Resisting the Nuclear: Art and Activism Across the Pacific. Elyssa Faison and Alison Fields (editors). University of Washington Press. 2024.

Resisting the Nuclear: Art and Activism Across the Pacific edited by Elyssa Faison and Alison Fields arrives at a time of increased global nuclear anxiety. An inaugural book from the series Critical Ethnic Studies and Visual Culture (University of Washington Press), the book turns to a paradigm of “resistance” through art and activism to consider responses to nuclear legacies past and present. This is a wide-ranging and ambitious collection which deviates from previous scholarship that focuses largely only on art-objects, and instead expands the nuclear humanities context by drawing from “anthropology, sociology, art history, arts education, environmental management, history, art, and photography” (7). 

Nuclear survivors and anti-nuclear resistance 

The book carefully attends to “originary” nuclear moments (Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Trinity) to situate anti-nuclear imaginaries outside of a solely Cold War framework (8). This is made ever-present by an important introduction early on to a character who emerges throughout the book: the Hibakusha (a Japanese term for survivors of the atom-bomb). This important recurrence of the hibakusha by contributors is part of a broader privileging of the voice of direct sufferers, survivors and indigenous actors. Particularly welcome throughout is an examination of the racialisation and stratification of hibakusha, who still face discrimination, both socially and economically. This focus exemplifies a broader emphasis the editors place on localised experiences, which in turn moves the books criticality away from Euro-American conceptions of universalised/global resistances. Instead, the book carefully exposes the acute limits, antagonisms and difficulties those who were directly impacted face in pursuit of resistance.

This important recurrence of the hibakusha (a Japanese term for survivors of the atom-bomb) by contributors is part of a broader privileging of the voice of direct sufferers, survivors and indigenous actors.

The idea of a “monument” is skilfully deployed throughout the narrative, to tie potentially disparate chapters together – from tourist sites, abandoned bunkers and temples, to exhibitions, art objects and more. Arguably, the book is itself a timely monument to modes of creative response and resistance through its focus on those overlooked and written-off antinuclear histories. Yet, the editors are careful to ensure that, when we consider “monuments”, we do so through a lens of Anti-monumentalism: whether they be art objects, tourist test-sites, commodities, exhibitions, performances, and even humans (who can, as in the case of the hibakusha, become reified as monuments to nuclear disaster). We must be careful, the editors warn, not to present such locales, sites and bodies as homogenous or static, but rather perceived within a criticality that resists “static, fixed, representation” (117). This in turn enables us to push “against dominant narratives of resistance” and privilege a “focus on those who have been relegated to the margins” (6).  

Disability and gender in activist movements 

An incident prevalent in later chapters is the Lucky Dragon incident of 1954: a Japanese fishing boat with 23 onboard which became contaminated by fallout from nuclear testing in the area. Here, the book’s impressive criticality and self-reflection on the potentialities (and limits) of resistance is especially evident. Takenaka’s chapter (207-216) on “Housewives petitioning for World Peace” offers an important reflection on the gendered dynamics of activists’ response to the incident. In particular, she elucidates how female activists “versed in political activism” (209) became characterised as “naive housewives” by those in pursuit of an anti-nuclear petitioning reliant framed within a “grassroots effort by ordinary mothers” (209). As a disabled scholar, I further welcomed Wake’s consideration (237-253) of the struggles faced by “atomic veterans” exposed to radiation during military roles who subsequently became disabled and Wake’s book explores this theme in more depth for those interested in further reading. Alongside scholarly reflections, intimate contemplation and interviews with artists on their personal ethical conundrums clearly sketch out provocations for artists to take forward in their own work and develop. Striking examples include Takeda’s musings on collaborations with hibakusha (970-116) and Diné artist Will Wilson’s work on the Navajo Nation (275-280).   

Resistance through art beyond the visual 

In such a varied and wide-ranging book, motifs around which the chapters coalesce are not immediately obvious. Between monuments, hibakusha, artistic ethics, commodification and tourism, the book dances from topic to topic and across various methodological practices. Though introductory musings and Machida’s opening section (13-48) on WW2 Pacific Art seem to offer a model for future chapters, this art-historical reading of visual nuclear is actually more of an outlier, as the book quickly switches to much broader art-activist strokes. For those interested in a strictly artistic investigation, there are, however, other works which have taken up this task, such as British Art in the Nuclear Age (Routledge, 2012) and Fukushima and the Arts (Routledge, 2017). 

Resisting the Nuclear effectively enables us to grapple with the complicated devastation of the nuclear, and the diverse and resilient forms of resistance that have emerged in its wake against it.

Resisting the Nuclear’s departure from a strict visual context has a clear purpose within the emergent field of nuclear-environmental humanities, wherein prior works focused on either a strict reading of art-objects or art and activism in a few singular locations. Perhaps the closest counterpart to this book is Art and Activism in the Nuclear Age (Routledge: 2023) though this focuses largely on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The generative and unique potential of Resisting the Nuclear is therefore arguably its open-endedness. The chapters which historicise modes of activism and deviate from discussions solely of the visual only serve to expand understanding of the contexts in which art practices, artists and their various interlocutors emerge and the impacts they make in furthering the language of nuclear resistances. 

Imagining anti-nuclear futures 

A quick Google search for the “Atomic Museum” (Nevada, US) tourist gift shop site advertises a top-selling board game called Proliferation, which encourages players to “unleash devastating nuclear force to dominate your rivals”. In a time where the horrific impact of nuclear technologies, destruction and waste have been increasingly normalised, commodified and even trivialised to the point of becoming the theme for a board game, we must arguably return to the sound of the doomsday clock, which, as the book reminds us, ticks ever closer to its midnight toll from which there will be no going back (168). Resisting the Nuclear effectively enables us to grapple with the complicated devastation of the nuclear, and the diverse and resilient forms of resistance that have emerged in its wake against it. This volume will undoubtedly provoke other scholars, activists, artists and more actors to imagine other anti-nuclear futures, and even, perhaps, to bring them about.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main Image Credit: Battered religious figures stand watch on a hill above a tattered valley in Nagasaki, Japan on 24 September 1945, six weeks after the city was destroyed by the world’s second atomic bomb attack. Credit: Cpl. Lynn P. Walker, Jr. (Marine Corps) via Wikimedia Commons.

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Digital Media Use in Early Childhood. Lelia Green, Leslie Haddon, Sonia Livingstone, Brian O’Neill, Kylie J. Stevenson and Donell Halloway. Bloomsbury. 2024.

Digital Media Use in Early Childhood by Lelia Green, Leslie Haddon, Sonia Livingstone, Brian O’Neil, Kylie J. Stevenson and Donell Halloway is a timely examination of how children interact with digital media in their early years. The book navigates the complex terrain between the fears around the negative impacts of screen time and the optimistic acceptance of technology in child development. Rather than framing digital media’s impact as simply harmful or beneficial, it offers a nuanced analysis of how children’s digital experiences are mediated and shaped within familial, social and institutional contexts. Using an ethnographic approach, the authors offer deep insights into how digital media becomes part of young children’s daily lives. This approach presents a multifaceted understanding of children’s digital engagement, accounting not only for their individual capacities but also for the aspirations, anxieties and adaptive responses of the surrounding adults.

Different parenting styles, cultural beliefs, migration backgrounds and family relationships all strongly influence how children use and experience digital media.

