decide to wage war against Annares, but waging war against a different celestial body is much more difficult than a normal war, so in practice the threat of war is not very large, and therefore the need for military is absent.

Who ever is in the ingroup would gang up on who ever is in the outgroup. Similar to many communes.

Erm, the same, I guess, but powered by renewable energies? It depends on what you imagine will happen in this fictitious litterary genre. I don’t really understand the point of the question, actually. It would be whatever the authors decide it to be.