Race & Class

A. Sivanandan, director of the Institute of Race Relations for over thirty years and the Founding Editor of Race & Class, has died. We publish below an interview with him, which prefaced the second collection of his writings Communities of Resistance: writings on black struggles for socialism (Verso, 1990), and which has not before appeared in the journal. In it, Sivanandan recounts his early life and education in the then colonial Ceylon, and the forces that shaped his politics, his poetry of language and thought, and his embrace of dialectical materialism. This was not just at the cerebral level but, more importantly and significantly, at the deepest personal level and, in this, it informed a profound and visionary activism that continued undaunted till his death. Crucial to the trajectory of his life was the experience of leaving the anti-Tamil riots in Ceylon and walking into the 1958 anti-black riots in Notting Hill, a ‘double baptism of fire’. The interview explicates the significance of the transformation that he spearheaded and, with IRR staff and members, fought for, of the Institute of Race Relations. In the process, an elitist government-orientated body became one that spoke from the vantage point of those at the sharpest end of racist exploitation and oppression. That transformation in itself exemplified the issues of race and class and their relationship that Sivanandan explored so fruitfully and with so much personal and political energy in all his writings and interventions. Out of it, and his thinking and principles, this journal was born.

Present ad hoc outcries about police excesses such as shootings of young black men on the streets and mass incarceration miss the point about the nature and role of the police, argues the author. Coining her own counter-category, ‘violence work’, she shows how the police carry out violence work for the state; policing being the quintessential translation of state power. In a considered argument taking in the history of colonial policing, the development of racial capitalism and US foreign intervention, the article discusses a number of fallacies about policing: that it is civilian and distinguishable from the military; that it is a public service rather than a private endeavour; and that it is locally based and municipally controlled. Policing is in fact the human-scale expression of the state. She discusses a number of state theorists from Adam Smith, to Poulantzas, Foucault, Agamben and Hall and contemplates the role of the state to the market. The piece lifts the assumptions about public safety, state/private sector, place and scale to reveal the ideological landscape that legitimates state-market violence.

Over the past decade, radicalisation has emerged as perhaps the most pervasive framework for understanding micro-level transitions towards violence. However, the concept has not only become a dominant policing framework, but also an overarching governmental strategy encompassing surveillance, security, risk and community engagement. The emergence of this strategy has been accompanied by a whole host of analysts, advisers and scholars, who claim to possess ‘expert’ knowledge of individual transitions towards political violence. Revisiting ‘Radicalisation: the journey of a concept’, Arun Kundnani’s 2012 typology of such ‘expertise’ (Race & Class, doi 10.1177/0306396812454984), the author comparatively examines scholarly developments in relation to ‘radicalisation’ and juxtaposes new knowledge claims with official government counter-radicalisation strategies and funding programmes in the UK, US and Canada to highlight how some of the most problematic knowledge claims continue to influence social policy as we move forward in the global ‘war on terror’.

It has been common to think that societies which become pathological and extreme are the responsibility of deranged leaders such as Hitler, Pol Pot, Kim Jong-Un or Saddam Hussein. In fact these are usually a reflection and symbol of deeper social disorders. This article considers the mental health of societies, and looks at the loss of equilibrium in what have liked to think of themselves as models for the rest of the world to follow. The advent of Trump has uncovered a profound crisis of faith in what the US represents; a crisis of loss of meaning, in its heartland, of an imperialism which has scattered and laid waste with impunity cultures and societies across the globe.

Europe’s response in 2015 to the arrival of the largest forced displacement of peoples since the second world war, was not to attend to their needs but to securitise its borders and use laws aimed at people traffickers and smugglers, against those giving aid to the destitute new arrivals. This article focuses on a discussion at the launch of Humanitarianism: the unacceptable face of solidarity, between the Institute of Race Relations, NGOs, solidarity campaigns, academics and students concerned about the EU’s attitude and policies to search and rescue in the Mediterranean Sea, the harassment and criminalising of those trying to give support to refugees and the ways to organise to preserve humanitarian principles in Europe. Discussion covers the secret deals being made by the EU with countries around the Mediterranean, in Libya and in central Africa to act as gatekeepers to prevent migration to Europe, the difficulty of challenging the Facilitation Directive which allows humanitarians to be prosecuted as people smugglers, within a European Parliament which has increasing numbers of members from the extreme Right, and the importance of independent research to counter the myths and misinformation from the EU and member states on migration and asylum.

The neo-Nazi terrorist organisation, the National Socialist Underground (NSU), committed ten murders, three bomb attacks and fifteen bank robberies between 1998 and 2011. The group, which did not claim responsibility for the crimes, was not discovered by police until 4 November 2011. This case has been called one of the biggest ‘failures’ of German law enforcement and the secret services by politicians and the mainstream media. These failures provide an unprecedented example of the close connection between the secret services and the neo-Nazi movement as well as the structural racism within law enforcement agencies, which led to the consistent blaming of ‘victim’ communities and hence the following of wrong leads for thirteen years.