Throughout the world, the number of festivals has grown exponentially in the last two decades as people celebrate local and regional cultures, but perhaps more importantly as local councils and other groups seek to use festivals to promote tourism and to stimulate rural development. This book discusses broad issues affecting music festivals globally, especially in the context of rural revitalisation, drawing on research which traces the overall growth of festivals of various kinds. Paul Benneworth commends the authors for making their landmark contribution in an open, accessible, and ultimately intellectually satisfying way.

Music Festivals and Regional Development in Australia. Chris Gibson & John Connell. Ashgate. April 2012.

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There is an increasing interest in urban and regional studies in the socio-economic impacts of events. Since the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 showed how short-lived celebrations can drive long term urban regeneration, festivals have become an essential part of the contemporary urban planner’s toolkit and attracted wider academic attention. But much of this concentrates on Mega-events, such as World Cups, the Tour de France, and Capitals of Culture, whose effect partly comes from the mega-scale of the efforts involved in their creation. These events are often important to national decision-makers who invest heavily in ensuring these events succeed. But much less is known about festivals more generally.  Intuitively, they should also have these regional development effects,  bringing outsiders into a place, creating new forms of cultural production and consumption, and creating new relationships between places and development opportunities. But the vast majority of festivals are unimpressive: small, short-lived, and without any massive infrastructural legacy: they seem too ‘ordinary’ to make a difference

Bringing a unique set of insights into this challenging conundrum, Chris Gibson and John Connell use Music Festival and Regional Development in Australia provide a landmark contribution into our understanding of festivals by studying the impact of music festivals upon the ultimate ‘ordinary’ place: remote rural Australia. Their starting point is what they see as the dual hybridity of festivals that gives even small scale events in ordinary places the potential to create a lasting legacy. Their first hybridity is how they bring the ‘outside’ into local places, creating extended networks of interest in the event: visitors, musicians, music publishers, governments and the media. The interest of these stakeholders makes these places and their events more important, strengthening their political economic situation. Gibson and Connell show compellingly how Tamworth made itself the ‘place to be’ for country music in Australia, and how Parkes has ‘put itself on the map’ for Elvis Presley fans, both through rather ersatz and unlikely annual music events.

Parkes Elvis Festival 2009. Photo: yewenyi

Their second hybridity is the relationship between economic and cultural impacts.  Events may often be measured in simple economic terms such as visitor numbers and spending power, but at the same time the economic power of festivals from people collectively creating culture in particular places. Gibson and Connell document at length the informal, reciprocal voluntaristic and even altruistic relationships that build up around these festivals’ commercial attractive. Their economic value depends on this local cultural community dimension, and by creating new local social capital, valued and consumed by outsiders, festivals help to strengthen and reinforce the liveability of communities that continually face a struggle for survival in contemporary Australia.

The book uses a two-part structure to make its argument. The first half is more abstract. There is a theoretical overview of the authors’ perspective on festivals, driving regional development by creating local social capital which attracts wider stakeholders thereby changing wider political economies. They provide a taxonomy of what regional music festivals actually are, and in particular the different kinds of audience they attract. They highlight the tensions festivals can create, between generations, urban and rural residents, locals and outsiders, the economic winners and losers, and perhaps most interestingly, the tensions festivals bring for Australia’s aboriginal and Torres Strait island communities.

The book then turns to present four thoroughly documented case studies, including the Tamworth Country festival, Parkes’ Elvis festival, two classical music festivals and a number of alternative gatherings at Byron Bay. These are rich in breadth and depth, and convey very effectively how festivals ‘make a difference’ to these places. The reader is confronted with a well‑structured mass of information that both stimulates and intrigues, and invites reflection on the development processes underway. Gibson and Connell should be praised for avoiding to merely celebrate these festivals, as they convey both the precariousness and tensions festivals can bring for host communities. The book draws more anecdotally on a database covering around forty other events in rural Australia, interwoven throughout the book to build a sense that the case studies are representative of wider trends. Tables, maps and charts are used highly effectively to give a more objective picture of these festivals, as well of photography and posters that conveys some flavour of the events.