Parents’ varying approaches to digital media

One of the book’s key strengths is its attention to diversity. In the chapter “Screen Time”, the authors highlight that children’s engagements with digital media must be interpreted within the context of their specific lived experiences. Different parenting styles, cultural beliefs, migration backgrounds and family relationships all strongly influence how children use and experience digital media. The chapter, “Parents and Digital Media” in the book shows that children’s digital lives depend not just on having technology, but also on the social, economic, and cultural environments where they use it. For example, the authors highlight the varying approaches of parents to digital media.  

Some parents embrace digital technologies as valuable tools for learning, while others see them as useful for expression and creativity. Out of many subjects who were interviewed, parents like Sandra Ross and Linda Palmer use touchscreen activities not just for fun, but to teach their children critical thinking, patience, and reflection. Digital play is encouraged as part of a teaching approach that values creativity and active participation. Meanwhile, some parents, either because they are cautious or not very skilled with technology, closely control or watch their children’s digital media use. These perspectives demonstrate the different views on education and comfort with technology. In the book the The Big Disconnect (2013), authors Catherine Steiner-Adair and Teresa Barker present similar perspective on digital media use by children and how to strike a balance between children’s screen time and their familial relationships as their parents. 

A central idea of the book is “parental ethnotheories” – the unspoken beliefs and ideas that shape how parents manage their children’s use of digital media. These ethnotheories are flexible and change with new experiences. For example, parents who start with strict screen time rules might loosen them when facing challenges like illness, sibling fights, or when they’re feeling tired. This flexibility shows a greater truth about digital parenting: there’s often a gap between what parents hope for and what really happens in daily life. The authors understand this gap with empathy and recognise the emotional effort parents put into managing digital media.

As children get older, their use of digital media moves from basic interactions to more complex ways of expressing themselves and connecting with others.

The book also looks at the challenges of digital parenting in divorced or separated families. Co-parenting across different homes often leads to different rules and tensions around digital media. Children may have to deal with these differences, with devices sometimes helping them stay close to absent parents or becoming a source of conflict. The book shows how digital media can act both as a bridge and a battleground in these family situations.

Wider family influence and educational settings

Beyond the role of parents, the authors include specific chapters to examine how siblings, grandparents, and preschool staff help shape children’s digital lives. Siblings often act as teachers or gatekeepers, showing new apps or helping set screen time limits. Grandparents also have an important role. Sometimes they support parents’ rules, but other times they go against them, like by giving children devices or allowing them to use them without supervision. The book also discusses preschools, where digital media use depends on the school’s goals and teacher training, and often looks very different from how it’s handled at home. This difference highlights the need for better communication between home and preschool to create a more consistent approach to digital media use. Not only should that but the pre-school educators also pay attention to how they are training their children to use digital means of studies in a positive way. Technology and Digital Media in the Early Years (2015) edited by Chip Donohue discusses the effective, appropriate, and intentional use of technology with young children.

A measured approach to children’s media use

The authors deftly explore how children’s use of digital media grows over time in chapters “Infants”, “Toddlers” and “Preschoolers”. Instead of seeing toddlers as passive users, the authors show how young children actively choose apps, explore content, and push against limits. They argue that digital play is an active way for children to build their identities and connect with the world. As children get older, their use of digital media moves from basic interactions to more complex ways of expressing themselves and connecting with others. However, the chapter “The Bases for Diversity in Children’s Digital Experiences” stresses that the quality of digital content, how it’s used, and family dynamics all affect how much digital activities support creativity, learning, or social skills. 

Even though some parents are excited about digital learning tools, the book is cautious, challenging the idea that apps and devices are automatically good. The authors recognise that digital media can help with learning and cultural growth but also warn about problems like bad content, ads, and tricky designs. They call for stronger rules and more responsibility from the industry to make sure digital media helps children instead of taking advantage of them. However, the authors don’t give specific policy recommendations. Instead, they more broadly emphasise protecting children’s privacy, safety, and wellbeing as digital media becomes more commercialised. 

Digital Media Use in Early Childhood is an important addition to research on children and technology. It avoids simple ideas and gives a detailed, realistic view of how children interact with digital media. The authors are careful to include a diverse set of families who participated in this research. Though relatively short, the book provides rich insight into this increasingly relevant topic, and is a must-read both for researchers in developmental psychology, media studies, sociology of education, digital anthropology but also for a more general audience.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Read an article in LSE Research for the World from 2024 by Sonia Livingstone, Young children and technology: what does “good” look like for young children’s digital lives?

Image: Steve Heap on Shutterstock.

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The Contest for the Indian Ocean and the Making of a New World Order. Darshana M. Baruah. Yale University Press. 2024.

In an era marked by escalating Great Power competition, Darshana M. Baruah’s Contest for the Indian Ocean and the Making of a New World Order offers a timely and compelling exploration of the 21st-century geopolitics of the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). While earlier scholarship, such as David Brewster’s analysis of power dynamics in the Indian Ocean or Robert Kaplan’s Monsoon, has mapped the strategic landscape of the IOR, Baruah’s intervention stands out in its focus on island nations’ agency and the technological transformation of maritime security domains.

US-China rivalry and strategic shifts

Baruah begins by establishing the relationship between geography and geopolitics against the backdrop of the US-China competition. China’s rise prompted the United States to reorient its strategic focus, leading to the Obama administration’s “Pivot to Asia.” This shift gradually evolved into the Indo-Pacific framework to contain China, which has placed maritime security at the core of foreign policy in the 21^st century. Baruah argues that “the Indian Ocean region is the vital theatre for competition within the Indo-Pacific construct” (3). She advocates for re-examining the Indian Ocean as a unified strategic space, pushing for adopting a maritime approach, deserting the continental silo perspective.  

Drawing on historical examples such as WWII disruptions of sea lines of communication (SLOC), Baruah highlights the enduring importance of maritime chokepoints. China is acutely aware of its vulnerabilities in the Indian Ocean, through which 80 per cent of its energy imports and substantial trade pass. To mitigate this, Beijing views a continued presence in the region as vital for securing economic growth, energy routes, and its expanding global role. Baruah warns, “A second Indian Ocean base from Beijing is simply a matter of time” (66), and argues that China’s Djibouti facility should be seen as an Indian Ocean base, not merely an African one. 

The US military base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean was established during the Cold War under the “strategic island concept,” which aimed to set up military installations on remote islands to counter its rivals. It remains a critical asset for maintaining operational reach, intelligence gathering, maritime surveillance, and power projection most recently demonstrated in US-led operations against the Red Sea blockade by Yemen. 

One of the book’s standout sections highlights the agency of island nations in shaping US-China competition in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR).

Baruah argues that the United States must reassess its strategic posture in the Indian Ocean in light of the evolving geopolitical dynamics in the 21st century. Meanwhile, China has become the leading trade partner of littoral states by establishing embassies in all six island nations and launching the China-Indian Ocean Region Forum in 2022. China’s expanding footprint in the region reflects a nuanced understanding of contemporary global realities marked by multipolarity, economic interdependence, and alignments grounded in pragmatism and mutual benefit.

Island nations as key players in the region

One of the book’s standout sections highlights the agency of island nations in shaping US-China competition in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). Negligence and complacency by traditional partners such as the US, UK, France and India induced a diplomatic standstill and strategic void in littorals in IOR. However, China’s proactive engagement has provided island states with an opportunity to forge independent partnerships, bolster their sovereignty and security, and simultaneously benefit Beijing in addressing its vulnerabilities in the Indian Ocean.  

