The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s. Jason Burke. The Bodley Head. 2025.

Anna D’Alton (AD): In your book, The Revolutionists, you focus on a period of political violence between 1967 and ‘83, wherein a new transnational terrorism emerged. What did that involve, and what factors created it?

Jason Burke (JB): I look at a wave of violence in the 1970s which saw extremists using transnational terrorist violence as a weapon in a new way. There had been transnational attacks before, but this was quantitatively and qualitatively different: there were many more attacks involving a much wider range of both targets and perpetrators than ever before. These were designed to be spectacular or attention-grabbing in a way that struck me as new, too. A high-profile example I look at in the book is the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

One cause of this wave of violence is the emergence of new media technology that its perpetrators wanted to exploit to raise the profile of their various grievances. Another factor is the new strategic terrain of contemporary aviation and its infrastructure which enabled numerous airplane hijackings. And you also have a very important moment of global agitation and protest in the late 1960s in support of so-called revolutionary causes. It’s this that generates the political energy that underlies the violence of the ‘70s and a very internationalised vision of revolutionary activism.

The book is about individuals, and what brings a person to use (often lethal) violence, their motivations and the circumstances that might direct them towards that kind of activity

But at around the same time in the Middle East, you have the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War in 1967 and the broad changes geopolitically, socially and politically that followed it. Israel’s victory and its repercussions pushed Palestinian armed groups towards a new strategy. All of this comes together and generates the wave of transnational political violence that you see from the late ‘60s through to the mid ‘70s.

AD: Why do you think it’s worthwhile to understand not just the attacks, which encompass hijackings and bombings and other types of violence, but the people behind them and their motivations? I’m interested as well in your use of the term “revolutionists”.

JB: The term “revolutionist”, popularised in the 19th century, refers to people whose profession is effectively attempting to foment a revolution. Importantly, it is neither “revolutionaries” nor “terrorists”, both of which wouldn’t have been acceptable as a title of the book. To use either would be to take an immediate political stance, which I did not think would be helpful.

The book is about individuals, and what brings a person to use (often lethal) violence, their motivations and the circumstances that might direct them towards that kind of activity, and the personal consequences, positive and negative, that follow. More broadly, it’s about how political and religious movements looking to effect change generate extremist fringes that see violence as the only useful tactic, and how that can play out historically.

The characters are also fascinating in their own right. They’re complex individuals who act out of multiple motives. I in no way sympathise with them, but I have attempted to render them as human beings with the complexity we all have. I think that approach makes it much easier to understand what happened in specific events, and to understand the events of that period more broadly.

AD: You look at the solidarity that was built internationally across different causes, from the liberation of Palestine to Vietnam’s struggle against the US, and multiple anti-imperialist causes. Did they manage to build solidarity?

JB: There was plenty of rhetorical and aspirational solidarity. There was a strong sense of solidarity between Western European leftists and the Viet Cong, or earlier with the Algerians and their fight against the French, or later, with those fighting on the ground against the Apartheid regime in South Africa, and of course, with the Palestinians. European radicals genuinely believed that they could help bring about a global revolution that would end the twin scourges of imperialism and capitalism through their support of causes in the Global South.

One of the reasons I wrote the book was to consider the trajectories of the leftist radical movement alongside that of the Islamist movement in the same period.

In practical terms, it was difficult to instrumentalise that solidarity. You had organisations with divergent agendas, ways of working and cultural approaches, which led to misunderstandings, arguments and few examples of successful collaboration.

AD: In the second half of the book, you look at the rise of Islamic extremism, and you argue there was a failure in the revolutionary leftist movement, a vacuum that Islamism stepped into.

JB: One of the reasons I wrote the book was to consider the trajectories of the leftist radical movement alongside that of the Islamist movement in the same period. The ‘70s saw the resurgence of faith-based political ideologies across the Islamic world. The key moments for modern political Islamism and its extremist variants, I argue, are in the mid- to late 60s, which aligns with that moment of global revolutionary mobilisation, activism and protest.