There are a few minor niggles. There is occasional use of unexplained Australian idiom, such as ‘snags’, ‘eskies’, Akubras and the peculiar Australian connotation of the word ‘regional’. Inconsistency in referring to festivals – by their names and locations – can make it sometimes hard to work out which festival takes place where. It is sometimes hard to know in the empirical section, when the authors cite historical sources related to phenomena such as ethnic segmentation around festivals, whether those sources deal specifically with the case studies, or have merely documented the phenomenon in other contexts, which undermines slightly their plausibility. But that should not detract from their overall achievement, to successfully change the way that one should think about rural music festivals.

But what really allows this volume to make a useful landmark contribution to the field is the clarity of thinking and the depth of evidence presented. This allows the book to make a wider contribution to the field far beyond the specialist field of small events in ordinary places.  The book covers many of the wicked issues facing contemporary regional studies, conceptualising the effects of temporary events and coalitions, of the impacts of culture and social relationships on economic development, and of the place of ordinary towns in the knowledge economy. The choice of music festivals in rural Australia provides a perfect laboratory, stripping away layers of complexity and noise and allowing crystal clarity in studying the interplay of people and places through events. This volume is an exemplar of what a research monograph should be, an academic masterpiece providing a turning point in an intellectual current that speaks far beyond its immediate audience. The authors should be commended for making their landmark contribution in an open, accessible, and ultimately intellectually satisfying way.

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Paul Benneworth is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies at the University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands. Paul’s research concerns the relationships between higher education, research and society, and he is currently Project Leader for the HERAVALUE research consortium (Understanding the Value of Arts & Humanities Research), part of the ERANET funded programme “Humanities in the European Research Area”. Paul is a Fellow of the Regional Studies Association. Read more reviews by Paul.

In this book, Jared Diamond reveals how tribal societies offer an extraordinary window into how our ancestors lived for millions of years and how they provide unique, often overlooked insights into human nature. Diamond argues the West achieved global dominance due to specific environmental and technological advantages, but Westerners do not necessarily have superior ideas about how to live well. Michael Yorke is impressed by the book’s beautifully crafted prose style but has doubts about its methodological validity.

The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? Jared Diamond. Allen Lane. December 2012.

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Jared Diamond is the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates Of Human Societies and the international bestseller Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In his latest book, The World Until Yesterday, Professor Diamond has taken on the huge and provocative subject of who has got it right: the technologically advanced westerners or the small-scale egalitarian hunter-gatherer groups of 50 to 100 individuals living in direct contact with nature.

He confronts head on the issues that haunt the romantics who want to find a better lifestyle. Why do holidaymakers head off on tribal adventure tours at great cost in search of the exotic and possibly idealistic back-to-nature lifestyle? Until very recently in human evolutionary history we all lived in small-scale traditional cultures, hence the book’s title, The World Until Yesterday. It is the story of a personal discovery that Diamond first confronted some fifty years ago when, as an ornithologist and evolutionary biologist, he was in the New Guinea Highlands and his indigenous helpers introduced him to an other way of thinking, behaving and understanding the world around themselves.

However, a scientist at heart and always eager to question, Diamond turns to cultural anthropology to understand the inner workings of the indigenous mind. He does not simply share his discoveries with us through personal anecdotes; he forces the reader to question our assumptions about our own way of life and that of small-scale societies.

His subject takes him deep into the Sir James Frazer’s analytical style in The Golden Bough (1894) where it was proposed that mankind progressed from magic through religious belief to scientific thought. Likewise Diamond plucks examples and anecdotes from a wide range of human societies, from New Guinea, Amazonia, the Andaman Islands, the Kalahari Desert, Tanzania, Sudan, Venezuela, America, Europe and a multitude of assorted cultures to make his ideas more elucidating and fascinating.

Fisherman with his children, New Guinea. Photo by FriskoDude

Many of his stories are too long, insightful and ornate, to repeat here. He does report that when New Guinean tribesmen talked about how they reacted to first contact with Europeans “two discoveries [convinced them] that Europeans really were human…feces scavenged from their campsite latrines looked like typical human feces…and that young New Guinean girls offered to Europeans as sex partners reported that Europeans had sex organs and practiced sex much as did New Guinea men” (p. 58-9). As with all good stories or anecdotes, this tells me more about New Guinean society and European sexual attitudes of the 1930s than about the first contact situations that he is analysing; their scatological fascination and the New Guinean acceptance and significance of everyday sexuality.