Island nations have welcomed China’s investments in infrastructure and capacity-building, which address critical sovereignty and security concerns. Through interviews with representatives of these states, Baruah challenges the narrative of “debt-trap diplomacy,” arguing that such claims undermine the sovereign agency of these nations. Moreover, representatives of island nations express scepticism about the sincerity of initiatives launched by traditional powers, viewing them not as efforts to meet the needs of island nations but as reactive geopolitical manoeuvres aimed at China.  

Baruah suggests a two-pronged island approach to compete with China in the IOR. First, it is imperative to recognise the sovereignty of island nations and prioritise their needs rather than treat them as pawns in a larger geopolitical chessboard. Second, she advocates for traditional powers to strategically utilise their island territories to advance military and security objectives.

Technological advancements in deep-sea research – whether for ecological, scientific, or commercial purposes – carry significant military implications, such as seabed mapping, extraction of critical minerals, and anti-submarine warfare capabilities.

However, the strategic value of islands and maritime security has remained at the periphery of Indian defence and strategic circles. A lack of imminent maritime threat, coupled with resource constraints, has led to a defensive outlook toward strategic assets like the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (ANI). Baruah argues that ANI’s strategic location offers significant potential to transform it into a pivotal hub for maritime security. Expanding its role beyond a mere military outpost to a centre for Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA), Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR), enabling India to monitor threats and movements across the Indian Ocean effectively. By investing in infrastructure development and defining ANI’s role in regional maritime security, India can leverage its strategic position to counter China’s threat and effectively shape geopolitical tussles in the Indian Ocean.

The future of maritime security and global competition

In her final chapter, Baruah seeks to assess the future of evolving geopolitical dynamics in the IOR and the role of India-China interaction in the region’s future decades. She addresses the convergence of both traditional threats affecting littorals – such as piracy and drug smuggling and non-traditional ones like climate change, illegal fishing, and the dual-use potential of civilian vessels for surveillance. The climate crisis poses a growing national security challenge for Indian Ocean littoral states, underscoring the urgent need to invest in blue economy initiatives. These initiatives aim to foster sustainable economic development, particularly in sectors such as fishing, tourism, and logistics, without compromising the health of the marine ecosystem. Island nations must leverage their strategic position to attract funding and partnerships that strengthen their capacity to adapt and thrive. 

Baruah concludes by identifying the underwater domain as the next frontier of geopolitical competition. Technological advancements in deep-sea research – whether for ecological, scientific, or commercial purposes – carry significant military implications, such as seabed mapping, extraction of critical minerals, and anti-submarine warfare capabilities. Such developments raise strategic concerns, especially in the absence of comprehensive legal frameworks governing the commercialisation of the deep sea and likely to expand this uncharted domain as a new arena for future strategic rivalry.  

The book offers a timely analysis of US-China geopolitical competition by centring the maritime domain and advocating for a unified geographic view of the Indian Ocean, challenging decades of continent-focused policymaking. By highlighting the strategic agency of island nations, it provides valuable insights for scholars and students of international relations, geopolitics, and maritime security, as well as policymakers engaged in Indo-Pacific strategy and regional cooperation.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image: Kyung Muk Lim on Shutterstock.

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Australia’s Evolving Democracy: A New Democratic Audit. Mark Evans, Patrick Dunleavy and John Phillimore (eds.). LSE Press. 2024.

A timely audit of Australian democracy

With the Australian federal election due by May 2025, it is an appropriate time for a health check on the state of Australian democracy. Within a context of global democratic backsliding, most notably in the US, Australia’s Evolving Democracy: A new Democratic Audit is a timely and important publication.

Indeed, editors Mark Evans, Patrick Dunleavy and John Phillimore initially situate this audit within the context of recent political turmoil in the UK and US, with destabilising political shifts such as Brexit or obvious polarisation as with Donald Trump’s election for a second term as US president. These are countries from which Australia has historically drawn not just inspiration, but structural arrangements too. A hybrid system often termed “Washminster” or the “platypus system” (a combination of two incongruous parts that should not exist) has seemed to endure and thrive as a liberal democracy “within a severely darkening world”. Australia’s “balanced model” with elements of two different systems has co-existed without snarling up a functioning political system. This model, with compulsory voting, strong federalism and proportional representation on the one hand, and Westminster traditions of strong central tax-raising powers and monarchical legacies of a settler history on the other, makes Australia a fascinating and often understudied liberal democracy. In such challenging political times Mark Evans asks, in an accompanying piece, what lessons Australia may provide for the UK, potentially flipping the traditional roles around.

This model, with compulsory voting, strong federalism and proportional representation on the one hand, and Westminster traditions of strong central tax-raising powers and monarchical legacies of a settler history on the other, makes Australia a fascinating and often understudied liberal democracy.

The book examines the roots of Australian stability and the current state of affairs, including political difficulties. Australia’s slow response to the climate emergency and having been unable to further minority indigenous rights in the 2023 Voice Referendum do however point to significant fault lines. McAllister and Biddle found that one of the key reasons for the failure of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum was a lack of bipartisanship, despite widespread public support for better outcomes for Indigenous Australians. This absence of bipartisanship on the Voice resulted in voters prioritizing the potential risks of constitutional change over the prospect of better outcomes for Indigenous people, a topic explored in Chapter Four. Tensions within the system are evident, and like other liberal democracies, Australia has seen a significant decline in public trust in political institutions driven by multiple factors. The book argues that it is the balanced model of democracy that has kept this relative stability, but Australia should not be complacent. 

Strengths and challenges of Australia’s model

Australia’s Evolving Democracy follows the tradition of the Democratic Audit framework first established by Stuart Weir and David Beetham in the 1990s. A variant on Australia was published in 2009, and Evans, Dunleavy and Phillimore’s volume is a welcome addition to the series. The great strengths of the book are both the comprehensive evaluation that provides a broad picture in (relatively) real time of the state of democracy, and the benefits of standalone chapters dealing with key aspects. The book is well organised into five sections: Foundations; National Politics, Federal Government, State and Local Politics, Challenges and Change. Each of the 26 chapters can be downloaded open access (or of course you can tackle the whole thing). The list of contributors is impressive, with well-regarded experts such as Michelle Grattan on the Voice Referendum, John Butcher on policymaking, Richard Eccleston on Tasmania, and Rob Manwaring on South Australia. Other notable contributors include Patrick Weller, John Halligan, and John Dryzek.  

The book is nuanced and detailed for scholars of Australian politics while also accessible to new entrants wishing to gain knowledge of key components of the Australian political system

The book is nuanced and detailed for scholars of Australian politics while also accessible to new entrants wishing to gain knowledge of key components of the Australian political system. The SWOT analyses (a planning tool which seeks to identify the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of a project) and other tools ensure that there is an emphasis on evaluation and assessment throughout. The data visualisation, utilising clear tables and graphs, is helpful without being overbearing and presents a good balance, supplying relevant material to support the commentary (eg number of councils) and trends (eg decline in unionisation 1986-2022). Each chapter presents a puzzle which frames the structure and content, adding a critical edge that would otherwise be largely descriptive. For example, Chapter Six on political parties frames the evaluation around the puzzle “what does democracy require for political parties and a party system?” The chapter then addresses each aspect to provide a clear outline. 

The book is naturally inward looking, concentrating on the functioning of democratic institutions at various levels and the extent of pluralism. Apart from some situating of Australia in the context of other liberal democracies in the final chapter by the editors (28) and contextualisation in the opening two chapters, there is little evaluation of Australia’s international standing. While such emphasis on domestic issues and democratic functioning is understandable given the exercise is one of an internal democratic audit, it is also a weakness. With only two chapters in the final section, there was perhaps some scope for a specific comparative chapter lifting the insightful comparative data from the concluding chapter to create a stand-alone “Australian democracy compared” chapter before the concluding the one on “challenges”. 