By the mid-70s in the West, that wave of mobilisation had receded. Some people were repelled by some of the violence that it entailed, others had just moved on or redirected their political energies into other, narrower, identity-based causes such as environmentalism or the anti-nuclear movement. Also, in the West, you’d had a lot of reform. The movement of the late ‘60s had achieved many of its aims, at least in social and cultural terms. It had gained better reproductive rights for women, lowered voting ages, secured better funding for universities and successfully challenged post-war political hierarchies. There was much less reason to protest by the end of the decade.

Iran is back in the news these days. People forget that the Left in Iran was a real force for a long time before it was crushed by Iranian authorities.

But in the Middle East, there were no such gains. Any left-wing radicalism was ruthlessly repressed. The material circumstances that so many people wanted to change remained the same. So, there was inevitably a vacuum, and that meant a different revolutionary programme – with different ideas and vocabulary – that diverged from the Left in some areas. But it was still, at heart, a programme of transformation of society, culture and much else towards an imagined utopia.

Iran is back in the news these days. People forget that the Left in Iran was a real force for a long time before it was crushed by Iranian authorities. In the ‘70s, the main armed violent opposition groups that targeted the Shah’s regime were on the Left. By 1980, they were all in prison or exiled or dead, leaving a massive vacuum that greatly aided the radical clerics to take power.

AD: That example of Iran and Shah Khomeini coming to power, and many of the events you explore in the book are seismic moments, and it feels like we’re still seeing the effects of them play out today. You see it in counterterror policy and US relations with so many Arab countries.

JB: As I researched, I was astonished by how much of the politics we see today has its roots in this period in the ‘70s. You see it the current situation in Iran, and in Sunni jihadi activism – Bin Laden was a child of the 70s. He was 13 in 1970, his formative experiences were during that decade. You see it in the role of states like Syria in the region, or indeed Israel, and the rise of the Right there during that period.

The events of the ‘70s and early ‘80s fomented a new understanding of terrorism. Rejecting that which had been prevalent earlier in the decade which described terrorism as a criminal activity, effectively, with social and political and other root causes, this new framing which saw terrorism as a cancer that could be cut out. And it viewed terrorists as mad, bad or misled, but certainly not acting out of an authentic desire to change their and other people’s circumstances.

AD: It’s interesting to consider that reframing in light of the recent decision from the UK’s High Court to overturn the Government’s proscription (in 2025) of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.

Yes it is. The definition of terrorism and application of the noun “terrorists” – which I don’t use at any point in the book, deliberately – is hugely politicised. You very rapidly run out of fingers if you want to start counting governments, democratically elected or otherwise, that have described their enemies as terrorists.

There are technical definitions of terrorism, including under UK law. In the case of Palestine Action, it seems very difficult to argue that their actions, their activities meet the standard or broadly accepted definitions of terrorism. And it seems to me to be highly politicised and counterproductive to characterise them in that way.

Note: This interview gives the views of the person interviewed and the interviewer, not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Worlding Home: An Urban Ethnography of Peacekeeping Camps in Goma, DRC. Maren Larsen. Indiana University Press. 2025.

Peacekeeping camps as active processes

Looking behind the walls of a peacekeeping camp – breaking down the physical and conceptual barriers and tracing the many flows and leakages between the camp and the city – is profoundly revealing. In Worlding Home, Maren Larsen offers an intimate and sharply observed account of the embeddedness of United Nations’ peacekeeping camps within both the urban fabric of Goma and the wider global network of humanitarian and military intervention. Peacekeeping camps are the sites where the personnel of a UN mission live and work while stationed in a conflict zone. Focused on the military branch of UN peace operations, Larsen’s ethnography demonstrates that such camp is never a sealed island; rather, it is a porous, eventful, and continuously transforming – improved and “beautified” – space within the city.

The book elegantly weaves together three interconnected geographies: the peacekeeping camp itself, the peacekeepers’ place(s) of origin, and the city of Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, where peacekeepers are stationed as part of the UN mission. By moving between these sites, with a focus on the camp, Larsen shows how spatial practices, routine actions and moments, inside and outside the camp co-constitute an urbanism shaped by the logics of “camping”. The camp emerges not as static or exceptional, but as a multi-layered process: the camp keeps changing. Through fine-grained analysis, the book provides the reader with insights into how peacekeepers dwell, how they become embedded in local rhythms while maintaining deep connections to places elsewhere, and how their presence reshapes the urban life they are part of.

