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Paper short abstract

This paper examines racial reckonings in the UK asylum and refugee sector after 2020, analysing how liberal institutions absorb and delimit abolitionist demands, and how migrant justice movements sustain anti-racist practices amid colonial continuities and intensifying border violence.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines contemporary forms of racial reckoning in the UK ‘asylum and refugee sector’ in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings and the growth of abolitionist and border abolitionist currents. It situates these developments within longer histories of colonial governance, racialised welfare, and postimperial nationalisms, tracing how liberal institutions manage, absorb, and delimit demands for racial justice amid far-right resurgence, authoritarian governance, and intensifying border violence.

Drawing on a collaborative ethnographic case study at Revoke, a grassroots youth organisation in East London, the paper explores how migrant rights casework, in-house therapy, transformative justice practices, and political education become sites where questions of racial reckoning and abolition are worked through day-to-day. Here, while critiques of NGO-isation and institutional capture have increasingly been articulated through abolitionist frameworks, we argue that the very language and ethics of ‘abolition’ have themselves become vulnerable to co-optation; folded into liberal state projects, professionalised care regimes, and forms of academic extractivism that neutralise their political force.

We ask how post-2020 institutional reforms and discourses of abolition reconfigure moral responsibility within the border regime, and how anti-racist and migrant justice movements attempt to sustain abolitionist practices rooted in longer Black feminist and anti-colonial traditions. In doing so, the paper highlights the continuities linking liberal racial reckoning to imperial moral governance, and the ongoing struggle to interrupt and dismantle these regimes.