Addressing public discontent to maintain a healthy democracy

Discussion of Australian republicanism is reduced to a rather short section in Chapter Three by Harry Hobbs, perhaps representing the lack of salience of the issue even after the succession of King Charles III. However, Anthony Albanese did appoint an assistant minister for the republic and has signalled a referendum may be a second-term issue. It would be useful to consider if such ambivalence over republicanism and the failure of the Voice referendum demonstrates a continuation of conservative values that the government may challenge or succumb to. Moreover, is this at odds with the evolving democracy discussed throughout – is Australia now looking beyond the US and UK, and how does it relate to its regional neighbours? The focus on process and democratic institutions sidelines any in-depth analysis of values, though Chapter 15 on government policy making by John Butcher is a helpful gem, posing a series of policy questions throughout. A chapter on class and social inequality as in the UK Audit of 2018 would also have been welcome. 

The editors’ verdict on Australia’s democracy is that it is still robust, but requires reimagining and reflection to address its citizens’ discontent. With such a comprehensive audit, this book presents strong evidence to support this conclusion. The failure of the Voice referendum was a significant setback for the country in terms of strengthening the protection of minority rights and ensuring that Australia moves towards becoming a country at ease with its Indigenous communities. Indeed, Australia should avoid any complacency over its democracy that may come with the high participation rate from compulsory voting, a lack of polarised parties, stable federal arrangements, and a balanced political system. Public dissatisfaction, low trust levels, and frustration with a lack of government responsiveness need to be addressed to ensure that Australian democracy continues to evolve, rather than stall or flounder. 

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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E-Cigarettes and the Comparative Politics of Harm Reduction: History, Evidence, and Policy. Virginia Berridge, Ronald Bayer, Amy L. Fairchild and Wayne Hall (eds.). Palgrave Macmillan. 2023.

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Why can’t public health agree on what to do about e-cigarettes? This book aims to answer that conundrum. More specifically, why have entirely divergent regimes of public health control emerged in the US, UK, and Australia? In an era of shrinking resources, this controversy wastes time, energy and confuses the public. So why is a scientific and policy consensus on vaping so elusive?

The editors, Virginia Berridge (UK), Wayne Hall (Australia), and Ronald Bayer and Amy Fairchild (US) have come together to offer us answers. The collective starting point is that policy cannot be about evidence per se; the same set of evidence has produced startlingly different regulatory regimes. Rather, we must look for clues within the histories and values of tobacco control in each country to understand how such schisms have arisen.

The same set of evidence has produced startlingly different regulatory regimes.

The first chapter takes us back to before e-cigarettes. In some ways the pre-histories of public health policy in each country were remarkably similar. All moved from an environmental approach controlling infectious diseases to an epidemiological one identifying modifiable risk factors such as tobacco. Differences were emerging, however, most notably the entrenchment of nicotine replacement therapy in the UK compared with Australia. In the US, young people and children were the target for tobacco control, alongside the more overt use of tobacco denormalisation. Thus, the stage was set for the great e-cigarette showdown.

In the US, young people and children were the target for tobacco control, alongside the more overt use of tobacco denormalisation.

In the next three chapters, the policy history of e-cigarettes for each country is examined. The first to be considered is the UK. Does its relatively positive attitude towards e-cigarettes as a tool for harm reduction make it an outlier or a pioneer (or both)? What follows is a complex account showing that the primary focus has always been to reduce the risk to adult smokers (legislation forbids the selling of vapes to under 18s). It is argued that the seeds of the UK’s harm reduction position stem from its prior harm reduction history, NHS funding of Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT) and the positive attitudes of main players such as Public Health England and Action for Smoking on Health (ASH).

This raises a question, however. Why has the UK focused on adult smokers? I would argue that UK public health was able to maintain its harm reduction stance more easily precisely because, for most of that decade or more, the bulk of vapers in the UK were adults. The youth vaping “epidemic” was happening elsewhere, primarily in the US, and to some extent UK public health may have felt insulated from this problem. Disposable vapes have changed this picture, creating issues in terms of littering, child addiction, and public perception. It is harder to maintain an adult-focused policy when there is a risk to “innocent others”, however much this risk may appear small or misunderstood. Youth vaping activates the moral panic of youth drug use. With increased youth rates, the UK is starting to feel the tension between the needs of the two groups as the US did a decade prior.

Disposable vapes have changed [the] picture, creating issues in terms of littering, child addiction, and public perception.

The next chapter examines how Australia ended up taking an almost opposite approach. Here, e-cigarettes have effectively been banned; having been classified as poisons, not available for import and only available (rarely) on prescription. The authors argue that this policy has been driven by concern over the “precautionary principle”: given uncertain risks, we should take precautions. This, coupled with a stance against NRT and fears about the “gateway” effect of e-cigarettes, has meant that few have stood outside the orthodoxy of keeping e-cigarettes under medical legislation. Despite this, 39 percent of Australian smokers have tried an e-cigarette.

One salient point both chapters highlight is the importance of Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) in leading the charge for or against e-cigarettes. Where they go, most other public health organisations follow (with a few exceptions). Certainly, figures such as Simon Chapman in Australia and Stanton Glantz in the US appear almost mythical.  Furthermore, and this is hinted at in the book, tobacco control policies often have an unarticulated national identity aspect to them: harm reduction is the “English” way; Australia is proud of having the lowest smoking rate. Between the heavy influence of KOLs and these collective public health identities, there is a lack of flexibility to respond to new thinking or evidence; all evidence simply becomes incorporated into existing positions.

Tobacco control policies often have an unarticulated national identity aspect to them.

The chapter on the US regulatory scene illustrates this perfectly. Until the recent ban on the e-cigarette company JUUL’s products (now under review), there was an absence of top-down federal regulation, with policy making occurring at state and city levels. US policy has been influenced hugely by the concern over youth vaping. The extensive JUUL use amongst youth is described again and again in quotes from policy actors in the chapter as an “epidemic”. As precedent suggests, in an epidemic, logical decision-making is often superseded by emotional judgement. The final chapter pulls together the threads to argue that evidence itself is not driving policy but values, pre-histories, and emotions.

In an epidemic, logical decision-making is often superseded by emotional judgement.

Overall, the histories given by the authors are impressively complex, with a couple of caveats. One is that the factors identified are all important, but we do not get much of a sense as to which is the most important. Would everything have been different had the KOLs been different? Second, this is a book of details, at an almost forensic level. If you are into tobacco control history, which I am, this is extremely useful as a resource documenting this period in history. If you are a more casual reader interested in public health in general, it might not appeal so much. Finally, due to space, very little discussion occurs about the huge international drug policy changes occurring simultaneously in relation to cannabis decriminalisation and legalisation. Why does the need for precaution and fear for “innocent others” not drive policy so strongly here? Are values less important than we think?

This book makes an important contribution to the history of e-cigarette policy and public health more generally. It is convincing in its main premise, that “it’s not about evidence, it’s about emotion’” (49). Where that takes international tobacco control next is still unclear.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.

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Stopping Oil: Climate Justice and Hope. Sophie Bond, Amanda Thomas and Gradon Diprose. Pluto Press. 2023.

