South African Institute of Race Relations

The South African Institute of Race Relations (IRR) is a research and policy organisation in South Africa. The IRR was founded in 1929 to improve and report upon race relations in South Africa between the politically dominant white group and the black, coloured, and Indian populations, making the Institute "one of the oldest liberal institutions in the country".

The Institute investigates socioeconomic conditions in South Africa, and aims to address issues such as poverty and inequality, and to promote economic growth through promoting a system of limited government, a market economy, private enterprise, freedom of speech, individual liberty, property rights, and the rule of law. The IRR tracks trends in every area of South Africa's development, ranging from business and the economy to crime, living conditions, and politics.

Throughout most of its history of opposing segregation and Apartheid, it has been regarded as liberal. In 1958, Gwendolen M. Carter wrote that "the Institute keeps close touch with non-European groups and over a long period of time has constituted itself as a spokesman for their interests." In more recent years the IRR and its work has also been variously labelled as right-wing (for instance by the academic Roger Southall and former Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba), conservative (in a ''New Frame'' editorial and by NEHAWU Western Cape secretary Luthando Nogcinisa), and reactionary (by former NUMSA spokesperson Irvin Jim), although it describes itself as adhering to classical liberalism.

During the periods of segregation and Apartheid, the IRR mostly drew its support from urbanites, tending to be from United Party-dominated parliamentary wards, who had a more "liberal" view on South Africa's race question.

Historian JP Brits argues that the IRR and its spiritual predecessor, the Joint Councils of Europeans and Africans, were the "most important extra-parliamentary organisations” to take an interest in the welfare of black South Africans. Both the Joint Councils and the IRR supported and had "native representatives" (whites chosen to represent blacks in Parliament) as their members and functionaries.

The IRR, alongside the Liberal Party, the Progressive Party, the Black Sash, the Civil Rights League, and the National Union of South African Students, according to Timothy Hughes, formed "the core of the 'liberal establishment'" in South Africa from the 1950s. In 1996, the academic Hugh Corder, and later critic, described the IRR as an important “national asset.” Provided by Wikipedia