RJN’s Renewed Strategic Directions (2026–2031)

The Racial Justice Network (RJN) is entering a renewed phase of strategic direction for the five-year period 2026–2031. This strategy has been designed to help RJN navigate increasingly turbulent, hostile, and unpredictable local and global contexts, while deepening its role as a vital pillar within the ecology of anti-racist, decolonial, and anti-imperialist struggles.

In the UK, the limited openings for racial justice that emerged in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings risk rapid foreclosure. Racism continues to reassert itself across communities, streets, online spaces, and political discourse—fueled by extremist politicians, sections of the media, policing institutions, and other power holders. Globally, the poisonous fangs of imperialism continue to tighten their grip. The imperial logics that continues to subjugate Palestine, destabilise Venezuela and other progressive nation – states, and enforce domination in the Global South persist across political, economic, ecological, and cultural spheres, reproducing colonial violence on a global scale.

This rollback of hard-won gains—legitimised by political leadership and state institutions—has contributed to widespread community fatigue, disillusionment, and activist burnout. Against this backdrop, RJN reaffirms its role within the broader ecology of anti-racist and decolonial movements. The organisation now moves to ground popular understanding, mobilisation, and organising for racial justice and anti-imperialism in renewed and sharpened strategic directions marked by clarity, intensity, and collective power.

Grounded in a comprehensive evaluation of RJN’s work over the past decade, extensive multilateral consultations with communities and partners, and a rigorous assessment of impact, this renewed strategy represents a shift in operational gears. It seeks to inject new energy, sharpen focus, and expand RJN’s capacity to respond to the current conjuncture.

Strategic Objectives (2026–2031)

RJN’s work over the next five years will be guided by five interlinked strategic objectives:

• Developing community infrastructures, skills, and relationships for racial justice.
• Decentering colonial and racist perspectives while centering liberatory knowledge.
• Building global networks of solidarity against racism and imperialism.
• Challenging dominant narratives that criminalise migration while obscuring its root causes.
• Building intergenerational, international, and intersectional approaches and analysis across all work.

These objectives will be delivered through five interlinked programme areas: Decolonial Knowledge Production; International Solidarity; Community Building; Race and Migration Justice; and Race and Climate Justice.

Programme Areas

1. Race and Climate Justice

Mission: To build international solidarity through decolonial climate action.

This programme is grounded in the understanding that colonial legacies shape every dimension of the climate crisis—from the historical emissions that caused it, to ongoing extractivist practices that deepen it, to false solutions that reproduce colonial power under the banner of climate action. The climate crisis disproportionately devastates countries in the Global South and marginalised communities worldwide—those least responsible for environmental destruction.

Key initiatives within this programme seek to push allies and movements towards climate responses that recognise the centrality of race, colonial history, and global inequality. The programme also advances an understanding of the climate crisis as a major driver of displacement and migration, linking climate justice directly to migrant justice and anti-imperialist struggle.

2. International Solidarity

Mission: To build global networks of resistance against racism and imperialism.

This programme responds to the transnational nature of racial capitalism, state violence, and colonial domination. It is rooted in the understanding that racism, colonialism, and imperialism are global systems that demand coordinated international resistance.

Through sustained partnerships with organisations and movements across the Global South, the Caribbean, and diaspora communities, this programme strengthens internationalist struggle as a core pillar of liberation. Anchored in a decolonial framework, it builds cross-border networks that challenge global structures of domination. Building on RJN’s proven track record, the programme expands RJN’s international front through a tri-sectoral network of academics, activists, and artivists across the UK, Europe, the Caribbean, and the Global South.

3. Race and Migration Justice

Mission: To situate migration as resistance and survival.

This programme confronts the violent systems that displace, criminalise, and exploit migrants globally. It recognises that the technologies, tactics, and ideologies developed to police borders are also deployed internally against Black, Indigenous, and racialised communities within wealthy nations.

Adopting an anti-colonial framework, the programme challenges dominant narratives that criminalise migration while erasing its structural causes—war, extraction, climate collapse, and imperial domination. It recognises both the violence that forces people to move and the courage required to survive and resist across borders. Positioned at the intersection of migrant justice, anti-colonial struggle, and community self-determination, the programme amplifies the agency of people on the move while confronting the systems that exclude and dispossess the global majority.

4. Decolonial Knowledge Production

Mission: To move the centre by decentering colonial perspectives and centering liberatory knowledge.

This programme challenges the colonial monopoly over what is deemed legitimate knowledge. It centres voices, experiences, and epistemologies from the Global South and marginalised communities worldwide. Through key initiatives, the programme validates non-Western knowledge systems and supports communities in reclaiming, remembering, and repairing suppressed histories, narratives, and cultural practices.

By centering lived experience, ancestral wisdom, and community knowledge, the programme contributes to collective healing, political consciousness, movement building and transformative social change.

5. Community Building

Mission: To develop revolutionary infrastructure for racial justice.

This programme is rooted in the understanding that liberation does not happen spontaneously—it requires intentional, long-term organising. In the face of structural racism, colonial legacies, and ongoing state violence, communities need more than reactive responses; they need durable infrastructures that sustain resistance and spaces to imagine and build alternative futures.

This programme focuses on developing the infrastructure, skills, and relationships necessary to sustain long-term struggles for racial justice, anti-colonial liberation, and collective autonomy. Its initiatives support community-led responses to oppression, deepen political education, and nurture a base of revolutionary organisers, educators, and caregivers grounded in accountability, mutual aid, and collective care. The goal is to cultivate a growing base of revolutionary organisers, educators, and caregivers rooted in accountability, mutual support, and collective care—building not only campaigns, but enduring movements.