Panel debate: Understanding the 2024 race riots

Panel debate: Understanding the 2024 race riots: Toxic polarisation and resilient communities

In summer 2024 far right protests leading to rioting broke out after a mass stabbing in Southport. Misinformation about the perpetrator of the attack spread online, and thousands of people participated in racist and anti-immigration disorder, with 1280 ultimately being arrested for criminality in the largest scale rioting seen in the UK since 2011. Although the riots have widely been described as anti-immigrant, racist and islamophobic, they have also been represented as opportunistic and spontaneous eruptions of violence, a ‘thuggery’. In this panel discussion we want to move away from a situational approach to what happened last summer, and discuss long term and structural processes which have laid the ground for the eruption of far-right violence. We also want to foreground community responses, and look with hope into the future towards a more tolerant society.

We will hear from a mix of academics and practitioners working with migrant communities in the UK, and particularly South Yorkshire.

• Aaron Winter, University of Lancaster.

• Melinda Momartinez (City of Sanctuary).

• Nazek Ramadan (Migrant Voice) [online participation].

• Ian Walker (Barnsley City Council).

The event will be hybrid and details will be shared with registered participants.