Race & Class

Raza, Shozab; Ali, Noaman G.

doi: 10.1177/03063968261442108pmid: N/A

Has decolonisation, as an analytical concept and political horizon, reached a dead-end? Some argue the term has been so overused – and misused – that it has lost meaning and should be confined to the era of formal empire. Yet, abandoning it obscures the endurance of imperialist, colonial and settler-colonial structures and forfeits a theoretical apparatus vital for confronting them. This article argues that decolonisation remains analytically and normatively indispensable, provided its meanings and political horizons are clarified. The authors map how scholars and movements have variously understood the concept, identifying different modalities of decolonisation that, by privileging certain elements over others, blunt its radical potential and even cover for reactionary agendas. Against this backdrop, the article recovers a militant and revolutionary modality: mid-twentieth-century Marxist-inspired projects that transcended the limits of juridical and economistic decolonisation, grappled critically with epistemic decolonisation, and reimagined anti-colonial political communities and futures. The authors term this revolutionary approach worldly Marxism and suggest it can revitalise contemporary theories and practices of decolonisation.

Farah, Wayne

doi: 10.1177/03063968261434853pmid: N/A

The author takes issue with the switch within the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) from a framework of equality (based on its founding principle of universality) to that of equity (based on a supposed responsiveness to specific needs). It is precisely because people’s lives are structured by unequal exposure to risk, exploitation and harm that universal provision is necessary. Equality, properly understood, does not deny difference; it protects against hierarchy. He argues that the move to equity, far from being progressive in recognising difference, is actually based in neo liberalism’s domination of a market in which scarcity has to be managed, hence hierarchies established. Equity justifies differential access by framing it as fairness, instead of questioning why there is less to distribute. Racial equity metrics capture relative change rather than absolute improvement, allowing disparities between groups to narrow even as overall conditions deteriorate. Proportionality, on which equity is based, means sorting ‘populations’, and race, even if not intentioned, becomes an explanatory factor rather than a social marker. The task is not, argues the author, to refine inequality more humanely, but to reclaim equality as a universal social right and to confront the conditions that have deepened social injustices, which clearly affect health.

Sajjad, Tazreena

doi: 10.1177/03063968261438746pmid: N/A

In the first year of his second term in 2025, President Trump systematically reshaped the United States’ immigration system through a series of executive orders (EOs) and proclamations. This article argues that these EOs and their subsequent policies should not be simply understood as exceptional authoritarian tools in extraordinary political times in the United States. Instead, these seemingly disparate measures reflect historical continuity when examined within the broader context of the country’s violent and exclusionary racial politics and anti-immigrant past. As such, the article argues that President Trump’s EOs, proclamations and their corresponding policies are serving as routine technologies of racial statecraft – embedding Great Replacement (GRT) ideology within the administrative machinery of the US such that it is no longer a cultural conspiracy or fringe ideology. Through legitimising state practice and explaining policy coherence across apparently disparate executive actions, these measures are serving as administrative rationality. Using a genealogical reading of policies derived from the current EOs on immigration, the article concludes with the implications for the future of multiracial citizenship and belonging in the United States.

Bello, Walden

doi: 10.1177/03063968261450056pmid: N/A

Akilan, Ambihai

doi: 10.1177/03063968261434852pmid: N/A

Chauhan, Sameera

doi: 10.1177/03063968261450421pmid: N/A

India’s legal framework for sex work occupies a persistent paradox: sex work itself is not illegal, yet the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act (ITPA, 1986) criminalises virtually every activity that sustains it. This article argues that this paradox is not legislative inconsistency but structural logic – one that reproduces, in postcolonial form, the colonial dispensation of moral surveillance and spatial exclusion. Drawing on Agamben’s concept of the sovereign ban, it contends that the ITPA produces sex workers as Homo Sacer: included within the legal order through their systematic exclusion from its protections. A qualitative survey of fifty sex workers across five urban sites in North India – Delhi NCR, Chandigarh and Zirakpur (Punjab), Baddi (Himachal Pradesh) and Noida (Uttar Pradesh) – found that 52 per cent entered sex work voluntarily, 82 per cent had experienced police harassment and 76 per cent did not perceive themselves as victims. These findings challenge the victim/criminal binary embedded in both the ITPA and the abolitionist feminist discourse that sustains it. The article critiques the Indian feminist mainstream’s construction of sex workers as trafficking victims, traces continuities between colonial suppression legislation and the contemporary legal framework, and calls for decriminalisation, labour recognition and sex worker-centred policymaking.

