Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
With the study of law’s relationship with racial justice in mind, this chapter draws on theories of antiracism and progressive lawyering to set out four principles for antiracist lawyering: reflection, creativity, collaboration, and accountability. It argues that lawyers who wish to promote racial justice should engage in reflection, should adopt creative approaches to lawyering, should collaborate, and should remain accountable to their clients.
This concluding chapter summarizes the analysis throughout the book, drawing on the case of Shamima Begum to highlight the limits of law in the struggle for racial justice. It also considers how law has been used to advance racial justice in former colonies of the British Empire. It considers the legal case for reparations for slavery, the use of law to secure compensation for victims of racial injustices in Kenya, and the use of law to challenge the death penalty in Barbados, a vestige of colonial rule.
The introduction draws attention to the paradoxical nature of the relationship between law and racial justice, highlighting how the law can be used to both help and hinder the struggle for racial justice. We might assume that the legal system will be allied to the idea of racial justice because it is said to be underpinned by the principles of neutrality and fairness, and there are various Acts of Parliament that appear to give effect to these principles such as the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010. However, there are examples of law failing to advance racial justice and sometimes facilitating racial injustices. The Introduction sets out the central contention of this book: that there are historical, cultural, and systemic reasons for the limits of law.
This chapter sets out some definitional and conceptual issues. It defines the term racial justice and outlines six key concepts of Critical Race Theory that underpin the analysis in the rest of the book: structural racism, the social construction of race and racism, intersectionality, interest-convergence, lived theory, and the inherent limits of legal processes. It also outlines the problems with ubiquitous terms such as BAME, equality, diversity, and inclusion.
As the British Empire disintegrated in the aftermath of the world wars in the first half of the 1900s, immigration laws were developed which replicated the effect of colonial rule. These laws maintained the two-tiered legal system that had developed during colonial rule, ensuring that people racialized as something other than ‘White British’ were denied the full protection of the law. Yet at the same time, laws to promote good race relations were introduced, which appeared to make the legal system a tool for racial justice, rather than racial injustice. It is with this in mind that we can better understand racial injustices today, in education, criminal justice, employment, housing, and healthcare systems.
This chapter is concerned with the use of law to create and perpetuate racial injustices during the era of the British Empire. It explores the use of law to justify and facilitate imperialism and colonial rule and to legitimize slavery. It considers how law was used to impose social control over indigenous populations and the ways in which law created the phenomenon of structural racism. In effect, a two-tiered legal system was created: one for those classed as White British, and another more disadvantageous system for those classed as something other than White British.
Racial justice is never far from the headlines. The Windrush Scandal, the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston and racism within the police have all recently captured the public’s attention and generated legal action. But, although the ideals of the legal system such as fairness and equality, seem allied to the struggle for racial justice, all too often campaigners have been let down by the system.
This book examines law’s troubled relationship with racial justice. It explains that law’s historical role in creating and perpetuating racial injustices continues to stifle its ability to advance the cause of racial justice today.
Both a lawyer’s guide to anti-racism and an anti-racist’s guide to legal action, it unites these perspectives to help both groups understand how to use the law to tackle racial injustices.
The legal system today appears to promote racial justice, through laws that prohibit racial discrimination and race hate crimes, for example. The law also requires public authorities to take proactive steps to advance racial equality and to foster good race relations. As this chapter illustrates, though, there are limits to the use of law. In education, criminal justice, employment, healthcare, and housing, legal authorities have been unable or unwilling to grapple with the six concepts of Critical Race Theory set out in Chapter 1: the problem of structural racism, the social construction of race and racism, intersectionality, interest-convergence, lived theory, and the limits of adversarial legal processes.
While racism, racialization and antiracism in football have been extensively studied, antisemitism within football has received comparatively less scholarly attention. Among the possible reasons for this academic neglect are the relatively low number of Jewish professional footballers and the debates pertaining to a hierarchy of racisms and whether antisemitic hate crime should be treated as a distinct form of racism. Yet, as this chapter evidences, antisemitic incidents are a common occurrence in English men’s football, with some high-profile examples both on and off pitch in recent years involving officials, club owners, coaches, players and, most frequently, supporters. The chapter provides an overview of expressive’ has positive connotations, so I would change this to ‘forms of antisemitism expressed within men’s football. It first discusses problems of contested definition of the phenomenon and then covers the scale of ‘religious’ hate crime in the United Kingdom (UK). Next, the nature of antisemitism in the UK is outlined before examining its prevalence and presence within English football fan culture. Finally, the chapter focuses on English Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur, whose supporters are the target of the majority of antisemitism within English football. This includes a discussion of the different uses and meanings of the controversial term ‘Yid’, which for many people in Britain today is an ethnic epithet and ‘race hate’ term, but which has taken on differing subcultural meanings within the context of English football fan culture. This is because for some 40 years, some Tottenham fans have appropriated and paradoxically used this taboo word as a term of endearment in songs and chants in an attempt to deflect the routinized antisemitic abuse they receive because of their perceived identity as supporters of a ‘Jewish club’.
Although racism in football stadiums has generally decreased over the last two decades, social media has provided a platform for individual fans and the far Right to racially abuse players, clubs and fans in relative safety. In 2022, The Alan Turing Institute released a report which tracked abuse on Twitter towards Premier League players across the 2021/22 season. Their machine learning tool found that there were 59,871 abusive tweets directed at Premier League footballers, with 68 per cent of players receiving abuse at least once. So, what is English football doing to challenge this and protect its players? This chapter begins by showcasing the findings from Kearns et al’s (2022) scoping review of sport, social media and hate, completed as part of a research project entitled Tackling Online Hate in Football. The review found that a total of 41 peer-reviewed articles were published in this field since 2005, with football receiving the most attention. The scoping review found that Twitter was the platform most examined, and racism was the most researched issue. Building on this, the chapter first contextualizes the existing research, including a focus on football-related online racism and a theorization of factors underpinning online racism. This provides a suitable backdrop for the next part of the chapter, where we critically analyse several campaigns and strategies used by key stakeholders to curb online racism and wider forms of discrimination in football. In our final summary, we put forward some ideas and countermeasures to challenge online racism in football.
