Crisis Cycle: Challenges, Evolution, and Future of the Euro. John H. Cochrane, Luis Garicano and Klaus Masuch. Princeton University Press. 2025.

Few monetary experiments in modern history have been as ambitious – or as consequential – as the euro. Launched in 1999 on the premise that a common currency could anchor European integration, promote growth, and bind the continent’s democracies in a durable peace, it has since endured the global financial meltdown of 2007-2010, the sovereign debt crisis of 2010–2012, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the economic shockwaves of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That the euro survives is itself remarkable. But as Crisis Cycle: Challenges, Evolution, and Future of the Euro contends, each survival has come at the cost of deeper institutional distortion.

The book’s authors represent an unusual and formidable combination of expertise. John H. Cochrane, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and author of the influential Fiscal Theory of the Price Level, provides the theoretical scaffolding. Luis Garicano, Professor of Public Policy at the London School of Economics and a former member of the European Parliament, contributes the political economy perspective. Klaus Masuch, who spent his entire career at the European Central Bank (ECB) – including as a member of the “troika” that negotiated the Greek adjustment programme – supplies intimate institutional knowledge. Their complementary vantage points give the book a depth that few single-authored treatments of the eurozone could match.

Founding design vs crisis-driven revision

Crisis Cycle opens by reconstructing the intellectual and institutional logic of the euro’s original architecture. The ECB was endowed with a narrow and clear mandate: pursue price stability through interest-rate policy, and refrain from purchasing sovereign debt. Member states were bound by debt and deficit ceilings under the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP). A “no-bailout” clause formally prohibited fiscal transfers between member states. The founders, as the authors explain, understood the central danger of a monetary union without fiscal union. Member governments might be tempted to borrow beyond their means and then rely on the central bank to monetise their debts.

Yet the founding framework contained crucial lacunae: no mechanism existed for the orderly default or restructuring of sovereign debt. Banks were permitted – indeed encouraged by regulation – to treat government bonds as risk-free assets, concentrating sovereign exposure in the very institutions most likely to be imperilled by a sovereign crisis. And no emergency fiscal facility existed to provide short-term liquidity to member states facing market pressure. These were not oversights born of negligence, the authors argue, but of the political and intellectual constraints of the 1990s. No one in that era anticipated advanced-economy sovereign debt crises, and a founding document is not the appropriate place to negotiate every contingency.

Member states were bound by debt and deficit ceilings under the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP). […] When France and Germany breached deficit limits in the early 2000s without meaningful consequence, the SGP’s credibility was permanently damaged.

The book’s most analytically powerful section charts how each successive crisis reshaped the euro’s institutional architecture in ways that gradually undermined its founding logic. When France and Germany breached deficit limits in the early 2000s without meaningful consequence, the SGP’s credibility was permanently damaged. During the 2007-2009 financial crisis, the ECB began lending more freely to banks against increasingly risky collateral, much of it sovereign debt – inadvertently financing government deficits through the back door.

The 2010 sovereign debt crisis was the decisive rupture, according to the authors. Confronted with market panic and the absence of any dedicated fiscal backstop, the ECB felt compelled to act as the de facto lender of last resort to sovereigns. Mario Draghi’s celebrated pledge to do “whatever it takes” stabilised markets, but at a profound institutional cost. It confirmed that the ECB would rescue over-indebted governments, eliminating the disciplinary pressure that market borrowing costs had previously exercised.

The authors identify a cruel irony at the heart of the eurozone’s crisis management: each intervention that saved the euro in the short run made it more fragile in the long run.

The subsequent rounds of quantitative easing (QE) – a monetary policy tool whereby a central bank purchases government and other securities on financial markets to inject liquidity into the economy and compress borrowing costs – were extended dramatically during the pandemic, embedding sovereign bond purchases as a routine instrument of ECB policy rather than an exceptional emergency measure. The authors identify a cruel irony at the heart of the eurozone’s crisis management: each intervention that saved the euro in the short run made it more fragile in the long run. It did so by weakening the incentives for fiscal discipline and structural reform that might have prevented the next crisis.

Moral hazards and the reform agenda

This is where the book’s central concept – the “crisis cycle” – acquires its analytical force. A moral hazard, in economics, refers to the tendency for insurance to reduce the incentives that would otherwise discourage the behaviour being insured against.

When governments know that the ECB will purchase their bonds should yields rise to dangerous levels, the incentive to maintain sustainable fiscal trajectories is blunted. When banks know that sovereign debt will effectively be supported by monetary intervention, they have little reason to reduce their concentrated holdings. When investors know that no sovereign default will be permitted, they have limited incentive to discipline profligate borrowers through higher interest rates. The result is a system in which each crisis generates institutional innovations that protect against immediate collapse but increase the underlying fragility – until the next, potentially larger, crisis arrives. Italy’s public debt, exceeding 135 per cent of GDP, and France’s deteriorating fiscal position loom large in the background of these pages.

The book’s final section is its most directly normative, outlining a package of reforms that the authors regard as necessary conditions for the euro’s long-term survival. Three pillars stand out.

First, the creation of a genuinely capable European fiscal institution that can provide temporary liquidity support to member states experiencing market pressure. If rendered subject to strict conditionality, this could relieve the ECB of the need to perform this quasi-fiscal function. Second, the development of a credible sovereign debt restructuring mechanism, so that default, however painful, remains a possibility that disciplines borrower and creditor behaviour alike. Third, a thoroughgoing reform of prudential regulation to break the “doom loop” between sovereign debt and bank balance sheets, requiring institutions to hold diversified sovereign portfolios and treat government bonds as the risky assets they demonstrably are.

Reform is easiest in calm times and most necessary in crises; yet it is precisely in crises that the short-term pressures for improvisation tend to crowd out long-term institutional design.

The authors are careful to distinguish their preferred path from two more radical alternatives they reject: full fiscal union, involving large-scale budgetary transfers to the European Commission, and unconditional debt mutualisation through Eurobonds. Their proposed middle course – disciplined national fiscal sovereignty, backstopped by a lean European fiscal facility and a credible default mechanism – is intended to restore the spirit of the original framework without requiring the constitutional revolution that fiscal union would entail.

The book addresses whether this programme is politically achievable with admirable candour. The authors acknowledge that reform is easiest in calm times and most necessary in crises; yet it is precisely in crises that the short-term pressures for improvisation tend to crowd out long-term institutional design.

An uncertain future for the euro

Crisis Cycle is a genuinely important contribution whose prose is uncommonly clear for a work touching on monetary economics, fiscal theory and European institutional law. The historical narrative is meticulous, situating the ECB’s successive innovations within the broader political contexts that shaped them, and the theoretical framework is applied with disciplined consistency rather than mechanical rigidity.

One might question whether the book’s reform proposals adequately reckon with the political economy of their implementation. The institutional actors – national governments, the ECB, the European Commission – whose co-operation is indispensable to reform are themselves among the principal beneficiaries of the current arrangements. The authors’ faith that the next crisis will galvanise rather than paralyse reform impulses is perhaps optimistic. The book also focuses principally on the monetary-fiscal nexus, with relatively less attention to the growth and productivity dimensions of Europe’s structural challenge – a gap that limits the comprehensiveness of the reform agenda.

These are, however, objections from within the book’s own framework rather than challenges to its fundamental contribution. Crisis Cycle provides economists, policymakers and engaged citizens with the most rigorous and readable account of the euro’s structural predicament to date. It is indispensable for scholars of European political economy, monetary theory and institutional design, and highly relevant to anyone seeking to understand why the future of the single currency remains, a quarter-century after its creation, genuinely uncertain.

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: hatsak on Shutterstock.

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Gijón, a hub of activity and culture

Gijón, or Xixón in Asturian, is a coastal city in Asturias, a province in northern Spain, located just north of the stunning Picos de Europa National Park. With 270,000 inhabitants it’s the region’s largest city, vibrant with shops and some of the best sidrerías (traditional cider houses and restaurants). It is home to San Lorenzo beach, where surfers and locals swim every day of the year, and is well connected to an impressive landscape of cliffs and geological formations.