This is a book so rich with anecdotes and stories that it leads me to question what he says without coming to any great conclusions. Like all good books it has a beautifully crafted prose style and is a straightforwardly written common-sense treatise. It does not tell us what to think, but rather, what to think about. At the most basic level it appeals to the popular and cynical notion that perhaps we have got it all wrong and the so-called ‘primitive’ mind is in touch with a deeper and more fundamental truth about life’s conundrum. It then leads us to question some of the fundamentals of our western lifestyle like conflict resolution, warfare, child-rearing, care of the elderly, religion, diet and disease.

He splits his analysis into either anecdotes about the tribal people he studied in New Guinea, or more rigorous sections that discuss the functions of religion or the types of political changes that occur when societies grow from a few hundred hunter-gatherers to millions of specialized W.E.I.R.D citizens: Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic (not that we are all as democratic as we would like to think).

At the core of the book is Diamond’s idea that modern life is “W.E.I.R.D” – a theme he sets up on page 9 and returns to throughout the book. In 480 pages he attempts to provoke and make the readers question every assumption, so that he or she may work out the answer for themselves. Frustratingly, he does not provide the answers, but asks some major and inspiring questions. It is not a book of profound academic theoretical analysis and obscurantist anthropological jargon. It is a book of extensive personal experience and insight derived from visiting and studying remote forest villages of highland New Guinea over fifty years.

Here his personal insights and stories bring his intended meaning and analysis to life. In trying to understand how and why trade, marriage, neighbourliness and war can so often be interdependent, he says “we will have to content ourselves with anecdotes”. During the famous Dani wars of Highland New Guinea, filmed by Robert Gardner (“Dead Birds” 1963), Diamond tells complex tales: “Societies tend to fight the people they marry and marry those they fight, to raid the people with whom they trade and to trade with their enemies…Trade and marriage give rise to disputes for members of small-scale societies, just as for modern states…Disputes over quality of “goods”, e.g. adultery, spouse abandonment, divorce, or inability or refusal to cook or garden or fetch firewood produce demands for refund, but the demand is refused…or the payment received has already been traded away or, if it was a pig, eaten. Any consumer, business owner, exporter, or importer…will recognize analogies with the problems facing traders in modern states” (p. 166). It certainly brings the subject to life, but I am not sure that it helps to explain it.

Despite his subtitle, What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? Diamond takes a carefully balanced view and is under no illusions about the W.E.I.R.D. benefits of technological medical care and the rule of law. He makes clear that we were not originally intended for our modern diet that leads to non-communicable diseases like obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease. He also points out the dysfunctionality of our children having so many toys that limit their creative imaginations. Although we can learn from tribal lifestyles, infanticide, euthanasia of the elderly, and vengeance killings in the name of retribution rather than legal justice, to name a few, are all good reasons why traditional people will happily abandon their lifestyle when they are exposed to the W.E.I.R.D. way-of-life. Overall, our way may be better, but it is still rewarding to dwell on these issues in a book that is so accessible and well written.

On the continuum of science books for the popular reader, The World Until Yesterday lies towards to the ‘pop’ end. Although it is not easy to decide who Diamond’s target readers are. As an ethnographic filmmaker and as an anthropological mythopoeicist, who believes in the power of a good storyline, I enjoy this style, but as a theoretical anthropologist I doubt its methodological validity. What I do know is that film and anecdotes lend imaginative life to dry analysis. At the bottom line some academic anthropologists have criticised it as “ethnology by anecdote”. Also some indigenous leaders in West Papua and Stephen Corry of Survival International, the indigenous rights organisation, have objected to Diamond’s characterisation of tribal societies as violent. However, I still recommend you enjoy this book. It will help you decide for yourself whether academics or good storytellers should rule the world.

