Press Release

European governments’ targeting of migrant solidarity activists for prosecution must stop, says IRR

The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) publishes today a compelling new report on ‘crimes of solidarity’, drawing attention to a dramatic increase in prosecutions, restrictions and penalties, against a variety of civil society actors. The online publication of When Witnesses Won’t be Silenced: citizens’ solidarity and criminalisation comes just days after the Global Legal Action

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Press Release

Resisting the new colonialisms

The April 2019 issue of Race & Class shows how the reinvention of colonialism through the domination of digital technology and transnational flows of securitisation is being met by unique forms of resistance. ‘Today, a new form of corporate colonisation is taking place’, argues Michael Kwet, ‘Instead of the conquest of land, Big tech corporations

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Press Release

The London Clearances a background paper on race, housing and policing

New IRR publication provides a fresh take on housing, policing and racism in London. The moral panic over supposedly dangerous black, urban subcultures in London, emerges at a crucial time, argues the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) in a challenging background paper published today. The impact of financialisation on local authority housing is converging with

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Press Release

Barbara Harlow – insistently against the stream

This week, the IRR publishes a memorial issue of Race & Class celebrating the lifework of the late Barbara Harlow, Solidarity here and everywhere. Barbara Harlow, a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin described as ‘a critic of both the world and the text’, profoundly shaped the fields

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Press Release

IRR statement on Stansted 15 verdict

IRR vice-chair Frances Webber comments on the stansted 15 verdict, a trial where laws designed to deal with terrorist threats at airports have been brought against human rights defenders. The crime of endangering airport security, under the Aviation and Security Act, was designed to deal with terrorist threats at airports – not peaceful anti-deportation activists

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Press Release

The Windrush scandal exposes the dangers of scaremongering about ‘illegal immigrants’

The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) publishes today a background paper showing how the injustices meted out to the Windrush generation are not anomalies but the logical result of an immigration system that, over many years, has weaponised the idea of ‘the illegal immigrant’. How can people who considered themselves British over a lifetime suddenly

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Press Release

Stealing C. L. R James

The October 2018 issue of Race & Class brings together pieces on racialising domestic violence, #Grime4Corybyn, the rebranding of C.L.R. James for a neoliberal era and memorial tributes to A. Sivanandan. Jessica Perera, who is currently assisting research at the Institute of Race Relations, explores how Grime artists in the 2017 UK general election came

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Press Release

The past in the present

Past oppressions are written into our statues, our architecture and our walls. This special issue of Race & Class brings a new perspective to reparatory history. ‘We are, at this moment, witnessing an eruption of active memory’, say Anita Rupprecht and Cathy Bergin. Resistances mobilised around Confederacy statues have provoked mass protests and fierce debate.

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Press Release

Police database spreads institutional racism

The IRR welcomes Amnesty International and The Monitoring Group’s recent reports on the racially discriminatory nature of the Metropolitan Police Service’s Gangs Matrix intelligence database. The fact that the Information Commissioner’s Office has launched an investigation into whether the Metropolitan Police Service Trident Gangs Matrix breaches the Data Protection Act is welcome, but the dangers

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