An interdisciplinary lens on peacekeeping 

Traditionally, peacekeeping has been the subject of political sciences and international relations, mostly focused on questions of effectiveness and driven by a security lens. Running parallel to this scholarship is a vibrant body of anthropological, sociological, and urban scholarship that interrogates humanitarianism, the international aid industry and infrastructure, and everyday practices of interveners. Within this interdisciplinary landscape, studies of camps – refugee and IDP camps, transit sites, or labour compounds, have been central in illuminating the spatial politics and materiality of encampment. Larsen draws from and contributes to this rich lineage. At the same time, Worlding Home builds upon a long-standing, rich body of research on Goma, a city shaped by decades of humanitarian presence, conflict, and displacement. The book, in line with prior literature, acknowledges Goma as both a humanitarian hub and an epicentre of emergencies that have generated successive layers of encampment, from colonial camps to the massive influx of refugees in the 1990s to the contemporary UN bases. 

Peacekeeping camps constitute active, evolving processes that blur boundaries between dwelling and mobility, as well as between ‘here’ and ‘there’

Mindful of this urban palimpsest of camping, Larsen situates the peacekeeping camp as part of a longer historical and spatial continuum in Goma. From a recent vantage point, she guides the reader through different moves, from outside the camp, to the camp’s fringes and through the gates, inside the camp, to everyday routines and practices, and beyond into global circuits of mobility of people, practices, flavours, and music. Through these movements, Larsen demonstrates that UN camps are neither isolated enclaves nor entirely exceptional spaces. Instead, building on scholarship that conceptualises camps as dynamic social formations, she argues that peacekeeping camps constitute active, evolving processes that blur boundaries between dwelling and mobility, as well as between “here” and “there.” 

A further strength of Worlding Home is its vivid portrayal of the interactions that produce hybrid forms of urbanity. Military peacekeepers in Goma (from places as far away as India, Bangladesh, South Africa, or Uruguay) and Congolese civilians (including children, contractors, or local friends and intimate partners) form both deep and fleeting connections. Larsen details the festivities, the importance of food and eating, the linguistic abilities of kids lingering around the camps (some learn to speak the language of the resident military contingent), and the routines of military culture, both inside the camp and their interaction with the world outside the camp. These scenes illustrate how camps function both as global nodes of UN intervention and as everyday domestic spaces. Indeed, “camping” as practice involves varied interactions that reshape socio-spatial relations, offering new understandings of home-making, global mobility, and urban development under conditions of humanitarian intervention. 

Dilemmas of peace operations 

The book also addresses some of the most pressing dilemmas facing contemporary peace operations: sustainability, blurred lines between humanitarian and military roles, civil-military tensions, and instances of abuse of power. Larsen engages these issues not abstractly but through grounded, often moving ethnographic vignettes. These moments remind the reader that peacekeeping is lived and experienced by individuals navigating complex moral terrains. 

The reader comes away understanding the peacekeepers’ camp as deeply entangled in the life of Goma: a space of global circulation, local negotiation, and everyday improvisation.

Larsen’s focus on the military branch of peace operations is justified and analytically productive, but this choice does narrow the aperture of inquiry. Civilian staff, local NGOs, and the city’s broader population play crucial roles in shaping the social and spatial dynamics of UN bases. Those actors live with chronic insecurity and multi-faceted urban violence. Urban dwellers’ perspectives and place-making in, and with, the camp(s) occasionally appear but are not explored with the same depth as those of uniformed peacekeepers. How, for example, do the many contractors, visitors, camps’ neighbours, and informal workers, shape the camp, and what is their share in “camping”? As a result, the portrayal of Goma sometimes leans more toward an ethnography of camps in a city rather than an ethnography of the city with camps, including its long-term urban, environmental, social, cultural, and economic consequences. Readers may find themselves wanting more sustained engagement with the urban residents whose daily lives intersect with, support, challenge, or adapt to the presence of peacekeeping infrastructures. 

Peacekeeping camps’ place in the world 

This desire for more in no way diminishes the book’s accomplishment. Worlding Home offers an invaluable perspective on what peacekeeping camps are and what they do in the world. It shows that the peacekeeping camp is not merely a site but a process – what Larsen aptly calls “eventful happenings” – embedded within urban space. The book illuminates these processes with nuance, empathy, and theoretical sophistication. 

