A New Wave of Anti-Racism in Europe?

This open access book provides a way to understand the current manifestations of anti-racism in Europe, including changes that became particularly visible with the Black Lives Matter related protests beginning in May 2020. The so-called ‘new' anti-racism is often described as being led by racialized minorities themselves, foregrounding structural racism, and drawing connections between contemporary racism and the colonial past. But are these features truly new? And can we speak of a new 'wave' of anti-racism, and what does wave-thinking clarify or obscure? The chapters in this volume explore anti-racist struggles and practices across a range of European contexts, tracing both change and continuity over time. They illuminate how several features of antiracism, now considered distinctive -  including the leadership by racialized minorities, have deep roots, though they were pushed to the margins, unrecorded or silenced by the mainstream. Today, these voices are beginning to rise, echoing -sometimes modestly - in the centre.  By providing a solid empirical portrait of current and past anti-racist movements in different parts of Europe, this book is a vital resource for students and scholars of race, anti-racism and migration in Europe, as well as for activists and policy-makers navigating the evolving terrain of anti-racist thought and action.

Ilke Adam is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Brussels School of Governance (BSoG) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. She directs the VUB’s Brussels Interdisciplinary Research centre on Migration and Minorities (BIRMM) and the Centre for Migration, Diversity and Justice within BSoG. Her research focusses on anti-racist activism, immigration, diversity, equality and inclusion policies. She published many books and articles on these topics and is regularly consulted by policy- makers, civil society leaders and the media.The chapter she co-authored in this book resulted in the creation, with many others, of the firstwaves.be website, an open-source collaborative webplatform that shares the often silenced struggles for dignity of the Black and Maghrebi diasporas in Belgium.

Jean Beaman (she/her) is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Ph.D. Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY)/ Her research is ethnographic in nature and focuses on race/ethnicity, racism, international migration, and state violence in both France and the United States. She is author of Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France (University of California Press, 2017), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. She is also an Associate Editor of the journal, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power and a Corresponding Editor for the journal Metropolitics/Metropolitiques. She was a 2022-2023 fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and a Co-PI for the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar grant, “Race, Precarity, and Privilege: Migration in a Global Context” for 2020-2022.

Mariska Jung is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Sciences with the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). She is affiliated with RHEA, the university research center on gender, diversity and intersectionality, and in the Netherlands with the the Race-Religion Constellation project at Radboud Universiteit and the Institute for Social Justice (in formation) at Universiteit Leiden. In her dissertation, Jung studies the ways in which racism, antiracism, and animal politics are entangled in the Netherlands. In 2022, Jung received a Fulbright Schuman scholarship to further her research at the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the VUB, she worked for anti-discrimination NGOs such as the European Network Against Racism. In addition to her professional work, Jung has been involved with antiracist, decolonial and migration activism through various collectives and campaigns.