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The urgent need to phase out fossil fuels has received growing public attention in recent years as damaging effects of global warming have accelerated. Aotearoa New Zealand (Aotearoa is the contemporary Māori language name for the country) is often under-scrutinised in public conversations on the issue, as the country’s progressive image and commitment to environmental preservation can easily conceal its complex political landscape. Yet, over the past two decades, offshore oil and gas development has become a highly contentious issue, leading to surging political tensions within the country.

Stopping Oil: Climate Justice and Hope offers analysis of the various tactics employed by the government-industry alliance to bolster and expand Aotearoa New Zealand’s petroleum economy. The book also highlights the persistent opposition to these tactics manifested through Māori- and community-led activism. As authors Sophie Bond, Amanda Thomas and Gradon Diprose note, what makes the struggle for climate justice in Aotearoa New Zealand particularly interesting is ‘its demonstration of ideas of environmental democracy, where democracy is understood as the ability to engage in active and robust debate about issues and the ability to meaningfully dissent, be heard, and propose ideas for alternative futures that are more fair, just, and sustainable’(2).

The distinct ways power manifests itself within the country’s context of continued colonialism, swift and extensive neoliberal transformation, and a history of indigenous activism

The book consists of eight chapters that collectively tell the story of the energy politics of Aotearoa New Zealand from 2008 to 2017. Chapter One, ‘Security for Whom,’ introduces the factors that gave rise to an ambition for offshore oil and gas exploration, as well as the Oil Free activism in response to it. The authors take a feminist political geography approach to the study of climate justice, which considers ‘politics and activism to be happening at every scale, and that one isn’t more important than another’ (4). Accordingly, the examination of conflicts surrounding fossil fuels in Aotearoa New Zealand goes beyond just being a case study that supplements content generated in the so-called centres of geography and theory. Instead, it exposes the distinct ways power manifests itself within the country’s context of continued colonialism, swift and extensive neoliberal transformation, and a history of indigenous activism.

Chapters Two (‘Securing Oil’) and Three (‘Contesting Oil’) further elaborate the economic, political, social, and cultural contexts that have shaped the oil and gas industry in Aotearoa New Zealand since the 1980s. Similar to other developed countries, the  government has implemented the core tenets of neoliberalism, such as a belief in the market as the best way to allocate resources and an emphasis on individual freedom and responsibility. This has undermined democracy and eroded the government’s role in checks and balances. As a result, resource industries and their proponents claim extractive activities as morally acceptable in order for Aotearoa New Zealand to catch up with Australia, maintain life quality, and sustain economic growth.

Resource industries and their proponents claim extractive activities as morally acceptable in order for Aotearoa New Zealand to catch up with Australia, maintain life quality, and sustain economic growth

However, as the government and its industry partners sought to expand offshore oil and gas exploration and development, they were met with substantial public opposition. Chapter Three links this trend to the growing public awareness of the social license concept.  For many Kiwis, this is considered unacceptable as it further undermines Indigenous sovereignty.

The book’s second part (Chapters Four to Six) delves into the ways in which the oil and gas industry, investors, the media, and sympathetic governments tame, depoliticise, and delegitimise the messages and actions of Oil Free activists. Chapter Four (‘Taming the Narrative’) examines how various efforts by Oil Free groups have been portrayed by the media, revealing a tendency within media coverage to portray extractivism through a lens of pragmatic realism, prioritising economic benefits over environmental concerns. The chapter also discusses how activists respond to biased media portrayals by aligning their campaigns with Aotearoa New Zealand’s eco-national identities, emphasising climate justice, and engaging ordinary citizens.

A tendency within media coverage to portray extractivism through a lens of pragmatic realism, prioritising economic benefits over environmental concerns

Chapter Five (‘Securing-Business-as-Usual’) turns to the various efforts by the oil and gas industry, along with its governmental allies, to maintain the investment conditions for offshore oil and gas development. The authors highlight the strategies that fossil fuel advocates employ to emphasise corporate social responsibility while implementing surveillance practices. Finally, Chapter Six (‘Policing and Dehumanising Activists’) discusses policing. It places the experiences of Oil Free activists within the context of growing public concern over expanding policing practices in Western nations (Britain, Canada, the United States, etc.), with a specific focus on the local context of Aotearoa New Zealand. The chapter criticises police brutality, as evidenced by the violence and dehumanisation experienced by many activists and draws attention to the rise of authoritarian responses to protest in Western democracies.

Discourses concerning care and responsibility serve as a potent rebuttal to the strategies of suppression and depoliticisation

The book’s final part (Chapter Seven, ’Enacting Care and Responsibility’, and Chapter Eight, ‘Democracy and Hope’) elaborates how key concepts such as hope, care and responsibility empower Oil Free activists to practice an ethic of care. This ethic not only provides them with the collective strength necessary to combat the delegitimisation and violence they face, but also underscores a broader sense of obligation towards climate and social injustice. The authors emphasise that discourses concerning care and responsibility serve as a potent rebuttal to the strategies of suppression and depoliticisation detailed in preceding chapters. This is because ‘carelessness’ serves as the central ideological framework through which contemporary neoliberal capitalism reproduces the separation of nature and society.

Overall, Stopping Oil: Climate Justice and Hope presents an engaging case study of a country previously underrepresented in climate crisis literature. The authors pledge in the beginning chapter to ‘share the story [of Oil Free activism in Aotearoa New Zealand] as a whole, linking key ideas, and more explicitly situating the story of this campaign within a broader trajectory of climate justice’ (3). Considering the powerful narrative constructed across all chapters, they achieve this goal. While this storytelling approach occasionally renders some theoretical discussions fragmentary, the lessons from Aotearoa New Zealand concerning public mobilisation for climate justice offer invaluable insights for environmental organisations, activists, and concerned citizens worldwide.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.

Main Image Credit: D.D. via 350Aotearoa.org.

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Photo by Jeremy Bezanger on Unsplash

Epidemics can turn the world upside down. They kill millions, isolate us and wreak havoc on international trade. But what is their impact on religion?

During my final year at LSE, I delved into the archives of Arthur Bernard Deacon, an anthropologist who conducted fieldwork on Malakula, an island of Vanuatu, from 1926 to 1927 – when he died, aged 24. Deacon wanted to document the traditional cultures of Malakula (then spelt Malekula), as he imagined they had remained unchanged for centuries. Instead he found life on Malakula irrevocably transformed by firstly, the rapid Christianisation of the island; and secondly, mass death following several epidemics, most recently, the 1918 influenza pandemic. Unlike Deacon, I wanted to understand the connection between the two.

Here I have compiled six, mostly anthropological, reads that can help us understand how epidemics might lead to religious change.

 Footprints on Malekula: A Memoir of Arthur Bernard Deacon. Margaret Gardiner. Salamander Press. 1984.

‘There is nothing here but Death,’ Deacon wrote in a 1926 letter to his girlfriend in England, Margaret Gardiner. Gardiner kept the letters he sent during his fieldwork and in 1984, she published them. Personal and unfiltered, Deacon’s letters show an island plagued by disease, where people tell him they will all soon be dead. At the same time, Deacon meets Christian converts who are out to revolutionise their own society. While not a scholarly work, this short book offers a snapshot of an island in the midst of religious change.

Malekula: A Vanishing People of the New Hebrides. Arthur Bernard Deacon and Camilla H. Wedgwood. Routledge and Sons. 1934.

After Deacon’s death, someone had to make sense of his fieldnotes and write his ethnography, and Camilla Wedgwood rose to the challenge – all while writing her own thesis. The book never displays the despair of Deacon’s letters and focuses on remnants of pre-Christian and pre-colonial life, but the 1920s seep through the cracks. Especially striking are Deacon’s brief discussions on how funerary rituals are changing because of the influenza outbreak. As a group of villagers grow sick, the demanding rituals, which go on for weeks, become more and more difficult to do, showing how badly traditional rites fit the present situation.