In the end, the reader comes away understanding the peacekeepers’ camp as deeply entangled in the life of Goma: a space of global circulation, local negotiation, and everyday improvisation. Worlding Home stands as a perceptive and timely contribution to the study of peace operations in an urban context and the anthropology of encampment. It invites us to rethink what it means to make a home – however temporary – amid intervention, and what it means for a city to continually absorb, reshape, and respond to the demands of those who camp within it.

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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Theresa Squatrito will present on the book at an LSE Research Showcase on Tuesday 17 February, Can international courts judge without political constraint? Find details and register.

Judging under Constraint: The Politics of Deference by International Courts. Theresa Squatrito. Cambridge University Press. 2025.

Anna D’Alton (AD): Firstly, how many International Courts (ICs) are there, what sort of functions do they have, and how is it decided which countries are in the jurisdiction of a certain court? 

Theresa Squatrito (TS): There are currently 25 permanent ICs, spanning the globe. Some of them have a much smaller jurisdiction in terms of what states they cover, and some are near global in coverage. 

For all of them, a member state decides whether they’re part of the jurisdiction, and sometimes this is connected to membership of an international organisation. For example, the EU has a court attached to it, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and the choice to be included in its jurisdiction is a question of whether you’re a member of the EU. To take another example, the African Court of Human and People’s Rights (ACtHPR) is attached to the African Union (AU), but not all members of the AU (and so, not all countries on the continent of Africa), fall within the jurisdiction of the court, because states have to take an extra decision to opt in. So, it depends on the court, but there’s always a step at which a state chooses to become a member. 

AD: In the book you highlight that ICs differ from other international organisations in that they serve their functions through decisions only. How does this work? 

TS: It’s an important distinction. An international organisation like the UN has processes of making decisions, like through UN Security Council resolutions. But a lot of what the UN also does is service provision: there are UN agencies worldwide helping to provide food aid, crisis relief, technical assistance and so on. The World Bank, for example, take decisions on granting loans, but a big part of what it does is gather data. The World Bank gathers and publishes some of the best data we have on development. 

Courts are distinct because the only sort of activity they engage in decision making, bar some exceptions, like when international criminal tribunals conduct investigations or how some courts monitor the execution of their decisions.  

AD: You argue that the centrality of decision making for ICs warrants research into how courts come to decisions. You focus on judicial deference. What is deference? 

TS: Deference is an idea that isn’t confined to courts. You could have an executive defer to a legislature, or a legislature defer to an executive. Or your mother could defer to your father on a question (“go ask your father”). Deference is a process of accepting another person’s authority or position on a matter. In that example of the family, the mother abstains from making the decision and tells the child, I’m going to accept your father’s position on this. 

If an International Court defers, it either abstains from making a decision, and so accepts the position of the state’s national government, or it actively validates that state’s decision.  

That’s in essence what I’m looking at: whether or not the IC is deferring to the states on an exercise of authority they’ve engaged in. In other words, is the court abstaining from making a decision, or does it validate what the state has said? If an IC defers, it either abstains from making a decision, and so accepts the position of the state’s national government, or it actively validates that state’s decision.  

AD: You claim that the amount of “strategic space” an IC has influences how likely it is to defer. What is a court’s strategic space? 

TS: The strategic space is the range of possible decisions that the court could make that would be acceptable to the state. If the court steps outside that strategic space, then it’s taking a decision that the state will potentially object to, and perhaps try to override, or worse, punish the court for. A court’s strategic space can be broader or narrower, and that depends, I argue, on two main things. 

The first is how like-minded or divergent member states’ preferences are on a given issue. More divergence among member states means that those states will have a harder time overriding the court: if they view things very differently, it becomes difficult for them to agree on what that override would be. The second factor is how independent the court is or not: how vulnerable a court is to states restricting its authority, restricting its budget or trying to punish its judges. The more opportunities states have to do that, depending on the rules of the institution, the more vulnerable the court becomes, and that can limit its strategic space.

AD: What did you discover about tendencies to defer in your three case studies, the East African Court of Justice (EACJ), the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), and the ACtHPR? 

