Institute of Race Relations

We’re hiring – new deputy director role!

12 – 26 November 2024 The IRR is really excited to report that it is looking to recruit a dynamic Deputy Director to drive the organisation forward in challenging times. We are asking anyone interested in helping the IRR develop its next phase as a radical educational body, which ‘thinks…

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…

An anatomy of the British ‘War on Woke’

  The October 2023 issue of  Race & Class provides a cutting-edge analysis of the British ‘War on Woke’, as well as the role of ethnic minorities in the Conservative party.   What does the ambiguous, catch-all term ‘woke’ actually mean, and how has it become central to the UK’s political discourse…

Watch: What is Antiracism?

A book launch and conversation with Dr Arun Kundnani, author of What Is Antiracism? And Why It Means Anticapitalism, also featuring Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore. 13th July 2023 | Brunei Gallery, SOAS University of London | Co-hosted with the Independent Social Research Foundation Why has liberalism been ineffective at combating…

Abolition, internationalism and communities of resistance

  Fifty years ago, the Institute of Race Relations overturned ‘race relations’ orthodoxies and set parameters for a committed anti-racism. Fifty years on, the IRR, with radical scholar activists, examined ‘New Circuits of Anti-Racism’ at a conference gathering. The July 2023 special issue of Race & Class, guest-edited by the…

Remapping Europe’s racisms

  The April 2023 issue of Race & Class offers a challenge to how Europe is understood and explores the origins and impacts of civilisational racism. A year on from the start of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, IRR director Liz Fekete in the April issue of Race & Class…