Gender, Christianity and Change in Vanuatu: An Analysis of Social Movements in North Ambrym. Annelin Eriksen. Routledge. 2007.

Annelin Eriksen’s research on Malakula’s neighbouring island Ambrym revolves around women’s role in social change – for example, how women from Christian families spread Christianity through marrying men and demanding they convert. She shows how Christianity appealed especially to women and low-status men, because it offered a vision of equality unlike the hierarchy they lived in. Eriksen also shows how illness and religion were connected: people thought diseases were caused by sorcery, and sorcery was the domain of men of high standing. Thus epidemics made people move close to the mission house, hoping missionaries could protect them from sorcerers.

‘The Millenarian Aspect of Conversion to Christianity’ by Jean Guiart in Millennial Dreams in Action: Essays in Comparative Study, edited by Sylvia L. Thrupp. Mouton & Co. 1962. 

Jean Guiart’s 1962 article may be overly concerned with the material benefits converts imagined they would receive. Nevertheless, his overview of conversions to Christianity in the Western Pacific from the nineteenth century to his own time shows us the complex relationship between epidemics and religious change. For example, an entire village converted to Methodism after their prayer for a cure was answered. But linking God with epidemics was a double-edged sword: missionaries who taught that epidemics were a punishment from God found themselves blamed for disease outbreaks and persecuted as often as they found converts.

Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Joel Robbins. University of California Press. 2004.

In the 1970s, the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea became evangelical Christians. Unusually, missionaries had not come to the Urapmin; rather, the Urapmin had sought out missionaries themselves and quickly became devout Christians. Joel Robbins highlights how Christianity offered a new path forward after cultural devastation. While he does not go into epidemics per se, Robbins’s on-the-ground account is an invaluable study of rapid religious change and its impact on everyday life.

Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Jonathan Lear. Harvard University Press. 2008.

Jonathan Lear’s book is a meditation on the life of Plenty Coups, a Crow chief who saw the end of traditional Crow life as the United States encroached on their territories and created reservations for Native Americans. He addresses the possibility that mass death from disease, in combination with political disenfranchisement, can lead our entire way of life to collapse. Faced with cultural devastation, your role in society no longer makes sense as the framework is gone. What then? Lear shows how Plenty Coups’s choices – including his encouragement to the Crow to become Christian – were acts of radical hope: the hope that there are ways to flourish in the future, even though these ways are unknown and different to what came before.

Note: This reading list gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics.

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This post was originally published on LSE Impact blog. 

COVID-19 has drawn new attention to the challenges faced by academic women across the world. Over the past two years, Twitter hashtags like #momademia, #womeninSTEM and #AcademicWomen have overflowed with words of exhaustion, anxiety and frustration, as women working in higher education and research struggle to cope with the impacts of a global pandemic. Women are using social media to share their worries about the impacts of caring responsibilities on mental health and career progression; to make experiences of insecure work and unrealistic workloads visible; and to question the fairness of systems that privilege narrow measures of ‘excellence’ over meaningful commitments to equity, diversity and inclusion.

The worries that women express about their ability to perform and compete in systems that feel rigged against them are borne out in the academic literature. Women are reported to publish less, have fewer high status authorship positions, are at a citation disadvantage, are awarded less funding and grants, collaborate less internationally and are underrepresented in many scientific disciplines and in senior academic positions. This depressing picture varies somewhat by discipline, but is present in a majority of countries. However, our recent research suggests there are different ways of interpreting and presenting this story.

GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUNding for scientific research #academia #WomenInScience pic.twitter.com/lLh2Y6NwTY

— Dr Paz Concha (@pazc) April 14, 2021

There can be no doubt that the challenges faced by academic women are real. However, we wondered whether dominant narratives about ‘research excellence’ and the narrow datasets and approaches used to measure success might also be masking stories about women’s achievements as pioneers and practitioners of open research as well as of the new paths that women are charting for themselves and the institutional changes that can help them to succeed.

Our review of existing research on the relationship between gender and open access (OA) found examples of the ways in which OA publishing is already benefiting women. We found evidence that OA is one of the tools that should be considered when developing strategies for addressing structural disadvantages faced by women in research.

Examples of OA’s positive impact for women include the neutralisation of the gender citation advantage in Political Science through open repositories (Green OA); more elite women researchers selecting open journal publishing (Gold and Hybrid OA), or equivalent to men, providing a positive increase for women’s research output and visibility; mixed women and men authorships publishing more in Gold OA journals; and higher positioning of women in authorship statements (first or last) in open science publications.

We also explored the relationship between the social and institutional contexts in which women are carrying out research and the ways in which they publish. We used data about the gender makeup of universities in Australia and the United Kingdom as well as data on the proportion of women in academic and non-academic roles, levels of research funding and discipline makeup at each institution. We found a negative correlation between the prestige profile of a university and its proportion of women academics.

Our analysis shows that prestigious institutions, such as the Russell Group in the UK or the Group of Eight (G08) in Australia, favour more traditional research areas and employ fewer women academics than less prestigious institutions. However, institutions with a higher proportion of women in academic roles make more of their publications available in OA and are arguably better at sharing research with the communities that fund and use it.

Percentages of women academic staff (headcount) compared to the total number of academics in the institution for a subset of 165 United Kingdom higher education institutions by grouping, 2020. The full list of institutions and data is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6500293. Data source: UK Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA). Image: Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative.

OA has much to offer women: as a strategy for achieving wider visibility for their work, higher citations and greater recognition. Sharing research openly is one step women in academia can take to heighten their scholarly profiles and challenge the publication, promotional and funding practices that continue to impose gender‐blind assumptions. OA may appear a career risk in those disciplines and institutions which encourage or require prestige publications, but circumventing the limitations of pay-walled outputs is one mechanism that women can use to increase the visibility and impact of the work they do.

If higher education and research are to move beyond outdated gender divides towards a future engaged with diverse perspectives, approaches and communities, then the ways in which we approach data about research also needs to change. Rather than focusing on the failure of women to fit within narrow, citation-based definitions of ‘good research’, we also need approaches to data that allow us to understand the characteristics of institutions that support diverse perspectives and experiences as well as the characteristics of institutions that marginalise and exclude them.

In our paper we took a first step: using correlation analysis, rather than traditional bibliometric approaches. By doing this we were able to ask questions about the characteristics of universities and the ways in which women share and publish their work, and to shift our focus away from the types of publications that women may not be producing towards the tools and approaches that they are already using to maximise their impact. This approach to engaging with data has the potential to help universities, funders and policymakers to understand change that needs to happen, and the strategies and infrastructures most likely to deliver it.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, the LSE Impact blog or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Banner Image Credit: Windows via Unsplash.

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Cities in the Anthropocene: New Ecology and Urban Politics. Ihnji Jon. Pluto Press. 2021.

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In her article ‘The City We Want: Against the Banality of Urban Planning Research’, Ihnji Jon reflects on the current state of academia and how a space of intellectual exercise is being threatened by marketisation, the fear of remaining invisible without publications, h-indexes and an obsession with producing ‘objective’ knowledge. As a young scholar trying to carve a pathway in urban studies, I ruminate on how the current knowledge produced within universities is affecting approached communities. Whose voices are we listening to? Why are institutions and academics trying to maintain the barrier they have constructed between research and activism? If cities are complex, why is academia generating ‘banal’ research? In this regard, Jon evokes Robert W. Lake’s words, calling for a shift ‘from a stance of distanced objectivity to an engaged attitude of solidarity and empathy’ (72).