TS: I found that the broader the strategic space, the less likely a court is to defer. The range of decisions they can make is wider because that strategic space is more permissive. Within the law, there is always reasonable room for interpretation. Courts that have broader strategic space are more inclined towards interpretations and remedies that are more intrusive on state sovereignty. They may ask a state to provide compensation, to expunge a person’s criminal record, to reform a certain law, or they could find a state in violation of the law.

I was interested in what sorts of potential impacts a court being in the developing world has on its functioning

With the three case studies I examined, the EACJ has a narrower strategic space, so by the reasoning I’ve outlined, I thought it would be the most likely to defer. I looked at all the judgments from the court over about a 15-year period and found that this bore out: the EACJ is the most deferential of the three. On the opposite end, the ACtHPR has the broadest strategic space, and I found that it was the least deferential, meaning it was the most inclined towards finding states in violation of the law and telling them they must provide victims with some relief. 

AD: The three ICs you looked at are all in the Global South, and they are also newer courts. Why did you focus on these three, and how does the newness of a court figure in its decision making? 

TS: I took a few things into consideration when I was choosing them. One element was methodological: because I was interested in the influence of formal independence, I wanted each court to be different along that dimension. But I was also interested in courts in the Global South that are less studied. Those that have been studied the most by scholars are the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) the CJEU and the World Trade Organization’s Appellate Body (its dispute settlement mechanism) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

The courts I chose are newer, which is part of the reason they are less researched. I was interested in what sorts of potential impacts a court being in the developing world has on its functioning. Being in the Global South, and being newer institutions, means that people might have less access to the courts and there might be different relationships with, for example, the rule of law, compared to courts based in the Global North.  

AD: In our current moment of declining multilateralism and a recalibrating international order, what power do ICs have, and are there any trends you’re seeing across them? 

TS: ICs are a venue where states and private actors can go to seek answers to some major questions and problems. Sometimes this stems from a social pressure and public salience to bring an issue to the fore. To take some high-profile examples, South Africa has brought a case against Israel for alleged violations of the convention against genocide in Gaza before the ICJ, a case which has been supported by several other states. The ICJ and all the regional human rights courts have been asked to weigh in on issues around climate change, sparked in part by social mobilisation. And the CJEU is weighing in on the outsized power of Big Tech with the case of (Google’s parent company) found to be wrongfully pushing Google onto Android users in a way that violated fair competition. in a way that violated fair competition. 

Having these cases heard in ICs matters because these institutions carry a certain gravitas: we’re inclined to look on their authority and decisions as having a social power, and even hearing a case gives that case a real social legitimacy. For this reason, it’s important for us to understand how these courts arrive at their decisions on such key issues and what political factors affect the international judiciary.

Note: This interview gives the views of the person interviewed and the interviewer, not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Register for the upcoming LSE Research Showcase with Theresa Squatrito, Can international courts judge without political constraint?

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Gendered Peace through International Law. Louise Arimatsu and Christine Chinkin. Bloomsbury. 2024.

In discussion around international peace, there is a growing narrative that peace can no longer mean merely the absence of war, but must also include the promotion of equality and justice for all. Gendered Peace Through International Law by Louise Arimatsu and Christine Chinkin, both based at the Centre for Women Peace & Security at the London School of Economics and Political Science, provides a new angle on this discussion. The book aims to promote the rights of women as essential to international peacebuilding. 

Peace and gender within international law 

Arimatsu and Chinkin provide an alternate, gender-focused viewpoint on women’s involvement in international law and peace-making. Their framework builds upon a consensus amongst feminist scholars that changes within international law must be made to uphold the rights and safety of women. Gendered Peace considers gender within international law through a wide prism that includes gender studies, international relations and history. Uniquely, the book focuses solely on peace, rather than conflict. The exclusive focus on peace counters how international lawyers tend to conflate peace with conflict or frame it as the absence of war. Arimatsu and Chinkin challenge the idea of peace as negative space, and instead conceptualise a positive peace.  

Chinkin and Arimatsu complicate our understanding of what peace means […] peace to some is not peace to others, and that Western perspectives may conceal how women in other parts of the world have different ideals for peace.