Gijón is also an important business centre, with a major port, large industrial parks and a history of worker organising, mining, and industry. Its heritage and culture are another firm part of the city, from folk traditions and dances to a lively scene for intellectuals and artists.

Mostly independently run, Gijón’s many independent bookshops serve as a window into the city’s rich culture and love for literature.

Gijón’s many independent bookshops make this city unique. Found both downtown and in the various barrios (neighbourhoods), there are more than 20 dotted around the city, offering thoughtfully curated selections of books and stationary. Mostly independently run, these serve as a window into the city’s rich culture and love for literature. The following is a short selection of some favourites.

Amarcord

Coming from the port, we first come across Amarcord on San Antonio Street. It is a specialised comic and graphic literature bookshop. The book seller Marcelino Fernández hosts many titles from small, independent, publishers around the world. Amarcord (the name a nod to Federico Fellini’s classic 1974 film) opened in 2012 and moved to its current location in the past year. The bulk of the stock is a colourful range of classic comic reissues, independent and underground authors, and commercial manga and comics mostly from US presses. You can also find some children’s illustrated albums, and a small curated selection of fiction and literary classics.

La Revoltosa

Situated nearer the beach, La Revoltosa is a “café-bookstore,” among the first of this type to open in Gijón 16 years ago. Verónica Piñera Magdalena, co-owner of the store and also a professional children’s psychologist told me she had seen some of these while she lived in Madrid and absolutely loved the idea of opening a space for both reading and socialising. Oriol Díaz Díez Mata is her partner and co-owner of “La Revol”, as locals call it.

The founder’s background working with children and in social activism, as well as love for nonfiction, shines through the bookstore’s collection. Readers interested in social justice, politics, and works on anarchism, feminism, and niche history and economics will find what they they’re looking for here. Like others in Gijón, they platform independent publishers, with favourites including Hoja de Lata, Impedimenta, Asteroide, Errata Naturae, and Tránsito, though they stock mainstream publishers, too. They select every carefully to ensure it fits their specific editorial line, and they have a large range of children’s literature on offer.

Owner Rafael Gutiérrez wanted la buena letra a comfortable environment where people could browse, attend workshops, storytelling sessions, and book presentations without feeling pressured to buy.

In the middle of the shop is the cafetería, or coffee counter, and in the back is a charming, decorated space with tables and a sofa. And, of course, it is hard to miss the dog, who wanders back and forth through the café without bothering anyone. It seems like a safe space for him, too!

La buena letra

Speaking of creating a safe and welcoming space, that was Rafael Gutiérrez’s vision when he embarked on the project to open his book and stationary shop. He wanted La buena letra to be a comfortable environment where people could browse, attend workshops, storytelling sessions, and book presentations without feeling pressured to buy.

He chose the shop’s name (which means “good manners” in English) after Valencian novelist Rafael Chirbes’ 1992 novel la buena letra, a story set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War that captures both a period of hardship and the need to preserve dignity and joy, even when you have very little. The bookstore opened in June 2009 and fiction titles have always been prominent (both inside and in the windowfront). His children’s collection is impressive and eclectic.

Paradiso

The owners of these three bookstores and many others in the city are an integral part of Gijón’s cultural life and reading community. They each run events, manage book clubs, and Rafa, for example, is a central figure in the local literary scene, serving as the president of the Asociación de Librerías del Principado de Asturias (Association of Bookstores of the Principality of Asturias).

All of them mentioned the bookshop Paradiso with admiration, a reference bookstore for Asturians and Spaniards. Paradiso offers both new and second-hand books, and it is also a record shop. In 2026 it celebrates 50 years as one of the city’s institutions, 48 of which it has spent on Calle Merced, its current location.

Paradiso is hard to miss, situated on a central, pedestrian-only street and decorated with a unique interior, with columns and high ceilings, every square metre filled with books and records.

Stacks of alluring titles pile to the high ceilings and around the shop window. The shop also features local, independent publishers.

The main shop floor houses fiction, nonfiction, poetry, cinema, and a large music section. José Luis Álvarez González, the original and current owner, considers music just as important as books and even organised concerts for iconic Spanish bands like Alaska and Los Secretos when these were starting in the ‘80s. The top area is more “serious,” he says, and changes less, containing specialised philosophy, science, pedagogy, history and psychology.

The store has a section for second-hand books, a recently expanded comic book area, and a dedicated section for US fiction. Books on feminism, labour history, Asturian history and culture are also popular. Stacks of alluring titles pile to the high ceilings and around the shop window. The shop also features local, independent publishers like La Fabriquina, which publishes only titles in Asturian and Castillian.

On your next visit to Gijón, make sure to take a break from wandering in the sea-swept streets and find shelter in one (or several!) of these literary havens.

Main image: The famous red Gijón sculpture. Credit: Dolores Giraldez Alonso on Shutterstock.

All other images by Paula de la Cruz-Fernández ©

Do you know a place with great bookshops? As part of a regular feature on LSE Review of Books, we’re asking academics and students to recommend their favourite bookshops in a particular city or town to share with our book-loving community of readers the world over.

Bookshops could be academic, alternative, multilingual, hobby-based, secret or underground institutions, second-hand outlets or connected to a university. We’d like to cover all world regions too and are particularly keen to feature cities outside of Europe and North America.

If something comes to mind, we’re looking for a brief introduction about the city, a selection of three or four bookshops with around 150 words per bookshop, detailing why each one is a must-see. Our editorial team can then find suitable photos and links to accompany the piece, though you’re welcome to supply these too.

Email us if you’d like to contribute: lsereviewofbooks@lse.ac.uk

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Far-Right France: Le Pen, Bardella and the Future of Europe. Victor Mallet. Hurst. 2026.

A far-right French president?

Will France find itself led by a far-right 31-year-old in 2027? Surprisingly, it looks likely, with Jordan Bardella leading in polls on the French Presidential election to take place next year. Even more surprisingly, in a country where most presidents have placed a strong emphasis on classical education and culture, Bardella has no university degree. And to complicate things further, he supports a staunch anti-immigrant policy, despite himself being of Italian and even Algerian descent.

This paradoxical situation matters for both France and Europe. The country is a nuclear power and veto-wielding permanent member of the UN Security Council, and one of the main engines of the European Union. Unlike Italy, Germany, or Spain, France remains a thoroughly centralised country, concentrating enormous power in the hands of the president. More than impacting French people, a Bardella presidency would embolden far-right leaders throughout the world.

The far right’s appeal in rural France

To understand this phenomenon, Victor Mallet, a journalist at The Financial Times and the author of several books, has written a crisp and lucid account of the reasons behind the far right’s success in France. He stresses a neglected factor: the far right’s newly established roots in many local communities. He depicts the slow but relentless momentum of the far-right juggernaut, delving deep into the country’s political history and social fabric. He achieved this by conducting interviews in neglected rural villages, and in rust belts ravaged by the disappearance of traditional manufacturing. His book is both an essay – backed by statistics, informed by social science literature, and extensive endnotes – and a travelogue, one that took him from the comfort of his Paris office to meet far-right leaders and their electorate living outside major metropolitan areas. He crisscrossed France from Etrepangy in Normandy to Beaucaire on the Mediterranean Coast, including Hénin-Beaumont in France’s northern Rust Belt, which Marine Le Pen has represented in Parliament since 2017.

As a French academic, I was surprised by the picture the book reveals because (like many others) I had limited my mental cartography to liberal and cosmopolitan locations. The most vivid pages are testimonies from people living in remote corners of France, where non-existent public transport demanded Mallet make long journeys on foot to reach his interviewees. One teaching assistant from Normandy states: “I voted for Mélenchon [the far-left leader] in 2022 in the first round, and in the second round I voted for Le Pen.” This is a recurring theme in Mallet’s book: the deep divide between pro-globalisation cosmopolitans embodied by President Emmanuel Macron, and the anti-globalisation of the far right and far left. Both “are relatively sympathetic to Russia,” (99) but disagree regarding environmental issues and immigration. Bardella has called the EU Green Deal one of the “biggest degrowth plan of the last 50 years” proposed by “EU ayatollahs” (178), while the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI) has regularly condemned lax environmental policy.

