Audio: the political praxis of Jamil Al-Amin
Host James Pope and Arun Kundnani go deep on the life of Jamil Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown, in this conversation for the Africa World Now radio show.
Audio: a conversation on CLR James
Brett St Louis and Arun Kundnani join our host Eleanor Penny to discuss the near foundational figure in the domains of decolonial, marxist, and pan-african thought – C. L. R. James.
There are two kinds of antiracism. Only one works, and it has nothing to do with ‘diversity training’
While liberal antiracists argue over vocabulary, radicals take direct action – which is the only way to change the system In news that ought to please antiracist campaigners everywhere, just recently everybody seems to be talking about antiracism. Chief executives such as Larry Fink of BlackRock, one of the most powerful financial companies in the…
Abolish national security
In this report, it is argued that a politics of abolitionism offers the best approach to overcoming the failures of US national security policy. Applying an abolitionist approach not only domestically within the US but also to agencies of global security will be an essential part of reconceptualizing the notion of security. An abolitionist framework…
Training is the Graveyard of Struggle: An Anti-Racist History
The following is the text of a talk given at Goldsmiths College’s Department of Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies on December 11, 2020. Anti-racist training should not be part of the demands we make because it’s the easiest way for our struggles to be co-opted and defanged. Training as a solution implies theories of racism…
What is racial capitalism?
Text of a talk by Arun Kundnani at the Havens Wright Center for Social Justice, University of Wisconsin-Madison, October 15, 2020 A more detailed and updated version of the argument in this lecture can be found in my book What is Anti-racism? And Why it Means Anti-capitalism, published in 2023. A video recording of this…
For Black Panthers, Radicalization Entailed Self-Transformation
As a new generation rises up against racist police and vigilante violence, organizers are thinking through how to build a mass movement that fully engages the most marginalized. Useful lessons can be found in the history of the Black Panther Party, if one reaches beyond the imagery of leather jackets and shotguns. Susie Day’s new…
On A. Sivanandan’s Communities of Resistance
Below is the introduction to a new edition of A. Sivanandan’s classic collection of essays Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism. A. Sivanandan was the foremost intellectual of the black working-class movement in Britain during its insurgent heyday from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. The essays collected here, written between…
Book review: Incarcerating the Crisis by Jordan Camp
There is a growing acceptance in the US that the war on drugs has led to a system of mass incarceration which, in many ways, resembles the Jim Crow system of segregation and disenfranchisement – as Michelle Alexander has argued. Even the conservative billionaire Koch brothers, who, over the last few decades, have backed almost every…