The book opens with a conversation between Chinkin and Arimatsu rather than a traditional introduction, a choice which exemplifies the book’s disruptive nature. As a conversation opens up ideas instead of pinning them down, “gendered peace” is presented as an open, multifaced concept. Near the beginning, Chinkin explains it as a concept with “multiple facets… there will never be an end point or a definitive answer.” These facets include “other axes of oppression,” such as race, sexuality and militarisation, among others, though Chinkin asserts that “the book is primarily about women and women’s struggles for equality and peace within the structures of international law.” 

Western bias and online abuse hindering peace

Chinkin and Arimatsu complicate our understanding of what peace means, drawing on feminist scholarship to highlight that peace to some is not peace to others, and that Western perspectives may conceal how women in other parts of the world have different ideals for peace. For example, Magenya and Hussen highlight that “the internet has emerged as a site of conflict and violence for women and girls” and women in Africa are being disproportionately affected by online gender based violence. The book argues that the impunity of online violence against women “is fostering a rise in sexist and misogynistic behaviour offline,” encouraging the reader to challenge and broaden their potentially biased understanding of peace. 

Through a mix of personal reflections, essays and conversations the book emphasises education’s key role in uplifting the rights and voices of women with the aim of building a feminist peace. The authors call for a multifaceted and multidisciplinary approach to achieve this. They argue that global discourse, broadly, has failed to adequately include women in peace-making efforts. As an example, the authors criticise the 1968 World Conference on Human Rights, example, as an “essentialising stereotype”, labelling women as inherently “peace loving” which “fails to take account of the many roles women play in supporting and participating in conflict.” They also scrutinise the UN Decade for Women, a period beginning in 1976 that saw a series of meetings and conferences centring issues that impacted women such as pay equity, violence against women, landholding, and basic human rights. The authors look more favourably on these efforts than the 1968 conference, But though the Decade “concluded with significant statements and strategies for the advancement of women that resonate today,” the progress made was limited, and “peace slipped even further off the agenda” after the Fourth World Conference on Women a decade later.  

Barriers to, and strategies towards, a feminist peace 

Chapter 10 explores how misogyny and sexism have historically blocked gendered peace, as freedom from violence and discrimination is a form of peace sought by – but too often denied to – women. The essay builds upon Kate Manne’s claim that women experience misogyny “due to the enforcement and policing of patriarchal norms” that encourage men to feel entitled to have control over women and girls, perpetuating violence. The misogynistic nature of online violence against women and girls, discussed in the book, is touched upon by the United Nations but has seldom been considered within the broader scope of a feminist peace. Building upon the authors’ atypical methods for achieving peace, they label the current climate for online violence as a “pandemic fuelled by the commodification of misogyny and sexism,” implying that the patriarchal order of “Big Tech” has used equality and peace to its advantage to incite outrage and draw more people onto their platforms. Women are silenced and victimised in the digital age, the book claims, which constructs a hostile online space which hinders a feminist peace.  

Promoting the rights and voices of women, as well as conceptualising peace in its own right instead of as the absence of war, are essential to the global peacebuilding agenda.

The authors then move into discussions of the “strategic practice” employed to further a gendered peace. They highlight that “women have… engaged in multiple tactics, typically non-violent, in pursuing strategies for peace,” including creative projects, such as the Palestinian embroidery project which highlighted women’s life stories, including ones of suffering. However, as the authors concede in a nuanced section of the book, difficult questions for feminists remain about when, if ever, the use of force is justified when peaceful strategies come up short. Strategies such as increasing women’s visibility within the international legal sphere and “breaking the silence about sexual violence as a war crime and a crime against humanity,” are positive but neither are “directly relevant to securing peace”. Raising awareness of an issue does not create a plan for change: gendered discourse directed towards ending violence and promoting peace is essential, and we must “ask where peace is to be found in the Women Peace and Security agenda” and in international treaties.  

Overall, Gendered Peace reconceptualises peace beyond dominant framings that emphasise war and sideline gendered concerns in peacebuilding. By identifying barriers to peace and presenting strategies to overcome them, the authors have produced a thought-provoking picture of how equality can promote peace. It would have been beneficial if the authors had more clearly laid out their proposals for what a gendered peace may look like, or how they believe it could be achieved in practice. Despite this limitation, Gendered Peace provides a bias-challenging lens for scholars in law, international relations and gender studies researching issues with current peace-making scholarship and teaching. Readers will come away convinced that promoting the rights and voices of women, as well as conceptualising peace in its own right instead of as the absence of war, are essential to the global peacebuilding agenda.