Marketing xenophobia and racism

The rejection of foreigners looms large in all far-right parties, including in France. Mallet nevertheless reminds us that Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) is not openly racist and xenophobic, unlike her father’s Front National. The latter was formed by Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972 with former French members of the Waffen SS, who fought in Hitler’s army during the Second World War, and with former members of the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS, or Secret Army Organisation), a seditious movement opposing Algerian independence that tried to assassinate Charles de Gaulle for his role in Algeria’s independence. Le Pen was the most presentable face of many fringe, far-right movements.

Marine Le Pen’s strategy of what the French call “dédiabolisation” (counter-demonisation) of her father’s radioactive FN has worked: the party is still fiercely hostile to immigration, but it is now seen more as anti-establishment than as racist.

Mallet excels at uncovering paradoxes related to racism: he interviews a leader of a mosque in Hénin-Beaumont, who speaks positively of the current mayor, Steve Briois of the FN. He also reminds us that during the second round of the 2022 presidential election, Le Pen won more than 60 per cent of the vote in the predominantly black regions of Guadeloupe and Martinique in the French Caribbean. It therefore appears that Marine Le Pen’s strategy of what the French call “dédiabolisation” (counter-demonisation) of her father’s radioactive FN has worked: the party is still fiercely hostile to immigration, but it is now seen more as anti-establishment than as racist.

The double act of Le Pen and Bardella

While Marine Le Pen was the natural leader of the French far right, successfully increasing the political importance of her new, seemingly more moderate RN, she is now embroiled in a trial where she is accused of embezzling European Parliament funds, thereby disqualifying her from the next presidential election. While a successful appeal would allow her to run, the next far-right candidate is more likely to be Bardella, a prodigy who won the first campaign he led for the RN at just 23 years of age, during the 2019 European election. While many observers have likened Bardella to porcelain – shiny but brittle – Mallet finds him rather sturdy. He and Le Pen form a seemingly unbreakable political couple.

Both Le Pen and Bardella share a Trump-like understanding of how much ordinary people resent the metropolitan elites

Both share a “Trump-like understanding of how much ordinary people resent the metropolitan elites” (135), even though Le Pen is the Parisian daughter of a millionaire. Bardella comes from a deprived neighbourhood, but “he was privately educated, and his father gave him a Smart car and regular holidays abroad” (108). Both are socially liberal, defending women, gays, and Jews, both for personal reasons and because it helps them to target Muslims. Lively portraits of Le Pen and Bardella – and countless RN voters – are what make the book such a page-turner.

The future of the French far right

The broader analysis of the rise of the far right is more traditional, with an emphasis on the support of conservative billionaires Vincent Bolloré and Pierre-Edouard Sterin, and on its populist discourse contradicting factual evidence regarding the economy, crime, and climate change. In terms of economic policy, it is difficult to gauge whether the RN will lean toward the dirigiste instincts of Le Pen or towards Bardella’s inclination towards the free market. They certainly promote a pro-business agenda, particularly regarding the dismantling of environmental regulations. The French right shamelessly uses popular historical references, often quoting Charles de Gaulle, France’s most popular leader, who was, ironically, a primary target of the far right. De Gaulle fought against the pro-Nazi Vichy regime and granted Algeria independence, and was at odds with the far right on both issues.

Mallet broaches but ultimately leaves open-ended what is perhaps the biggest question: whether a new far-right president would transform France into an authoritarian regime like Hungary’s Orbán or simply give it a more conservative direction, like Italy’s Meloni.

Mallet broaches but ultimately leaves open-ended what is perhaps the biggest question: whether a new far-right president would transform France into an authoritarian regime like Hungary’s Orbán – a plausible outcome considering France’s institutional system with a “near-monarchical president” (102) – or simply give it a more conservative direction, like Italy’s Meloni. The book sketches out several scenarios, including a possible financial crisis, but presents none as a forerunner. Europe is rarely mentioned; the wider world even less so. Given the weight of Orbán and Meloni in Trump’s Washington, it would be surprising if a Bardella victory in 2027 did not resonate on the other shore of the Atlantic.

Of course, this 264-page book is not comprehensive, but its shortness and liveliness are also its major appeal. While the endnotes span over 40 pages, some important books are missing, such as Luc Rouban’s recent La vraie Victoire du RN, which dissects the latest presidential election. The book also includes at least one minor inaccuracy, on page 117, which states that Bardella dropped out of his geography studies at Sciences Po; he was actually enrolled at Sorbonne Université. A valuable complement to Mallet’s down-to-earth and personal approach is Patrick Lehingue and Bernard Pudal’s newer, more academic study, Du FN au RN. Les raisons d’un succès, and sheds light on long-term social, economic, institutional, and cultural dynamics that explain the rise of the far right in France.

Overall, this book is a depressing read for liberals. It tells the tale of how two improbable leaders – a woman in an arch-conservative party, and a young nationalist with a foreign-sounding name – managed to stoke and exploit the grievances of peripheral voters. The presidential election in 2027 will reveal how far they can push their success.

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: Victor Velter on Shutterstock.

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Deconstructing Refugee Women’s Empowerment: A Comparative Approach to British and French Aid Structures. Zeynep Kilicoglu. Routledge. 2025.

Empowerment, vulnerability and global hierarchies 

While humanitarian programs targeting refugee women have always been strongly motivated by assumptions about their gender-specific vulnerability, a language of gender equality and women’s empowerment have been increasingly embraced in international policy and governance frameworks. Scholars and aid organisations are increasingly recognising that displacement does not always or only make women vulnerable. The upheavals of war, migration and exile can also provide new opportunities and prompt renegotiation of gender norms. However, in a context of political backlash against refugees and persistent xenophobia, racism and state violence directed at them in host countries, what does the empowerment of refugee women mean? How do efforts at empowering refugee women play out in landscapes of global and historical hierarchies and local, everyday hostility? In Deconstructing Refugee Women’s Empowerment, Zeynep Kilicoglu offers an original analysis of these questions through a rich analysis of humanitarian aid practices in support of women asylum seekers in the United Kingdom (UK) and in France.

In the UK, feminist-oriented humanitarian actors perceive the provision of practical support and essential services for women as inherently linked to a broader social justice agenda that seeks to dismantle unjust structures rooted in racism, sexism, and neocolonialism.

The book draws on extensive empirical work conducted via semi-structured interviews with refugee women and aid professionals, and participant observation in refugee communities. Notably, the study focuses on women-only or feminist organisations supporting refugee women, rather than more mainstream – and male-dominated – actors in the humanitarian aid sector. The actors in focus have a clear operational focus on women’s empowerment and can be expected to take a more explicit feminist stance. This sets the book apart from previous analyses of humanitarian gender policy and practice, where major international agencies such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have often been the focus of critique. Yet even among these actors, how feminism is mobilised and what empowerment means can vary considerably. Kilicoglu represents her interlocutors with empathy and nuance, but also critically demonstrates that a feminist orientation does not inoculate well-meaning aid workers from – sometimes unintentionally – reproducing global and local patterns of inequality and injustice.

Collaborative approach in the UK 

Through her fine-grained analysis, Kilicoglu brings the work and interactions of aid workers and refugee women to life and reveals striking differences between the UK and France. In the UK, feminist-oriented humanitarian actors perceive the provision of practical support and essential services for women as inherently linked to a broader social justice agenda that seeks to dismantle unjust structures rooted in racism, sexism, and neocolonialism. Programs treat refugee women as partners alongside humanitarian workers, team members and friends often invite them to participate and take up leadership positions. This model diverges from restrictive asylum systems and the dominant logics of mainstream humanitarian aid and challenges representations of refugee women as vulnerable and passive victims. Here, empowerment means not only responding to practical and legal needs for support but creating space for refugee women’s agency and amplifying their voices in political activism.

