Beyond State Solutions: Confronting the Contradictions in Hate Studies

This article critically examines a fundamental tension within hate studies scholarship: its reliance on state mechanisms as primary solutions to hate despite overwhelming evidence of state complicity in perpetuating systems of inequality and harm. Drawing on perspectives from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, we interrogate how the narrow administrative criminal justice approach dominates hate studies discourse while overlooking the state’s problematic position as simultaneously a perpetrator, enabler, and purported solver of hate-based harms. We argue that these realities compel different forms of engagement with criminal justice systems and a reconsideration of the place of criminal justice institutions in the way the field conceives remedies to hate crime. We ultimately argue that for the transformative goal of hate studies scholarship to be realised, all harms, even harms created by the very institutions charged with safeguarding, must be combated.