During the pandemic, the World Health Organisation and governments took a back seat and power was centred on corporate interests. Health was viewed not as a right or a necessity, but as a product to be marketed and sold. Even in the midst of a global health emergency, companies treated the ill and the vulnerable…
The privatisation of public services is a long-standing global trend. But in the wake of the pandemic and through the introduction of contact tracing apps, Big Tech has gone one step further: Large corporations like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are now set to control the very infrastructure that underlies our public health system. In this…
Governments around the world have used the pandemic as an excuse to expand their powers. Populations have been divided on the basis of race and class into those deserving of protection and those perceived as risky and to be controlled. Migrants, refugees, precarious workers, and racialized groups have faced vulnerability and repression. Many Western liberals,…
How did we end up in a place where security is understood in the narrow terms of policing? Why does this kind of security fail to make a large part of the population feel safer? And can we imagine a society where my security is not the opposite of your security? In this thought-provoking video,…
In this fascinating conversation, Arun Kundnani interviews Deepa Kumar who traces the longer historical and racist roots of the War on Terror that in the last 20 years has killed at least one million people. They discuss how Arab and Muslim communities were racialised and targeted well before 9/11 and what interests this dehumanisation served.…
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…
Prevailing scholarship on neoliberalism fails to recognise that it generates its own distinctive forms of racial domination. Influential analysts such as Wolfgang Streeck, David Harvey and Wendy Brown assume or argue that racism exists today because neoliberalism’s defeat of racial legacies is incomplete. This ignores how racism is reconfigured in ways that are specific to…
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…
In his signature 2001 general election speech, Conservative party leader William Hague argued that four more years under Tony Blair would turn Britain into “a foreign land” governed from Brussels and overrun with asylum seekers. Labour “thinks Britain would be alright if only we had a different people,” he claimed. The implication was that a…
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…