However, this approach is not without challenges. Notably, a feminist agenda that seeks to empower refugee women through challenging restrictive gender norms can sometimes clash with the need to accommodate diverse cultural and religious beliefs. Aid workers express frustration over examples where refugee women are seen as unwilling to question traditional gender norms and patriarchal community and family structures. In this way, the feminist goals that aid workers espouse come into tension with their aspirations to solidarity, respect and mutuality towards refugee women.

Hierarchical dynamics in France 

In France, organisations take an entirely different approach to empowerment. Organisations supporting refugee women focus strongly on legal support and advocacy, based on a narrow understanding of empowerment as achieving a secure legal status. Humanitarian workers take a technocratic approach emphasising legal expertise and focusing on guidance to refugee women and working with state agencies to facilitate asylum processes. This approach positions aid workers as experts and decision-makers, and refugee women firmly as dependent recipients. This hierarchical relationship is compounded by the dominance of representations of women asylum seekers as victims of gender-based violence. In part, this is an example of how refugee women’s vulnerability is strategically leveraged to secure their access to protection and rights, as an emphasis on gender-based violence might increase the chances of a successful asylum claim. However, this framing simultaneously reinforces an image of refugee women as vulnerable victims by default, and obscures diversity in women’s experiences and needs for protection and support.

Alongside legal assistance, French aid actors focus on integration of refugee women through practical support but also sensibilisation to “French values”. Here, gender equality and women’s empowerment are framed as French values that refugee women must be educated on and work to internalise. This approach reinforces racial and cultural hierarchies between French women, representing a superior culture, and refugee women, viewed as deficient and in need of reform.

Political culture and women’s movements 

Kilicoglu convincingly argues that the distinct political cultures of the UK and France explain these differences in how they each approach empowerment in humanitarian aid to refugee women. In the UK, a multiculturalist tradition and immigration history makes for more acceptance of diversity, a more participatory and activist aid sector less dependent on state funding, and a women’s movement promoting a more inclusive form of feminism. In contrast, the republican political culture in France positions the state as the sole provider of rights and resources, and many humanitarian organisations operate in a technocratic fashion as extensions of the state. French feminism is shaped by universalist values that leaves little room for recognition of refugee women’s agency and their alternative perspectives and interpretations of feminism.

However, as Kilicoglu shows, French aid actors in the Calais region differ from those in other parts of France through a more activist approach closer to that of UK actors. The example of Calais offers fascinating insights into dynamics of change that have broader relevance in a global context of state repression against migrants. After the French government dismantled the Calais refugee camps in 2016 and state-funded humanitarian aid providers pulled back, their space was taken over by less formal and more participatory grassroots networks. These activists adopted a more collaborative approach to the refugees, as well as a more radical critique of existing relations of power. Thus, an environment of heightened state repression fostered a more solidarity-based approach to humanitarian aid, with the potential of more fundamentally disrupting and challenging the global order that produces displacement and suffering.

Kilicoglu adds nuance to previous literature that has demonstrated how humanitarian politics are shaped by, and reinforce, global hierarchies and colonial legacies

Through the analysis of political culture and context, Kilicoglu adds nuance to previous literature that has demonstrated how humanitarian politics are shaped by, and reinforce, global hierarchies and colonial legacies. In this context, feminist ideals can be mobilised as symbols of civilisational difference that works to uphold, rather than disrupt, inequality. While this book supports these arguments, and illustrates them in rich empirical detail, it also adds novel insights about how specific political, institutional and ideological structures and governing logics shapes the interpretation and implementation of global norms, and thereby the lives of refugee women. Deconstructing Refugee Women’s Empowerment offers essential insights to scholars, activists and practitioners interested in the gender politics of humanitarianism, as well as European refugee politics. Beyond that, it will appeal to those more broadly interested in the dilemmas of feminist activism and solidarity across differences and asymmetries of power and privilege.  

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: UN Women on Flickr.

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Making Refugees’ Political Agency Visible. Amelie Harbisch. Routledge. 2025.

Refugees are among the most visible figures in contemporary global politics. They dominate news coverage, humanitarian campaigns, policy debates and electoral rhetoric. Yet they are rarely recognised as political actors in their own right. Instead, they are most often portrayed as passive victims in need of protection, or as threatening bodies to be managed, controlled, or excluded. In Making Refugees’ Political Agency Visible, Amelie Harbisch intervenes powerfully in this paradox. Her book asks a deceptively simple question: how might we see refugees not as objects of international politics, but as subjects who actively shape and challenge it in their everyday lives? 

Harbisch’s answer is both theoretically ambitious and empirically rich. Drawing on practice theory, performativity, and ethnographic research with refugees in Germany and Austria, she argues that refugees enact political agency through everyday practices of meaning-making – practices that are frequently overlooked, dismissed, or actively depoliticised by states, institutions, and humanitarian regimes. In doing so, the book makes an important contribution to contemporary debates in International Relations (IR), refugee studies, and critical approaches to global governance, particularly at a moment when the moral and institutional foundations of refugee protection appear increasingly fragile. 

Refugees, agency, and the limits of dominant frameworks 

A central problem Harbisch identifies is how narrowly political agency is conventionally understood in IR. Agency is often associated with formal participation, institutional authority, or overt resistance. Refugees, who often lack legal status, citizenship, and access to decision-making arenas, therefore appear as political non-actors – governed rather than governing, spoken about rather than speaking. Even critical approaches that foreground refugees tend to oscillate between two limiting frames: the refugee as bare life, stripped of political capacity, or the refugee as heroic resistor, whose agency appears only in moments of protest or collective mobilisation. 

Harbisch rejects this binary. Instead, she proposes a practice-theoretical understanding of political agency as something enacted through everyday interactions, performances, and interpretations. Agency, on this view, does not require sovereignty or institutional power. It emerges in how people navigate, reinterpret, and sometimes subvert, the categories imposed upon them. Refugees become political not only when they protest, but also when they joke, remain silent, or refuse to conform to expected scripts of victimhood or gratitude. 

A refugee who appears too assertive risks being read as threatening; one who fails to display sufficient vulnerability may be deemed undeserving.

This move is one of the book’s most significant contributions. It aligns with feminist and postcolonial scholarship that has long insisted on recognising agency within constraint, while offering IR a more systematic way of conceptualising it. Harbisch demonstrates that refugees are not merely affected by global politics; they are implicated in the everyday reproduction – and disruption – of its meanings. 

Scripts, subjectivity, and depoliticisation 

At the heart of Harbisch’s analysis is the concept of “scripts”: recurring discursive and visual frameworks through which refugees are made intelligible and governable. Across the book, she identifies several dominant scripts, including refugees as bare life, criminals, perpetual children, and useful labour. These scripts operate across media representations, bureaucratic procedures, and everyday interactions, shaping how refugees are expected to behave and how they are treated by states and societies. 

Importantly, these scripts are not merely descriptive; they are productive. They assign roles, prescribe behaviour, and delimit what kinds of claims refugees can legitimately make. A refugee who appears too assertive risks being read as threatening; one who fails to display sufficient vulnerability may be deemed undeserving. In this way, depoliticisation is not simply the absence of politics, but an active process through which political subjectivity is constrained. 

Harbisch’s analysis moves beyond identifying these scripts to examining how refugees navigate and disrupt them in practice. Through ethnographic observation and close analysis of refugee-led artistic and social projects, Harbisch shows how humour, irony, silence, and creative self-representation can unsettle dominant narratives. A joke that exaggerates stereotypes, an artwork that refuses victimhood, or a strategic silence in an asylum interview can all function as acts of political meaning-making – not because they overturn structures of power, but because they expose their contradictions and limits. In one example, participants in a refugee-led language project jokingly reversed expected hierarchies by correcting native speakers, quipping “I must tell you, your German is really good!” (142). 