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Dr. Michael Yorke lectures in Practical Ethnographic Film in the Department of Anthropology at University College London and works on the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Committee. Before that he was an award-winning freelance TV documentary producer for Channel Four, ARTE, National Geographic and Discovery Channel. He also worked for a decade on the BBC Ethnographic Unit.  His early anthropological doctoral and post-doctoral research work for SOAS was on the tribal ‘adivasi’ communities of central India. Prior to academic life he was a professional photographer. Read more reviews by Mike.

Responding to increased emphasis in the classroom and the field on exposing students to diverse epistemologies, methods, and methodologies, Bagele Chilisa’s Indigenous Research Methodologies aims to provide tools for situating research in a larger historical, cultural, and global context. With case studies from around the world, the book seeks to demonstrate the specific methodologies that are commensurate with the transformative paradigm of research and the historical and cultural traditions of third-world and indigenous peoples. Meike de Goede finds the book is a welcome contribution to the available teaching materials on methodology.

Indigenous Research Methodologies. Bagele Chilisa. Sage. 2012.

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Postcolonial, subaltern, and post-structural critique – which emphasises the power relations between the west and the non-west in international policy as well as in knowledge production about the developing world – has in recent years become more and more influential in international studies. However, translating this often abstract critique into concrete research methodologies is a difficult task. Reading Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak for the first time as a student made me despair. Although I was deeply intrigued by her work, I was confronted with the problem of how to translate her critique into practical, applicable research methodologies. Bagele Chilisa’s Indigenous Research Methodologies is a welcome contribution, offering an accessible and practical methodology handbook for students and researchers interested in applying postcolonial critique to research methodology.

Chilisa, a Professor at the University of Botswana, develops a “postcolonial indigenous research paradigm” that emphasises indigenous knowledge systems and forms of knowledge production, and how social science researchers can meaningfully engage with these. The book proposes a research paradigm that aims to make intelligible for academic research the historical and cultural traditions and knowledge systems of non-western societies and traditional peoples. It thus develops a critique of academic research dominated by western ways of understanding the world, and develops a perspective that emphasises diversity in knowledge production. Ultimately, it is about the decolonisation of research as knowledge production. Chilisa proposes an activist paradigm, aimed at emancipation of the “colonized other” in systems of knowledge production, and to find ways to integrate indigenous knowledge methods and techniques into the “global knowledge economy” (p. 289).

The book engages with important questions, such as how to break the vicious cycle of power in the process of knowledge production. How can we access and include indigenous research methods knowledge systems? And how can we ‘indigenize’ conventional research? Drawing on her own research on reproductive health and HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa, as well as secondary material from research on indigenous communities in North America, Australia, and New Zealand, Chilisa makes abstract critique concrete. Throughout the book, she translates problems and issues that have been outlined by postcolonial critique into opportunities for exciting and innovative research.

The book possesses the structure of a conventional methodology book. Whereas the first five chapters are more theoretical, engaging with postcolonial critique and the need for postcolonial indigenous research, as well as epistemology, ontology, axiology and ethics, the last five chapters are more practical, focussing on concrete research methods. In these chapters the author provides tools to assist in conducting culturally sensitive research, to decolonize the interview technique, and to successfully conduct participatory interviews. For example, the author discusses the construction of life stories as an alternative interview technique (p. 208), as well as approaches that engage with the wisdom of elders that is locally respected but not part of knowledge in the Western sense (p.211). She also challenges the researcher to engage with material such as songs, storytelling, and proverbs. In these chapters on research techniques, the relation between the researcher and the researched is central. Chilisa argues not just for participatory research, but goes an important step further by proposing a more ethical relationship based on partnership. This is fundamental for a postcolonial indigenous research paradigm.

Although Chilisa has intended her book for academic students and researchers as well as practitioners, these readers might be put off by the style of the book, which is hardly suitable for tertiary education and experienced scholars. The chapters all have learning objectives, questions for discussion for “before you start reading”, as well as exercises, summaries and bullet pointed lists of what one should have understood from the chapter. The flip side of this school-ish style is that the text is indeed very accessible. Chilisa thus makes postcolonial research accessible to students who are not yet familiar with postcolonial critique, which can only be applauded.

