A new Open Society Foundations research project on Europe’s white working class provides a welcome corrective to those who champion the class as a victim of immigration while colluding in the abandonment of working-class areas. In his classic text examining production processes Labor and Monopoly Capital, published in 1974, Harry Braverman showed how ‘poverty and
More and more voices are speaking out against the annual spectacle of blackface ‘St Nicholas helpers’. We have written before about the Dutch blackface tradition of Sinterklaas’ (St Nicholas’) ‘helper’ Zwarte Piet (Black Pete). This year, though, the debate about Zwarte Piet — dressed in a golliwog-style wig, pronounced red lips and gold earrings —
Anti-extremism frameworks, popular in policy and academic circles, are masking the multi-dimensional and pan-European nature of contemporary fascism and the role of the state. Not since the early 1990s, and the pogroms at Hoyerswerda and Rostock have Europe’s far-right movements posed such a tangible threat to the safety of racial and religious minorities. In truth,
How, asks a Dutch anti-racist, is slavery dealt with in the Netherlands? 2013 marks 150 years since the abolition of slavery in the former Dutch colonies. It’s worth mentioning that the Dutch abolished slavery a while after the British (1833) and French (1848), and only after much resistance. One of the efforts to mark the
A series of hunger strikes, following allegations of abuse, force and the use of forged documents, are showing up the fault lines in the Dutch detention system. For the first time in more than a decade, hundreds of people in Dutch immigration detention centres have gone on hunger strikes in protest at their hopeless situation.
EU countries are accused of leaving asylum seekers from the Russian Federation vulnerable to the repressive reach of the Russian state. In the early hours of 17 January 2013, 36-year-old Aleksandr Dolmatov, a Russian engineer, was found dead at a Rotterdam deportation centre. Dolmatov, an activist linked to the opposition Other Russia movement, fled Russia
Helen Hintjens, from the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam, reports from The Hague on the violent eviction of a refugee protest camp. …we are not people to be pitied, who need to be given shelter. We are demonstrators, who want to get our political message across, by staying visible to
Asylum-seekers and migrants across Europe are determined to change the inhuman circumstances of their existence. In his new book Fortress Europe: dispatches from a gated continent, journalist Matthew Carr describes a protest in Lombardy in which five migrants climbed to the top of a crane above Brescia’s new light railway line. ‘For seventeen days they
An asylum seeking father’s suicide in Holland for the sake of his children has highlighted the growing local-national divide over the deportation of children. On 9 April 2012, Alain Hatungimana, a 36-year-old Burundian facing deportation with his two children, took his own life in a desperate attempt to prevent his children’s removal. Fourteen-year-old Abdillah and
If you want change, argues the Transnational Migrant Platform (TMP) in Amsterdam, you need to build a broad coalition capable of working simultaneously both on the domestic and the international front. Over the last six months, the IRR has been trying to find out more about the pioneering work of the TMP which was launched