In this sense, the book offers a nuanced account of depoliticisation and its disruption. Refugees are neither fully silenced nor fully liberated. Their agency is real, but fragile; meaningful, but constrained; visible in some moments and erased in others. 

A critical moment in refugee governance and discourse 

Making Refugees’ Political Agency Visible arrives at a critical juncture. Across Europe and beyond, refugee governance has become increasingly securitised, bureaucratised, and moralised. Asylum systems demand ever more precise narratives of suffering, while political discourse oscillates between humanitarian compassion and exclusionary fear. Against this backdrop, Harbisch insists on  everyday political agency. 

For IR, the book contributes to several ongoing conversations. It strengthens the “everyday turn” by showing how global orders are reproduced and contested in mundane practices, challenges biopolitical approaches that risk reducing refugees to passive objects of power, and complements feminist and postcolonial critiques of liberal governance through detailed empirical insight into subject formation. 

If refugee agency is continually rendered invisible by the very systems designed to protect refugees, then recognition itself becomes a political problem.

Crucially, Harbisch also raises uncomfortable questions about the limits of existing institutional responses. If refugee agency is continually rendered invisible by the very systems designed to protect refugees, then recognition itself becomes a political problem. This has implications not only for scholarship, but also for policy debates around asylum, integration, and humanitarian intervention. 

From visibility to real political agency 

The book’s empirically grounded analysis of European asylum regimes raises productive questions about how far its conceptual framework might travel beyond these settings. At the same time, Harbisch’s focus on everyday forms of disruption – such as humour, silence, and performance – opens up a broader conceptual question about the relationship between micro-level practices and political effect. While these practices powerfully expand what counts as agency in IR, the book invites further reflection on how such forms of visibility translate into more durable structural and political transformation, rather than remaining symbolically or locally significant. 

By shifting attention from institutions to practices, from formal participation to everyday meaning-making, Harbisch invites new ways of understanding refugee lives and global politics alike.

Finally, the book invites reflection on the relationship between political agency and epistemic authority. While refugees’ practices are analysed with great care, their own theoretical understandings of politics, morality, and belonging tend to be mediated through the author’s conceptual framework. This raises fruitful questions about how refugee knowledge might be engaged not only as evidence of agency, but as a source of theory in its own right – an avenue that a more explicitly decolonial engagement could productively pursue. 

Making Refugees’ Political Agency Visible is a thoughtful, sophisticated, and timely contribution that pushes IR to rethink who counts as a political actor, and how politics itself is constituted. By shifting attention from institutions to practices, from formal participation to everyday meaning-making, Harbisch invites new ways of understanding refugee lives and global politics alike. 

For scholars of IR, migration, and global governance, the book offers both a conceptual toolkit and a challenge: to take seriously the political significance of those who are most often rendered invisible. In a world where refugees are everywhere discussed but rarely heard, let alone taken seriously as political actors and producers of knowledge, this is no small contribution.

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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Extroverted Financialisation: Banking on US Dollar Debt. Mareike Beck. Cambridge University Press. 2025.

Mareike Beck’s Extroverted Financialisation explores why German banking, frequently characterised as relatively conservative, relationship-oriented, and domestically rooted, underwent a profound transformation by adopting US-style financial practices. The question is a salient one. Although the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007-9 was caused by speculative innovations tied to the US housing market, it was European banks that ultimately sat at its epicentre and bore many of its heaviest costs. Prevailing accounts of Europe’s experience of the crisis emphasise how the globalisation of finance enabled rapid contagion. Such descriptions tend to underscore the thick mesh of cross-border claims and obligations that link the balance sheets of financial institutions trading complex products, such as credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations. 

Why did Germany deepen its exposure to risk? 

Beck acknowledges the intricacies of these mechanisms but argues that a fixation on instruments and exchanges obscures the more fundamental question of motivation. Why did German banks deepen their exposure to the vulnerabilities of US finance? The book thus traces how shifts in German banking make legible the pervasive influence of US-led financialisation. 

Germany’s two largest banks, Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank, exemplify the processes that Beck terms “extroverted financialisation”, through which German banks reoriented themselves towards US finance. These two banks and their historical transformations are the subject of the latter part of the book. Earlier, the focus is on some core concepts that help the reader understand financial imperatives and the prowess of the system underpinned by the United States Dollar (USD). 

The Pfandbrief, which translates to ‘letter of pledge’ is Germany’s covered bond (a financial instrument  backed by a pool of assets) and a compelling success of the banking system for supporting long-term investment in the domestic economy by easing the mismatch between the supply of capital and the demand for credit. Pfandbriefe have been a feature of German banking for centuries, with Friedrich II using this instrument in the 18th century to finance the reconstruction of Prussia. In more recent times, Pfandbriefe have provided long-term finance for urban housing, agrarian development, and infrastructure projects. Their widespread use in Germany underscores that market-based finance is not a US innovation.  

German stability versus American strain 

The 1960s offer an instructive contrast between the relative stability of a German system and the mounting strains in US banking that enhanced the appeal of speculative and market-based practices. Post-war German banking benefited from strong household savings, steady deposit growth, and robust demand for long-term credit. US banks, by contrast, were constrained by Regulation Q, which capped deposit rates; as inflation rose and non-bank instruments became more attractive, they struggled to retain deposits. In response, they began to marketise their debt and develop instruments that could circulate on money markets: pivotal shifts that undergirded the market-based strategies that would define liquidity management.  

German banks were pushed to internationalise and soon found themselves competing directly with the expanding Eurodollar market, where US banks were already offering services to European firms. 

While large German banks operated in a competitive environment and occasionally acquired smaller institutions, they did not face the rivalries confronting US banks from an expanding array of non-bank financial actors. German banks neither competed with money-market instruments for household savings nor relied heavily on wholesale funding. This divergence helps explain why the German system remained anchored in long-term, prudently structured collateralised finance, even as the US shifted steadily toward a market-based model. 

The pivot to the US market model 

Beck notes that this German model of banking might have provided the basis for a more organic European financial architecture. Yet this proved untenable given the export orientation of the German economic miracle or Wirtschaftswunder, which relied on domestic capital accumulation alongside Marshall Plan funding. German banks were therefore pushed to internationalise and soon found themselves competing directly with the expanding Eurodollar market, where US banks were already offering services to European firms. 

Eurodollars became pivotal to financial globalisation from the 1960s onwards. Beck’s account of this trajectory is so detailed and thorough that compressing it feels wrong, but its core dynamics are as follows. Eurodollars are USD-denominated deposits held outside the United States, especially in London within US and UK merchant banks. These deposits expanded rapidly during the Cold War, driven in part by foreign investors’ concerns about potential US asset seizures, which made offshore dollar holdings an attractive means of maintaining dollar liquidity beyond the reach of domestic regulation. Freed from domestic constraints and hungry for funding, US banks turned to offshore markets for liquidity, enabling rapid expansion of their asset portfolios. They soon emerged as central intermediaries for American corporations, European exporters, and an expanding group of sovereign borrowers. 

Deutsche Bank’s and Commerzbank’s strategies 

Beck shows that Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank faced complicated choices in reorienting themselves outward by adopting US-style market-based practices. Only after overcoming deep scepticism about the ethics and risks of US financial expansion did they pursue extroverted financialisation, with each bank taking a different approach. When efforts to build Pan-European resistance to the displacement of European currencies failed, Deutsche Bank, followed by Commerzbank and eventually forty or so other German banks, accepted that resistance was futile and moved to assert themselves in the Eurodollar market by establishing a strong presence in its key hubs, Luxembourg and London. Deutsche Bank, after acquiring the British merchant bank Morgan Grenfell in 1989, initially sought to keep the two entities separate: an attempt to shield its conservative domestic operations from the more aggressive, market-oriented practices of Anglo-American finance.  

Whereas Deutsche Bank saw Europe within a broader global strategy, Commerzbank remained regionally anchored, using Eurodollar liquidity mainly to support European SMEs and making only limited incursions into US finance.