However, what this reviewer feels the book is really missing is a good discussion of issues related to the positionality of the researcher vis-à-vis the researched. Although the relationship between the researcher and the researched is a central theme in the book, Chilisa ignores the issues arising when western researchers (often white, perhaps coming from the former colonial power, possibly young and/or female) engage in research of non-western communities. Chilisa herself is from Botswana, and her research focuses on communities in Botswana and the Southern African region. The book is written with the assumption that non-Western researchers conduct research on their own communities, or on communities they can culturally connect with. As such, the book serves an important emancipatory purpose. However, western researchers that conduct research on non-western communities using postcolonial indigenous research methods will evidently be confronted with obstacles. How to establish the ethical research relationship Chilisa proposes when the researcher is such an obvious outsider? Particularly when framing the research in postcolonial critique, such issues cannot be ignored.

Also, designing suitable postcolonial indigenous research methodologies requires in-depth – if not insider’s – knowledge and understanding of the community concerned. This is an evident obstacle for non-autochthonous researchers, particular at early career level when the researcher is (relatively) new to the community or society she or he is researching. Although Chilisa emphasises partnerships between the researcher and the researched, as well as institutional partnerships with local academic institutions, I am not convinced that this solves these fundamental issues.

Nevertheless, Indigenous Research Methodologies is a welcome contribution to the available teaching materials on methodology. Although it discusses complex theory, the book is written in an accessible style that may inspire students and researchers interested looking for innovative research methods.

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Meike de Goede completed her PhD in International Relations at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on the interaction between local agencies and liberal peace building in Africa. She previously studied History at Leiden University, and Peace and Conflict Studies and Human Rights at Utrecht University. She currently lives in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, where she works in democratisation and development. Read more reviews by Meike.

Neither the end of the Cold War nor the aftermath of 9/11 has led to the creation of a “next generation” of multilateral institutions. But what exactly is wrong with the United Nations, and how can we fix it? Is it possible to retrofit the world body? Thomas Weiss contends that substantial change in intergovernmental institutions is both plausible and possible. Natalie Beinisch finds Weiss’s account of the afflictions which cripple the UN is systematic, comprehensive and substantiated by detailed examples.

What’s Wrong with the United Nation (and How to Fix It). Thomas G. Weiss. Polity Press. April 2012.

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As the title suggests Thomas Weiss, a seasoned United Nations specialist, examines his chronically ill patient and prescribes several treatments to nurse the ailing organisation back to health. He identifies four acute problems affecting the world body.

Firstly, Weiss recognizes that the United Nations too often manages international problems on the basis of state interests when the most urgent issues, so called problems “without passports”, require alternative forms of organisation. This is true in the sphere of human rights, where the principle of state sovereignty more often than not trumps principles of human welfare. Here the UN has failed to produce institutions which are capable of resisting capture by states. For example, Libya was elected to chair now defunct Commission on Human Rights in 2002. Its replacement, the Human Rights Council has not fared much better, with states such as China, Russia and Saudi Arabia elected to drive its agenda. Considering the UN is an organisation of states, such challenges are unsurprising. Weiss recognizes that recently the United Nations has tested other models of organisation; the Global Compact for example was designed to integrate corporations into the UN system. These efforts to widen participation have still not had an impact on areas of decision-making where problems such as the examples above of state capture are severe.

A second issue which cripples the UN is that there is an artificial division between states from the North and South. This division, originating in the Cold War, does not reflect a clear set of common interests in respect to either developed or developing nations and is used instead to paralyse discussions on issues such as reforms to the Security Council and defining terms of human rights, security and development. Zimbabwe has for example succeeded to protect itself from sanctions due to support from other African nations whose leaders have no collective interest in defending Mugabe’s appalling human rights track record apart from apartheid era political ties.

While the first two afflictions weakening the UN are to do with its membership structure, the second two are connected to its bureaucracy. To begin with there is no central authority which has the power to make decisions on organisational mandates and resource allocation so UN institutions often have overlapping goals and compete for patronage; Weiss equates this set-up to a feudal kingdom. Indeed, he points out that such an inefficient and politicised form of organisation has compromised the capacity of the UN to deliver on issues relating to Internally Displaced People (IDPs), human rights, women and the environment because those in charge of the relevant organisations are reluctant to give up their independence to coordinate.

