Pioneering research shines a spotlight on ‘police pursuit killings’
University of Manchester sociology lecturer Siobhan O’Neill’s research, published in the January 2026 edition of the IRR’s journal Race & Class, emerges out of community organising around an under-researched aspect of state violence: police pursuits. According to the IOPC, in the last ten years there have been 299 police-related…
Policy and prosecutorial responses to the summer 2024 riots risk fuelling a cycle of racist violence
Policy and prosecutorial responses to the summer 2024 riots delink the violence from racism, paving the way for anti-immigration and Islamophobic protests and far-right vigilantism to form an infinite loop. A unique study published today by the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) finds that policy and prosecutorial responses to the Summer 2024 riots that…
Enforcing Britishness: from the ‘numbers game’ to far-right vigilantism
This briefing paper is aimed at providing community sector voices, concerned politicians and policy makers with an overview of trends on the far Right, also examining developments in electoral politics, and international hard Right movements, that serve to amplify far-right themes. The last six months have seen far-right manipulation…
Race & Class UK criminal justice resource – The Past in the Present
A collection of summaries of and links to Race & Class articles (1975-2025) on racism, class, criminal justice, related urban and ‘race’ policies, and key moments of resistance to state/institutional racism. In addition to the archive, an accompanying Race & Class UK Criminal Justice timeline provides information by year…
Paramilitary policing against the people: Colonial continuities and the challenge from below
Europe’s increased use of weaponry against racialised minorities, migrants and protesters, signifies creeping authoritarianism – IRR new study finds The new study, published on the fifth anniversary of the death of George Floyd, links the growing use of dangerous crowd control weaponry to the embrace of hypermilitarised policing in Europe. The…
IRR statement on research findings on charging and sentencing patterns following the summer 2024 racist riots
Research from the IRR on charging and sentencing after the far-right-orchestrated racial violence in England in summer 2024,[i] finds that attacks could be traced back to scare statements about immigration and two-tier policing and that courts failed to acknowledge the full extent of the racism behind the riots. Interim…
Mainstreaming hate: how the Right exploits the crisis to divide us
This briefing paper asks if it makes sense any more to isolate the far Right from a reconfigured, identitarian and traditionalist hard Right. It attempts to do so by providing a detailed but easily accessible account of how far-right ideas have already passed into the mainstream and what we…
Animating the archive
The July 2024 issue of Race & Class includes several articles which use past struggles to reread the present. In a thought-provoking article, Natasha Carver (University of Bristol) sheds light on the contours of the present-day narrative of ‘Female Genital Mutilation’, by analysing how, in the heyday of empire,…
Systemic injustice and the criminal legal system
Racism seeps into every aspect of criminal ‘justice’ and radical scholars are exposing the breadth and depth of the issue. The April 2024 issue of Race & Class contains cutting-edge articles on the criminal legal system, adding to a growing number of campaigns voices rejecting the normalisation of systemic…
‘County lines’: racism, safeguarding and statecraft in Britain
‘County lines’: racism, safeguarding and statecraft in Britain by Insa Koch, Lauren Wroe and Patrick Williams, three leading experts in law, criminal justice and legal and social policy, is published in the IRR’s journal Race & Class. ‘County Lines’ refers to the government and police’s unique crime label for…