This separation ended in 1994 with the creation of Deutsche Morgan Grenfell. This new entity could meet a key imperative of extroverted financialisation: a presence in US money markets, which for Deutsche facilitated a series of acquisitions of American non-bank institutions. The purchase of Banker’s Trust by Deutsche in 1998, for nearly USD 10 billion, created a formidable German mega bank which would rely on investment banking for more than half of its operating income. Commerzbank did not follow the same path as its larger rival. Whereas Deutsche Bank saw Europe within a broader global strategy, Commerzbank remained regionally anchored, using Eurodollar liquidity mainly to support European SMEs and making only limited incursions into US finance. This left it poorly positioned as global banking shifted toward US money-market funding. The watershed was its 2008 acquisition of Dresdner Bank, whose own unique strategy of extroverted financialisation had produced heavy exposure to toxic US asset-backed commercial paper. Eager to expand and unaware of the full extent of Dresdner’s troubles, Commerzbank absorbed these liabilities and, in doing so, became entangled in the very US money-market dynamics it had long avoided. 

Beck’s work is rich, rigorous, and indispensable for readers seeking a deep understanding of how US hegemony is exercised across different domains. Extroverted Financialisation is, at its core, a story of how the dominance of the US dollar is sustained not only by the scale and liquidity of US debt but also by the global banking system’s persistent need to access US money markets to avert liquidity shortages. Although the book develops its arguments through meticulous analyses of European particularly German, banking, it is far from merely a study of Western finance. Its overarching themes speak directly to the major debates in the political economy of global finance, with relevance for the global South, where the dollar’s apex position is the foundation for an uneven international financial and monetary system. 

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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Founded more than twelve centuries ago, Utrecht – one of the oldest cities in the Netherlands – combines the charm of a medieval canal town with the vitality of a modern urban centre. Its cobbled streets and canal-side cellars, once used by merchants, now host cafés, galleries, and a remarkable number of bookstores, each reflecting a different facet of the city’s creative life. Whether you come in search of a rare edition, to enjoy a coffee among the shelves, or simply to linger by the water with a new read, Utrecht, designated a UNESCO City of Literature in 2017, invites every visitor to slow down and rediscover the quiet pleasure of books. 

Broese Boekverkopers 

Situated in the heart of the city centre at Oudegracht 112-b – about five to seven minutes from the Dom Tower and the adjacent St. Martin’s Cathedral – the store occupies the former post office and lies along the Old Canal, a picturesque medieval canal, that runs through Utrecht’s historic core, with unique wharves and cellar-level cafés that reflect the city’s rich history and vibrant charm. As one of the larger and better-known independent bookstores in the Netherlands, Broese Boekverkopers offers a wide and varied selection of books in both Dutch and other languages (with special attention to English-language titles), spanning genres such as literature, non-fiction, cookbooks, travel, young adult, fantasy and science fiction, psychology, history, children’s books, and graphic novels. For anyone visiting Utrecht – or looking for a one-stop destination for books in multiple languages and genres – Broese provides both breadth of choice and a comfortable space to linger. International students in particular note that the extensive English-language section and café-style browsing make it a favourite. 

Boekhandel Bijleveld 

Boekhandel Bijleveld is located pposite the Janskerk church, where one can see the Anne Frank statue. It’s an 8 to 10 minute walk from the Centraal Museum which showcases art from the medieval period to contemporary times, including major works by artists from the Utrecht School, and only five minutes to either the historic main building of Utrecht University, one of the oldest in the Netherlands, established in 1636. Boekhandel Bijleveld carries a broad selection of Dutch- and English-language books, with a particular emphasis on notable works of fiction, non-fiction (such as philosophy, history, science, and art), and children’s books, rather than just mainstream bestsellers. Dating back to 1865, when Jacobus Bijleveld took over the business, the store welcomes visitors with a light-filled space where warm wooden shelves and high ceilings reflect the building’s historic roots, offering a quiet opportunity to step away from the rush of Utrecht and spend a moment browsing through books. The Bijleveld store combines a long-standing independent bookstore tradition with a curated collection in a pleasant, historic setting – making it ideal for readers looking for something beyond the usual high-street chain fare. The staff are knowledgeable and helpful, too. 

De Utrechtse Boekenbar 

De Utrechtse Boekenbar is located at Westerkade 2 – about a 12 to 15 minute walk from the Utrecht University Museum, which also includes a historic botanical garden with a sequoia that can potentially reach the height of the Dom Tower. It’s also roughly 15 to 18 minutes from the Sonnenborgh Observatory. This appealing bookstore specialises in literature, art books, photo books, and cookbooks, as well as independent magazines and small-press publications alongside the main genres. Straddling the line between a boutique bookstore and a convivial café, Boekenbar devotes as much care to creating a social, design-oriented space as it does to curating its collection of visually engaging books. Functioning as a cultural meeting place for events and community gatherings, Boekenbar hosts book discussions, open-mic nights, pop-up sales, and author talks in collaboration with cultural organisations and local artists, which might be of interest for visitors looking to experience Utrecht’s contemporary literary and cultural scene. 

Boekhandel en Antiquariaat Aleph 

Boekhandel-Antiquariaat Aleph is tucked away in the old market area at Vismarkt 9. It’s about 5 to 7 minutes from the Museum Catharijneconvent, which, housed in a former convent, presents a rich collection of Christian art, manuscripts, and cultural history from the Middle Ages to the present. The shop specialises in second-hand and antiquarian books across a diverse range of subjects, including art, literature, philosophy, and history, offering rare editions and specialist works. Founded in 1986 and now run by bookseller Ris Schortinghuis, this gem combines a passion for rare and second-hand books with a warm, community-oriented atmosphere, inviting visitors to explore Utrecht’s historic Vismarkt district, where fishmongers once sold their fresh catch. Providing a rich and atmospheric experience far beyond that of a standard bookstore, Aleph serves as a special place where bibliophiles can enjoy browsing for unique finds, rare volumes, or out-of-print editions. 

Paper Moon Books 

Finally, we come to Paper Moon Books, located at Oudegracht 254 – about 8 to 10 minutes from the Nijntje Museum dedicated to Miffy (the internationally beloved white rabbit created by Dutch author and illustrator Dick Bruna). Paper Moon offers English-language books, including new, second-hand, and rare titles, with a focus on children’s books and bilingual families. It provides a specialised selection of English-language children’s books (and some for adults) – including, among past highlights, a 1930 edition of Alice in Wonderland and 19th-century editions of works by Charles Dickens – in a market often dominated by Dutch-language titles, making it a valuable go-to for that niche. Welcoming visitors with young children, and featuring a cosy reading corner and a space to relax with a coffee, Paper Moon regularly hosts creative storytelling and illustration workshops for children, as well as book launches for local illustrators.

Note: This bookshop guide gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main image credit: ColorMaker on Shutterstock.

Do you know a place with great bookshops? As part of a regular feature on LSE Review of Books, we’re asking academics and students to recommend their favourite bookshops in a particular city or town to share with our book-loving community of readers the world over.

Bookshops could be academic, alternative, multilingual, hobby-based, secret or underground institutions, second-hand outlets or connected to a university. We’d like to cover all world regions too and are particularly keen to feature cities outside of Europe and North America.

If something comes to mind, we’re looking for a brief introduction about the city, a selection of three or four bookshops with around 150 words per bookshop, detailing why each one is a must-see. Our editorial team can then find suitable photos and links to accompany the piece, though you’re welcome to supply these too.

Email us if you’d like to contribute: lsereviewofbooks@lse.ac.uk

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Indignity: A Life Reimagined. Lea Ypi. Allen Lane. 2025.