Weiss compares the confusing bureaucracy of the UN to that of the military or of a centralised government; for all of the problem of these types of organisation, there are much clearer lines of accountability and centralised budgeting processes which makes resource allocation and coordination more efficient. The feudal nature of the UN establishment is further undermined because its budget for human resources is small and senior staff are less likely to be career professionals and more so for political appointments. This makes a long-term career in the UN unattractive to global talent and exposes the UN to decision-making which is based on special interests as opposed to the good of the organisation. Weiss points to the leadership of Amadou Mathar M’Bow of UNESCO and Edouard Saouma of FAO, both of whom mismanaged their organisations and exercised strong control over information as examples of how these appointments have been toxic for the UN. Furthermore, corruption as seen in the Oil-for-Food Programme and the low priority the UN has put on issues such as the advancement of women reinforces its image as an out of touch bureaucracy. This analysis resonates as an employee of an organisation that carries the UN ‘brand’ as the career expectations of potential employees, particularly young graduates are difficult to meet.

After offering a comprehensive diagnosis, Weiss goes on to suggest paths to convalescence. By his own admission, the course of treatments he offers are not always feasible. Some however are grounded in past examples. The evolution of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine is an example of how new attitudes towards state legitimacy, namely that states are accountable to domestic and international constituencies for their human rights performance, have been achieved through consensus building in the UN framework. States have also been able to transcend North-South coalitions on issues such as landmines, which brought together like minded, but otherwise unaligned parties such as Canada, South Africa and Burkina Faso and on topics related to the empowerment of women and human security, which shift the focus of debates from the state to individuals. There are also cases in which the UN has set up centralised funds to respond to crises which have been more successful than other attempts to encourage coordination between UN departments. This includes the Global Environment Facility and the Central Emergency Response Fund. To improve the civil service Weiss suggests discipline for peace keepers, better representation of women, structured job rotations, more permanent contracts and the culture where ideas are fostered. Interestingly, this is an area where there are few examples of reform.

Weiss’s account of the afflictions which cripple the United Nations is systematic, comprehensive and substantiated by detailed examples. Should I ever fall seriously ill, I could hope for no better doctor to offer me a diagnosis. The organisation of his work also makes the book appealing for textbook reading. Nonetheless, where the volume falls short is on its recommendations. Weiss might do more to draw out why or why not the recommendations he gives could be implemented, particularly because he recognizes the challenges of doing so. His suggestions leaves the reader to conclude that a world organisation could work well in theory, but the sheer number of competing interests and coalitions make this a very difficult task to fulfil in practice. On the other hand, this is also a strength, as by asking what is wrong with the United Nations and how it is should be fixed, Weiss is asking a much more difficult question about the types of institutions which should be playing a role in global governance. The clarity and structure of his works means this book can benefit not only students of international organisation but practitioners inside of them as well.

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Natalie Beinisch is a PhD Candidate at the London School of Economics and runs the Academic Network at the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment. Her research area is transnational regulation. She is particularly interested in understanding how labour is regulated by systems of industry self-regulation and what influences their institutional design. Her dissertation focuses on two cases in the chocolate and toy industries. Natalie’s professional career has centred on talent development beginning with executive leadership at Duke Corporate Education and more recently to research oriented careers. She is currently based in London, having worked in Canada, Japan and Singapore. Read more reviews by Natalie.

Since launching in April 2012 we’ve published reviews of over 350 books from across the social sciences. Here’s a selection of some of the most popular and striking books that could well make for perfect presents under the tree this year.

Looking for a present for…? A city explorer / the next Angela Merkel / the political rebel / the startup star / the philosopher / the globetrotter / 

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For the city explorer…

Hyun Bang Shin finds Ghetto at the Center of the World to be a fascinating peek into the future of life on our shrinking planet.

