The ambivalence of the “Macpherson moment”: re-examining the political struggles following the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence

This paper provides a systematic re-examination of the political struggles following the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in April 1993. While the Macpherson Report has received considerable academic attention, there is still a lack of engagement with the complex political struggles based on which Lawrence's horrific death has become a major cause célèbre with far-reaching yet contradictory political consequences. Drawing on hegemony-theoretical approaches and presenting original archival research, this paper brings together an in-depth analysis of various aspects of the public debates, protest dynamics, and institutional struggles in the years following the murder of Lawrence with a contextual analysis of the broader politics of (anti-)racism in the transitional period between Thatcherism and New Labour. More specifically, it analyses the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry as the “condensation of a relation of forces” (Poulantzas) characterised by an ambivalent nexus between activist breakthrough, institutional reform and political stagnation in the post-Thatcherite conjuncture.