The photo, an old black-and-white image, was posted on social media by a man with the username Çim, probably short for a communist-era name such as Çlirim (Liberation) or Shkëlqim (Splendour) or merely Ndriçim (Enlightenment) – a person whom I had never met, or even heard of before. Within hours of being shared, it went viral across Albania. A young, glamorous couple stare at the camera, while relaxing on sun loungers in front of a luxury hotel. In the background a pair of skis leans against the wall, just under an arcade. The woman is clad in a long white fur coat, her hands buried deep in its pockets, a small handbag precariously balanced on her lap. Her big smile and vaguely distracted expression contrast with the much more serious, almost probing look of the man stretched out on the sun lounger next to hers. It’s hard to say if his frown and squinting eyes are on account of the sun or displeasure with the photographer, at whom he stares as if trying to communicate something. A packet of cigarettes lies on a nearby side table, and beneath it a paper carrier bag, fancy but not ostentatious. You can just about make out the name: ‘Hotel Vittoria’. 

‘I felt the happiest person alive,’ she would say, ‘and Cortina was the happiest place in the world.’ Yes, truly, she would insist, even though this was Italy, and it was the winter of 1941 and war raged all over Europe as never before. 

I did not need to read the caption online to recognize my grandparents, Leman and Asllan, in the photo. Judging by their winter attire, the name of the hotel and the skis in the background, it was taken during their honeymoon in Cortina d’Ampezzo, in the Italian Alps. The year was 1941. My grandmother spoke often and fondly of those ten days spent learning to ski in the Dolomites. ‘I felt the happiest person alive,’ she would say, ‘and Cortina was the happiest place in the world.’ Yes, truly, she would insist, even though this was Italy, and it was the winter of 1941 and war raged all over Europe as never before. 

Years later, when she was no longer around, or perhaps because of it, I became absorbed by the question of what it meant to feel the happiest person alive in the winter of 1941. Part of me wondered if her description genuinely reflected her feelings at the time, and what this revealed about her character. I had trouble connecting her personal rendition of those weeks with my knowledge of historical events, both in Albania and elsewhere. Operation Barbarossa in the Soviet Union, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the ongoing battle in Yugoslavia, all this would have been making headlines just as she was learning to ski, relishing the crisp winter air. Was she indifferent to the most brutal battles of the most brutal war humanity had ever known? I had trouble squaring this with her personality, and with her views. She was no fascist apologist, of that I was certain. And she was far from indifferent to what was going on around her. Perhaps she was simply trying to cope, as she had done throughout her life, sensing that something even worse was about to unfold, that her days of innocence were numbered. Yet, her elaborate account of the young couple’s activities  – skiing in the morning, bridge in the afternoon, dancing in the evening –  was sufficiently focused on facts rather than subjective impressions to make me feel genuinely uneasy about sentiments that seemed at odds not simply with her character but with the entire trajectory of world events at the time. 

The way she spoke about those days in Cortina clashed with my perception of her as a kind of moral saint –  duty-bound, compassionate, always attentive to the needs of others before her own.

Looking back, after her death in 2006, I regretted having been unable to articulate clearly not so much these questions but what I found disturbing about her reconstruction of that period in her life. The way she spoke about those days in Cortina clashed with my perception of her as a kind of moral saint –  duty-bound, compassionate, always attentive to the needs of others before her own. It is not that I had expected her to forgo her honeymoon – life continues, even in 1941, even in the middle of war, perhaps with greater intensity, the closer one feels to the end.

This excerpt from Indignity: A Life Reimagined by Lea Ypi published by Allen Lane (2025) is reproduced here with the permission of the author and publisher. © Lea Ypi 2025.

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: A photograph of Lea Ypi’s grandparents, Leman and Asllan, in Cortina d’Ampezzo during they honeymoon in 1941.

Read a review of the book here.

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Indignity: A Life Reimagined. Lea Ypi. Allen Lane. 2025.

When Lea Ypi, a professor at the London School of Economics, published her award-winning memoir, Free, it sparked numerous positive reactions around the world. Free was in virtually every library imaginable, translated into more than thirty languages, and was reviewed and praised extensively in dozens of formal outlets. Fast forward to September 2025, Ypi has written yet another fascinating book – Indignity: A Life Reimagined. 

The relationship between fact and fiction 

In an email exchange we had in 2022 after I reviewed her first book, adamant about our collective need to study history if we are to make sense of the world, Ypi described her next work as being “about the relationship between fact and fiction.” This remark stayed with me. Perhaps, I thought, it could respond to the venomous rhetoric within certain Albanian circles that discredited Free for minor historical inaccuracies. Contrasting with the international response to Free, the book’s reception in Albania framed Ypi as an apologist for communist dictatorship. Ypi’s academic background also puzzled many Albanian readers who wondered how a prominent academic could fail to produce what they expected: an “objective” and rigorously historical account. However, this was never Ypi’s intention: Free was, explicitly, a highly subjective and personal memoir. 

Indignity: A Life Reimagined opens with a photograph of Ypi’s grandparents, Leman (Leskoviku) and Asllan Ypi, taken during their honeymoon in the Italian Alps in 1941. When this black-and-white photograph was posted on the internet by a random user, it went viral across Albania and prompted a wave of accusatory comments towards Leman, who had passed away almost twenty years earlier and was unable to defend herself. 

Confronted with this posthumous indignity, Ypi decided to respond to this emotionally charged trolling both as Leman’s granddaughter and as the researcher she is. Her journey thus began in the Authority for Information of Former State Security Documents, a state institution covering the years of Albanian dictatorship. When asked about the reasons behind her visit during her taxi ride to the Sigurimi archive, Ypi (8) admitted to being uncertain why she was doing any of this: to rescue her grandmother Leman from the trolls, to ease her own guilt over the fact that her great-grandfather, Xhafer Ypi, had briefly led fascist Albania, or, perhaps, to write a book that examines a country’s history through the lens of individual people’s lives? 

Ottoman collapse and the rise of nation states

From here, Indignity (re)traces the life of Ypi’s grandmother, Leman. Born in Salonica, Leman’s story begins against the backdrop of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Questions of identification were especially pertinent in this context, as overlapping identities and multi-ethnic coexistence gave way to new nationalising states. Leman found herself in a new socio-political context where nationalism became a way of aligning political and cultural units. The collapse of the imperial order displaced communities, increased suspicion towards cosmopolitan pasts, and pressured people to conform to newly minted national categories. This first section of the book can thus be read within the broader nationalist momentum sweeping Europe.  

This sets the stage for the second part when Leman, known as “the Albanian” in Greece, moves from the cosmopolitan milieu of Salonica to Tirana, Albania’s capital and the symbolic centre of the newly established nation-state. Considering that Leman had moved to Albania during the interwar period, Ypi often notes the confusing archival references to her grandmother as “the Greek”. This aptly depicts the bitterly ironic dynamic that, although borders promised stronger identity, they often delivered the opposite. Leman was Albanian in Greece, and Greek in Albania – a life lived under the “indignity” of never fully belonging. However, Leman settled in Albania and lived there throughout the turbulent events of the 20th century that culminated with Enver Hoxha’s Stalinist dictatorship. She married Asllan Ypi, had a son, Zafo, and endured nearly fifteen years before Asllan’s release from prison. Asllan (Ypi’s grandfather, whom she never met) was imprisoned due to his alleged contacts with foreigners and, by extension, disloyalty to the Albanian state. This would have immense consequences for Leman and her Zafo (Ypi’s father). 

Living and remembering under authoritarianism

The epicentre of the book, however, is neither the story of Ypi’s grandmother nor her family’s relationship to the broader socio-political events of the 20th century. Indignity’s power lies in the deft way it moves between what is factually true yet narratively trivial, and what is narratively powerful but not verifiably true. One of the book’s key contributions is a literary one: its focus on not only what, but how we remember.  

The book illuminates the ways in which this interacting ‘what’ and ‘how’ are made complicated for those attempting to preserve a sense of self, agency and moral integrity under the indignity of authoritarian brutality.

The “what” of memory gives us facts, but the “how” of memory governs interpretation, transmission, and moral weight. More than this, the book illuminates the ways in which this interacting “what” and “how” are made complicated for those attempting to preserve a sense of self, agency and moral integrity under the indignity of authoritarian brutality. History is thus never neutral data; it is “how” we remember that sustains communities, legitimises power, or enables resistance. 