The current climate situation and the continuous debate between governments and policymakers about the deteriorating state of the planet, in addition to the differences in public opinion, push us to question governments’ approaches to climate issues and to ask why many have failed at implementing climate-related policies. Jon’s book Cities in the Anthropocene is a call for researchers, city planners and the public to reflect on the benefits of a bottom-up approach in environmentalism and to incentivise the public to evaluate its local position within an interdependent global system.

Jon’s scholarship focuses on analysing a ‘new ecology’ that advocates for anti-essentialist environmentalism theory and speaks against political discourse that commands the public to foster a coercive relationship between humans and nature. In her words, ‘‘‘new ecology’’ tried to go beyond the kinds of environmentalism that rely on the fetishised understanding of ‘‘nature’’ or ‘‘the environment’’ that unnecessarily creates the boundaries between our everyday living (human needs) and ecosystem functions (ecological needs)’ (3).

Image Credit: Photo by Lucas Alexander on Unsplash

The book starts by addressing the politics of scale and how cities can act as frontiers for climate change mitigation. The notion of ‘scale’ remains contested, especially in environmental governance. The interconnected planetary ecosystem continues to shed light on the limits of tackling climate issues on a national scale, as these issues expand beyond political delimitations.

In addition, turning environmental issues into ‘leftist debates’ impedes climate change mitigation and conceals the sources of these issues. The ideological turn of the climate debate must be dismantled, as it is a global issue that incessantly deteriorates our daily lives that rely on the state of the environment. As Jon articulates, ‘proposing a positive reconfiguration of scale is needed more than ever, especially for the environmental issues that are intrinsically both local and global’ (32).

Jon illustrates the implications of embedding nature and climate change mitigation in planning without making it a case of leftist political engagement through two cities: Darwin, Australia, and Tulsa, USA. The urban policies and strategies deployed in these cities are intended to attract different communities whose political positions do not align. This is a phenomenon that Jon refers to as ‘pragmatic environmentalism’ (34).

Climate-related disasters, notably hazardous weather, have been affecting urban citizens’ lives in Tulsa. The city’s history of flooding has contributed to centring nature in design, which has led to the creation of ‘pragmatic environmentalism’ strategies: for instance, stormwater management systems as well as embedding greenery, walkability and the ‘Instagram-able’ in urban space to attract Millenials, professionals and families.

In the case of Darwin, its tropical climate and weather hazards have encouraged the implementation of different projects that foster what the author refers to as ‘secularising nature’ (38). This pragmatic approach to nature strengthens proximity between urban citizens and the weather hazards that affect their cities. It asks us to reflect on how we can implement pro-nature practices without idealising ‘nature’.

Through contrasting Bruno Latour’s attention to ‘negative feelings that are generated by the individuals’ (40) with Spinozian ethics on how doing good makes us feel good (41), Jon highlights the importance of practices that foster care, instead of feelings of obligation and authority. In fact, pro-environment city-scale projects – such as embedding greenery in the streets, minimising parking areas, low-impact development (LID) initiatives (namely on-site stormwater treatment centres), green energy transition and establishing attractive amenities in different neighbourhoods – can shift the narrative on climate issues. They also invite different communities to participate in the pro-nature ethos, as our quality of life relies on the state of the ecosystem. Jon linked these initiatives to Deweyan philosophy which shows how valuing the public’s experiences can serve to build bridges with the ordinary, instead of only relying on theories and ideologies (71). This approach centres the everyday experiences of people and establishes engagement with different communities.

Another timely topic the author tackles is how we can address climate change, environmental sustainability and urban inequalities through the same prism, without marginalising communities who endure socio-spatial disparities. Jon studies this issue in two different cities:  Cleveland, USA, and Cape Town, South Africa. These two cities endure poverty and socio-spatial segregation. Cleveland is one of the rust belt cities that bore the aftermaths of the 2008 financial crash and industrial decline, which engendered housing inequalities and socio-economic instability (77, 86). Cape Town’s apartheid history and policies created a spatial divide between white settlers and non-white citizens and pushed the latter to dwell in informal settlements, without access to clean water, sanitation, energy or socio-economic opportunities (94, 97,102).

Jon highlights the role of environmental justice theory, which studies how a green policy agenda can reinforce socio-economic inequalities (81). Environmentalist institutions and climate change social movements, particularly in the West, demonstrate how whiteness continues to dominate these spaces and how environmentalists and activists should question whose climate justice they are advocating for. Socio-economic precarity and urban segregation are colonial and the history of white supremacy is still visible in post-colonies. Recognising this offers a chance to re-imagine inclusive and equitable development policies.

The last chapter of the book explores how social complexity theory can inspire environmental action. Referring to the work of Manuel DeLanda on the materiality of cities and connecting this to Deleuzian assemblage theory, Jon explains the role of interaction between different individuals, how this generates a group identity and how this affects the members of the group. In Jon’s words: ‘placing interaction effects at the heart of understanding social entities may relieve us from the ontological contradiction between “having a group identity (which is the soul of the whole)” versus “respecting/acknowledging individual agency and heterogeneity”’ (114). Additional elements vital to recognising the complexity of social entities are understanding the history of the interactions that have occurred between individuals and establishing practices that accommodate heterogeneity (116, 117, 119). Planning with/within complexity can push decision-makers to consider the varieties of social entities and to practise inclusion.

Jon asks how cities can ‘inject their pro-environmentalist ideas via an abstract machine, using the powers of imagination, narratives, expressions, or poetic devices that can inspire people rather than forcing them to pursue environmentalism’ (135). Jon draws on various examples that illustrate how creative projects are working to shift dominant narratives, including the New York Times’s ‘Modern Love’ series that depicts the multiple forms of ‘love’. Through these, Jon calls for a shift in planning and narrative in urban studies (143) through the embrace of the ‘habit of tolerance’ (158) and the complexity of narratives in cities.

While I continue to reflect on practices of inclusion and exclusion inside and outside of institutional walls, Jon’s book helps in setting the mood for establishing a new approach to urban research. It connects the philosophy of pragmatism, climate change mitigation and city planning. It defines cities as complex environments where inequalities are reinforced through systemic marginalisation, and where local/global governments can advocate for pro-environmentalism through a bottom-up approach. It encourages us, researchers and practitioners, to examine the utility of theories produced in the academy, collaborate with communities and be attentive to their narratives and needs.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.

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The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago. Alison Mountz. University of Minnesota Press. 2020.

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Last October, the Guardian revealed that the UK Prime Minister’s office was assessing the possibility of detaining asylum seekers in Moldova, Morocco and Papua New Guinea. Aiming to strengthen the ‘hostile environment policy’ after Brexit, documents consulted by the Guardian show that Downing Street asked the Foreign Office to examine if the UK could follow the Australian model of detaining asylum seekers offshore.

In fact, in the last decade, Australia has been criticised notably by the UK ­­for its harsh and inhumane immigration detention system, which uses remote detention facilities on islands outside its shores. Since 2012, Australia has detained more than 4,183 people offshore, on Christmas Island, but also in foreign countries such as Papua New Guinea and Nauru. Other countries, such as Italy, Spain and the United States, also externalise their asylum-seeking process on islands such as Lampedusa, the Canary Islands and Guam. This transformation of the island from a space of transit to a space of containment – or, in other words, from a space of life to a space of death (Achille Mbembe, 2019, 99) – is at the centre of Alison Mountz’s new book, The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago.