Ciniero, Antonio; Nardis, Fabio de

doi: 10.1177/03063968261437985pmid: N/A

This article examines migrant agricultural labour in southern Italy as a concentrated site of contemporary extractive capitalism. Focusing on the 2011 strike of migrant workers in Nardò (Apulia) and the subsequent Sabr trial, it argues that labour exploitation in European agriculture is not a marginal deviation or the result of criminal excess, but a structurally organised regime sustained through migration control, labour flexibilisation and territorial governance. Situating the case within the framework of racial capitalism and state-mediated extraction, the article conceptualises Europe as a space of internal frontiers, where incorporation into production is systematically coupled with precarious legal and political membership. The Nardò strike exposed the racialised foundations of agricultural production, while the Sabr trial translated structural exploitation into individualised criminal responsibility. Together, they illuminate the dialectic between conflict and legality through which extractive labour regimes are both challenged and stabilised. By foregrounding the legal and institutional production of vulnerability, the article contributes to a critical understanding of how democratic legality coexists with, and mediates, extractive accumulation in contemporary Europe.

Dana, Tariq; Ayyash, Muhannad

doi: 10.1177/03063968261425124pmid: N/A

Genocide is commonly approached as an exceptional crime defined by episodes of mass killing, yet such understandings remain inadequate for grasping how colonial modernity organises the systematic destruction of collective existence. Dominant approaches to genocide have historically been shaped by Eurocentric legalism and Holocaust-centred paradigms, which have constrained analysis to questions of intent and eventfulness. As a result, they have struggled to apprehend forms of violence that unfold through racialised governance, infrastructure, and the gradual erosion of the conditions that sustain collective life over time, particularly in settler-colonial contexts. The article advances the concept of ‘infrastructures of existence’ to capture the material, social, symbolic and political systems through which racialised populations reproduce themselves across generations. From this perspective, genocide is understood as a cumulative process that operates through coordinated assaults on these infrastructures rather than solely through direct killing. Four interrelated vectors are identified: ontological denial, through which racialised groups are positioned outside the moral boundaries of humanity; reproductive destruction, which undermines intergenerational continuity; epistemic erasure, which targets knowledge systems and testimonial authority; and necropolitical domination, which governs racialised populations through managed unlivability. The argument is developed through an analysis of Gaza, approached as a paradigmatic site of contemporary colonial violence. The genocide since October 2023 is situated within a longue durée of settler-colonial harm that Palestinians describe as an ongoing Nakba, which aims at the systematic dismantling of collective existence.

Bertoluzza, Giulio

doi: 10.1177/03063968261422586pmid: N/A

Fero, Ken; Bradshaw, Jodie; Patterson, Samantha

doi: 10.1177/03063968261450818pmid: N/A

This commentary by the organisers of the ongoing People’s Tribunal on Police Killings (PTPK), which held its first hearings in London on 5–6 April 2025, describes key features of the background to and hearings of the PTPK. Despite an estimated 3,000 police violence related deaths in the UK, no criminal conviction of officers has ever followed an inquest, and the judicial system has acted to contain the struggles of the families of those killed by police. The PTPK provided a space for families to tell their narratives in an unfiltered way, and verbatim testimonies are included here. The authors are aware that these testimonies might well not accord with evidence presented at inquests and rulings by inquests and the Crown Prosecution Service. But the shared patterns of systemic treatment by the state as well as collective resistance needed to be documented. These testimonies were interventions of what Fero and Hutnyk term obstinate memory – which functions simultaneously as qualitative data, research method and political praxis. Families testified to decades of betrayal by coroners, prosecutors, complaints bodies and lawyers who maintain a fiction of accountability. The very language of deaths in custody is, it is argued, a deliberate state strategy of erasure. Instead, the PTPK proposes the term police killings; to name them as such is to challenge power. The collection of testimonies, expert witness evidence and panel judgments underpin a series of class actions that the PTPK is undertaking. Further tribunals are planned on state killings in prison, secure medical units and during immigration control.