The role and limits of the archive

The book’s second key contribution is methodological, relating to a revelation that she becomes aware of late on in her research. This incident casts doubt on the question of whether and under what conditions we trust an archive unreservedly. As Ypi puts it, “[f]acts can only be reliable if one trusts the mechanisms through which they are transmitted, if error is no longer possible” (335). 

It is precisely through this merging of fact and fiction that Indignity demonstrates how all history, however rigorously pursued, is ultimately a form of narrative.

This particular experience with the archival records led Ypi to become part of a broader scholarly and literary circle that offers a degree of hybridity between conventional history and memoir. Ypi’s methods thus are comparable to Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “critical fabulation” in Black Atlantic studies, or W. G. Sebald’s fragmentary essayistic style that accentuates the unreliable nature of memory. Ypi’s work is also comparable to the Nobel Prize winner, Svetlana Alexievich, whose books challenge systems of power while giving dignity to individual voices.  

The use of narrative invention can thus be seen as an ethical attempt to give voice to what is often left unsaid. This methodological choice, among others, exposes that Ypi, the author and academic, is also against a positivistic notion of history that has shaped the Western tradition. In its slippage between archive and imagination, Indignity too attempts to protect the dignity of those whose stories exist only in arbitrary historical records. It is precisely through this merging of fact and fiction that Indignity demonstrates how all history, however rigorously pursued, is ultimately a form of narrative.

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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The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman. Didier Eribon. Translated from the French by Michael Lucey. Allen Lane. 2025.

In 2018 Allen Lane published an English translation of Eribon’s memoir, Returning to Reims, first published in France in 2009. Reims is something like other French provincial towns in writers of autobiography: one to leave rather one for return. Spending time in Rouen in her early life as a lycée teacher Simone de Beauvoir spoke of it in The Prime of Life (1960), her second autobiographical work, with little fondness. Across decades Paris was the centre of intellectual life and individual freedom. 

Eribon followed this trajectory. He did not return with glee to Reims in his first autobiographical work. He returns with even less in his account of the old age of his mother, whose commitment to the city emerges in the first pages of The Life. We are plunged in the first few pages into meeting a mother who is old, frail, unable to care for herself and yet who retains a sense of her proper place in the universe: “Reims is where I live” she says (16). As it turns out, there is no place for her to live in Reims and the three Eribon brothers, with varying degrees of engagement, eventually find a place for her in a nursing home in a small town outside Reims called Fismes. 

What hangs over [the nursing home], as in many other homes across the world, is the sense that there is no choice but this; anyone old and fragile can no longer make choices about their material or social life

After setting the scene for the final years of his mother’s life Eribon returns to the discussion at the heart of this work: how can he relate to this fragile, elderly woman whose ideas are so very far from his? In the four sections of the book he raises questions about the origin of his mother’s political views, hugely alien to his own, discusses the ways in which the contemporary Global North encounters old age and how that engagement is determined by class.  

The lifelong absence of choice for the working class 

We first meet Eribon’s mother at the point when her increased vulnerability dictates entry into a home for the aged. Unsurprisingly, it is not a particularly pleasant place. What hangs over it, as in many other homes across the world, is the sense that there is no choice but this; anyone old and fragile can no longer make choices about their material or social life.  Anyone entering such a home loses most of their personal possessions and is plunged into a life amongst strangers. Yet as Eribon points out, in illustrating the impact of the term “working-class” in the title of the book, few working-class people ever have many choices about their lives in their more active and productive years. The layoff letter written to Eribon’s father when he was “let go” from the firm for which he had worked has both a note of finality and a suggestion that the employers “have no choice” (149). It is in these kinds of circumstances that Eribon’s parents struggled endlessly to put together a life for themselves and their children. In one of the saddest sentences of the book, Eribon reflects, “my mother was unhappy her whole life” (41). Eribon (and indeed his brothers) were able, with varying degrees of success, to “leave” Reims but for his parents the avenues of education, employment in larger cities and choices about personal life were simply not there. 

Isolation, dismissal and contempt for older people  

It is against this background of the endless material insecurity of his early life that Eribon turns, in sections three and four, to theoretical literature about old age: the work of, amongst others, Foucault, de Beauvoir and Norbert Elias. That literature offers diverse accounts of old age: from Elias’s account of the ways in which the modern world does not contemplate death and dying (The Loneliness of the Dying), to Foucault’s exhortation about the possible freedom of old age in his lectures on “The Hermeneutics of the Self” to de Beauvoir’s statement in the concluding pages of Old Age that “old age exposes the failure of our entire civilisation” (603). These accounts differ in various ways, but the consistent thread of concern is that of the contempt, isolation and dismissal for the elderly, coupled with the loss of agency which the physical impact of ageing may produce. Some of the freedoms which Foucault outlines may exist for those blessed with material and educational privilege. But for a person such as Eribon’s mother it brings none of these things. As he points out even those creatures of the future – the grandchildren – who are supposed to illuminate and enrich the lives of the elderly, only visit under duress. 

The “us” and “them” that age can create 

Eribon’s mother is in a situation similar to millions of elderly people worldwide. There is nothing exceptional in her case or in the mix of care and dismissal that she met. But for Eribon the issue is that he cannot understand, explain or come to terms with his mother’s racism and homophobia. It is a puzzle which is not only his. A rich vein in recent public debate has considered the question of why sections of the white working class have become, apparently, so attached to views of “others” that leave little space for toleration or accommodation. 

[Eribon] engages critically with the question of the politics of old age, when, he argues, it is difficult for people to situate themselves in terms of that essential ‘we’ of political action.

The instances of racism and homophobia which Eribon recounts in his mother’s behaviour are entirely domestic. This is not a person who takes to the streets or social media to air her views about non white immigrants to France or sexual identities outside conventional heterosexuality. When Eribon came out as gay he lost meaningful contact with his family; it is only after his father’s death that we see him engage with his mother. When he does so, he is a successful metropolitan person, meeting a person who had once been a political subject (and a supporter of the left and union activity), but is now a supporter of the right. It is at this point in the book, its final pages, that he engages critically with the question of the politics of old age, when, he argues, it is difficult for people to situate themselves in terms of that essential “we” of political action. In a somewhat muted criticism of Beauvoir on he points out that “She does not ask why those she calls the ‘elderly’ do not say ‘we’….she knows that they cannot do so” (230). 

The changes in the capitalist economy in the past decades, particularly those related to the decline in solidaristic forms of industry, removed a sense of solidarity, belonging and the collective for people employed in those contexts.

Beauvoir explains the absence of an active politics of old age in terms which Eribon describes as an economist: that capitalism has no interest in those whose labour is no longer valuable. But in rebutting this – and here he is surely developing an argument which has considerable force across multiple contexts – he argues for a new politics which has at its heart the concern with dependence and a sense of the collective. Beauvoir, as every reader of The Second Sex will know, posits a future for women of unfettered economic independence; a model of the lives of the majority of the world’s population which has little reality in lived experience. 

A need for the collective 

Important themes emerge from these final pages. One is the mistake of identifying the “old” as a special category, given that we are all, in different ways and different contexts, dependent at some, if not all, stages of our lives. A second, and very much a theme which relates to contemporary discussions about support for the populist right, is that many of these movements represent a “we” in terms that suggest solidarity and interdependence. Familiar representations of ourselves, in terms of race, class and gender inhabit the speech of Eribon’s mother: “we”, she says “are all fed up” (231). But crucial here is an implicit theme in Eribon’s book: that the changes in the capitalist economy in the past decades, particularly those related to the decline in solidaristic forms of industry, removed a sense of solidarity, belonging and the collective for people employed in those contexts. In these circumstances the energy and the wish for a collective sense has turned to a location of the collective in national and racial terms. In the concluding remarks of the book Eribon has to confront his sense of guilt at spending so little time with this mother. That theme in the book, and the recognition of the individual work of caring for the dependent, is written with great emotional honesty. Yet in this vivid account of the life of one human being we can also see the ways in which social changes manifest themselves in our personal lives. 

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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