The Argument, or the Multiple Deaths of Asylum 

Combining data from her field trips on Italy’s Lampedusa Island, Australia’s Christmas Island and the US territories of Guam and Saipan with a diverse range of secondary sources (reports, public statements, policies, laws, etc), Mountz’s main argument can be summed up in this sentence: the proliferation and the normalisation of the island as a site of enforcement and detention is threatening the right to asylum. For the author, we are witnessing the ‘death of asylum itself’ (xi). In fact, the securitisation of migration by Western countries and the increase in ‘the strategic use of islands to detain people in search of protection from persecution – to thwart human mobility through confinement – is part of the death of asylum’ (xv).

In line with the use of ‘archipelago’ as a metaphor to discuss multiple sites of detention, Mountz argues that the ‘enforcement archipelago’ (xx) ultimately results in the ‘slow death of asylum itself’ (xx). This doesn’t mean ‘that asylum has ceased to exist but rather that it is in crisis and under threat of disappearance. This crisis is evident in law, public discourse, politics and practice’ (xxi). Mountz dates this process of externalising asylum back to the 1970s to the 2010s, noticing that with each decade (from the early stages to a decade called ‘freneticism’), Global North authorities increased these measures (Chapter One).

Drawing on Judith Butler’s work on precarious lives, Mountz highlights that asylum is experiencing three forms of death: the physical, the ontological and the political (xxi-xxii). The first refers to the count of almost 40,000 lives lost during migration since 2014. As states have increased the resources spent on limiting access to their territory through the use of enforcement practices, migrants have found themselves with fewer geographical and legal routes to claim asylum. As a result, they have increasingly resigned themselves to using more clandestine and deadly pathways. The impossibility of accessing asylum is ontological death. Finally, Mountz defines the political death of asylum as Global North citizens’ acceptance of this new carceral regime (xxi-xxii). What must be understood here is that the use of geography by states is strategic as it aims to ‘undermine access to the right accrued when a person lands on sovereign territory, including the right to seek asylum’ (7).

The Cases, or on the Compartmentalisation of the World 

In her book, Mountz focuses only on the Five Eye Countries (referring to an intelligence alliance between Australia, Canada, the US, the UK and New Zealand). Mountz chooses these nations as they share information (such as fingerprint databases, biometric details, etc), but also enforcement practices (as each one learns from the others and replicates policies and practices).

Although this selection is very limited and cannot be generalised outside of the Global North, Mountz posits that the use of islands for detention is becoming a worldwide phenomenon, creating ‘a global constellation of sites and places where people and places are exploited to carry out exclusion’ (xx-xxi). For Mountz, the island is not only the new border (Chapter Two) in aiming to indicate where state sovereignty starts and ends, but it is also the new prison, as it becomes the site where migrants are detained. Ultimately, the body itself seems to mutate into an island, as Mountz concludes: ‘The person detained becomes an island within an island within an island within an island’ (127).

On the one hand, she highlights how EU countries such as Italy have institutionalised the interception of boats in the Mediterranean. In the case of Lampedusa, for example, the island has transformed from being a passage point to a site of detention (78). Italy’s respingimento (pushback) policy involves collaboration with Libya, who is responsible for intercepting migrant ships and returning them to Libyan shores. This cooperation also means that Rome, along with other European states, is ‘policing borders on Libyan soil, deporting and supporting detention there to prevent departure by sea’ (86).

On the other hand, this collaboration between Global North and Global South countries is actually a form of bribing: in the name of ‘developing’ the Global South, the West funds the construction of detention facilities and the implantation of policies and measures to intercept, detain and deport migrants before they reach the shores of the US, Canada, Australia or the EU. An example of this is the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, which was agreed in 2015 and introduced as a way to address the root causes of irregular migrations and displaced persons in Africa. However, it has become an instrument to implement border security measures in Africa (such as the collection of biometrics data and investment in the creation of specialised police units).

These new trends are an important element in a planetary process that could be called the fragmentation – or what Frantz Fanon referred to as the ‘compartmentalisation’ – of the world between the wealthy, former colonial powers and the economically underdeveloped, formerly colonised nations of the World. It is as if the world is being divided by a global colour-line, a new iron curtain, erected with policies and laws, carceral facilities, shipwrecks and confined bodies or floating corpses. In fact, one must recall W. E. B. Du Bois’s warning about the twentieth century that can be applied to our times: ‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, – the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea’ (2007, 15).

The Antidote: What Must Be Done to Protect Life

Counterintuitively, Mountz distances herself from Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception theory. First, Mountz claims that Agamben’s conceptualisation of the ‘camp’ is unable to take into account the historical and spatial patterns of this new regime of remote detention (132). In fact, she highlights the colonial history of some of these sites. On this note, she gives the example of Guam, which has been under US rule since the Spanish War in 1898. She also discusses American control over Guantánamo. Second, she notes that Agamben’s theory does not consider how spaces of exclusion target specific racialised groups (133).

Finally, Mountz’s strongest critique, and where the last chapters lead us, is how Agamben’s analysis seems to leave out how people resist such exclusionary spaces. Mountz provides an overview of how people are fighting against the death of asylum. She argues that ‘they [activists, migrants, NGOs, etc] are countering the death of asylum with the life of activism’ (197).

In fact, migrant solidarity and border abolitionist groups, such as the UK’s SOAS Detainee Support or Canada’s Solidarity Against Borders, have been at the forefront of the fight against the expansion of these dead spaces. For these activist groups, the only way to sustain and protect life in the future is to end, once and for all, the borderisation of the world. As Mbembe wrote eloquently:

In truth the problem is neither the migrant nor the refugees nor the asylum seekers. Borders. Everything begins with them, and all paths lead back to them. They are no longer merely a line of demarcation separating distinct sovereign entities. Increasingly, they are the name used to described the organized violence that underpins both contemporary capitalism and our world order in general […] In fact, everything leads back to border – these dead spaces of non-connection which deny the very idea of a shared humanity, of a planet, the only one we have, that we share together, and to which we are linked by the ephemerality of our common condition (99).

Overall, Mountz’s book is quite accessible and undoubtedly as politically relevant to the general public as to academic circles. However, there are some limitations and minor flaws in Mountz’s analysis. For instance, in my view, the plurality of concepts and Mountz’s reference to a wide variety of authors can be quite challenging and at times unproductive. This can be observed in Mountz’s use of Avery Gordon’s conceptualisation of haunting as ‘one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with, or when their oppressive nature is denied’ (cited in Mountz, 101). Mountz draws on this concept to conceptualise ‘the work done on behalf of (though not always directly by) states on islands where sovereign and biopolitical powers envelop asylum seekers’ (101). However, in this very short section, Mountz does not convincingly show how this applies to migrants’ daily experiences of detention and the concept only re-emerges in the book’s conclusion.

Nevertheless, The Death of Asylum is a critical contribution to various debates on how geography can be used by state actors to protect their specific and rivalrous interests.

Additional Resources

Interview with Alison Mountz

Christmas Island: Tropical destination, detention facility, coronavirus quarantine zone

Inside Australia’s Infamous Pacific Island Detention Centre (2003)

Netflix’s Stateless

 Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.

Image Credit: Detention Centre Fencing, Christmas Island (David Stanley CC BY 2.0).

The post Book Review: The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago by Alison Mountz first appeared on LSE Review of Books.