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Gordon Mathews’ book Ghetto at the Center of the World focuses on the residents of Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong. The building, built nearly half a century ago, is located in the heart of Hong Kong’s bustling commercial district, Tsim Sha Tsui on the peninsular, and to Matthews, is a locus of globalisation that is played out “on a human-to-human scale” in its own right (p.19). Through the ethnography of Chungking Mansions, Mathews tellingly reports the life of traders from sub-Saharan Africa, of Chinese shop owners and their South Asian managers, temporary workers, asylum seekers, domestic helpers and so on, all of whom are drawn to Chungking Mansions from various parts of the world, producing their own experience of globalisation. The attention to the traders and workers from Africa and Asia and the examination of their life stories place their home countries back on the globalisation map. This is further supported by Mathews’ attempt at the ethnography of multiple sites, tracing the life of these traders and workers as experienced in their origin cities. Read the full review…

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 For the next Angela Merkel…

In this book, Jürgen Habermas’ central argument is that the European project must realize its democratic potential by evolving from an international into a cosmopolitan community, finds Natacha Postel-Vinay.  

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Perhaps because of its title, but also because of its author, Jürgen Habermas – a world famous philosopher and weekly columnist in Die Zeit – The Crisis of the European Union will attract many a reader interested in topical issues. The unfolding Euro crisis which started a few years ago has raised many questions about the viability of the Euro-zone, the wisdom of decisions taken in Brussels, and the decision-making process itself. Many of these questions have remained unanswered, partly because, as Habermas himself claims in this book, the media are relatively poor at informing the public and generating useful debates around them. Many readers will thus relish the perspective of reading a book dissecting and deciphering current events for them. Read the full review…

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For the political rebel…

Occupy! is an unofficial record of the movement and combines first-hand accounts with reflections from academics and writers. Jason Hickel finds the book has excellent moments of insight.

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When a small group of activists first occupied Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan last September nobody thought it would amount to much. But it wasn’t long before Occupy Wall Street struck a chord with a nation embittered by bank bailouts, plutocracy, and rising social inequalities, galvanized hundreds of thousands of angry protestors, and inspired similar encampments in dozens of cities across the United States and Europe. As a scholar who followed OWS closely with both personal and scholarly interest, I was thrilled to get my hands on Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America, one of the first book-length texts to have been published on the topic. Read the full review…

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For the startup star…

The Founder’s Dilemmas examines the early decisions by entrepreneurs that can make or break a startup and its team. Tamara Micner finds that it’s a worthwhile, prudent read for anyone considering entrepreneurship.

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Technology startups are the new alchemy. Young programmers the world over dream and toil to become the next Mark Zuckerberg, Larry and Sergey, or Bill Gates. They flock to Silicon Valley, and New York and London, in droves. And the UK government want in: their Tech City scheme touts London as the Digital Capital of Europe, and invests £1.7 million annually to that end. London now holds more than 1,900 startups; Google, Mozilla and General Assembly have opened co-working/event spaces, and Silicon Valley Bank chose London for their first European branch. But how can founders help ensure their ideas turn to gold? Read the full review…

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For the philosopher…

This engaging book from Nigel Warburton introduces the great thinkers in Western philosophy and explores their most compelling ideas about the world and how best to live in it, finds Susannah Willcox.

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Nigel Warburton is a philosopher of the people. While he may not ask shoppers difficult questions about morality as they pick up their groceries in Sainsbury’s (as Socrates, the founder of Western philosophy, might have done), Warburton tweets, blogs and writes philosophy for the curious bystander. His podcast series featuring interviews with a range of philosophers has had over 12 million downloads. He even has his own iPhone app. Who better to write a succinct, palatable – in fact, absurdly enjoyable – introduction to the great thinkers of Western philosophy? Read the full review…

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For the globetrotter…

When China Rules the World considers how China has become a challenge to the West. Ting Xu recommends this book to anyone interested in China and its future.

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Martin Jacques is a highly distinguished British scholar, writer and columnist. When China Rules the World, first published in 2009, is among his most important publications. Since then the book has been translated into eleven languages, and sold nearly a quarter of a million copies worldwide. The book’s focus on Asian modernity and the rise of China as a global power is of course highly relevant for contemporary concerns and interests in globalisation, as well as its implications for evaluating an evolution from the economic and geopolitical ‘great divergence’ to the recent rapid ‘convergence’ between China and the West. Read the full review…

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