In this unique volume, the International Institute for Research and Education’s current and previous co-directors explain its origins, activity and challenges. On 11 June 1981, the Institut international de recherches et de formation pour promouvoir le socialisme scientifique et democratique (later shortened to the more versatile Institut International de Recherche et de Formation) was founded by a Belgian royal charter. It fulfilled a plan by Jacob Moneta, the editor-in-chief of the important big German trade union journal Metall, the Belgian Marxist economist Ernest Mandel, the Swiss economist Charles-Andre Udry and the philologist Jan Philipp Reemtsma. The following summer, the IIRE opened in Amsterdam as a centre for education and research in the service of progressive activists, linked closely to the Marxist and workers’ movements worldwide. After three decades, hundreds of successful seminars, schools and lectures have taken part at the IIRE, with many dozens of participants from every continent the IIRE. In Amsterdam, as in the new IIREs in Manila and Islamabad, its meeting rooms and bedrooms are used by a wide range of progressive activists and organisations. The IIRE is also the home for projects like the Notebooks for Study and Research, the Ernest Mandel Study Centre and the Institute for Critical Research.