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 Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention: An Introduction. Jonathan Parry. Routledge. 2025.

What warrants humanitarian intervention?

Jonathan Parry kicks off this slim but surprisingly demanding book with a scene most of us remember: Libya, March 2011, a burning tank column outside Misrata, kids cheering as French fighter jets roar overhead. For a moment, it feels simple: bad guys stopped, civilians rescued. But Parry doesn’t let that simplicity sit for long. He shifts the focus forward to when the municipal buildings lie in ruins and rival militias carve up the power vacuum. That jolt from adrenaline to uncertainty frames the moral knot he untangles across these 180 pages. When a government turns on its own people, outside force can seem not only justified, but necessary. But as Parry reminds us, rescue never arrives without its own blast radius, political fallout, and lingering after-effects. 

Parry outlines four thresholds for possible intervention: genocide, ethnic cleansing, systematic war crimes and large-scale repression. But he makes clear that size alone doesn’t settle the case.

Parry does most of that hard thinking in what feels like a crowded but calm intellectual workshop. He brings in familiar voices: Michael Walzer’s defence of community self-determination in Just and Unjust Wars (1977),  Fabre’s view that individuals, not states, carry the real moral weight in Cosmopolitan War (2012), and Alex Bellamy’s account of how the UN’s Responsibility to Protect (2013) took shape. But Parry doesn’t take sides. Instead, he lets them argue with one another. Walzer reminds us why outsiders should hesitate before intervening. Fabre objects when hesitation becomes an excuse for doing nothing, and Bellamy steps in when theory runs into the reality of institutions and international rules. Instead of handing over a finished theory, Parry provides a set of tools for examining this issue and leaves the space open for readers to grapple with the ideas themselves. 

The book’s structure mirrors how intervention often unfolds in real life, from the first sense of urgency to the complicated aftermath. Each chapter closes with questions prompting reflection rather than conclusions, inviting readers to sit with the arguments instead of reach for definitive answers. The opening chapters explore questions of sovereignty and self-determination   and the problem of consent, asking whether it matters if approval for intervention comes from governments, rebels or ordinary people. The heart of the book lies in chapters Four and Five, which look at what really counts as a just cause for intervention, and whether these efforts work in practice. After that, Parry takes up the alternatives in more detail from the risks of backing rebel groups (Chapter Six), the use of sanctions (Chapter Seven) and the often-overlooked strategies of providing aid and offering refuge (Chapter Eight).  In his concluding chapter, Parry then circles back to the bigger question of whether intervention is ever not just allowed but morally required. 

Sovereignty and its limits 

Parry’s discussion of sovereignty is where his teaching style really shows. He acknowledges that collective self-government has value, drawing on Anna Stilz’s argument that political membership gives people basic freedom to shape their choices. But for Parry, that value depends on how a state treats its people. When a regime turns on its citizens and commits mass violence, it is the regime, not the population that loses its claim to immunity. The idea feels intuitive, but Parry lays out clearly and convincingly why sovereignty only holds when it serves the interests of real people. His next chapter on consent follows the same thread. Genuine popular backing can give intervention legitimacy, but staged referendums or invitations from embattled juntas only add farce to tragedy. The Liberia 2003 case, where West African troops finally intervened after pleas from civilians in Monrovia, gives the argument something solid to hold onto and pulls it out of abstraction. 

Thresholds for intervention 

The most striking section comes in the middle of the book where Parry explores just cause, proportionality, and effectiveness. He outlines four thresholds for possible intervention: genocide, ethnic cleansing, systematic war crimes and large-scale repression. But he makes clear that size alone doesn’t settle the case; we must look at patterns, intentions, and what is likely to come next, he argues. The genocide in Bosnia (1992 to 1995) qualifies but shows how late action still leaves moral costs. Rwanda (1994) shows how speed, not just legal clarity, might have saved lives. Darfur (2003 to 2005) warns what happens when bold statements aren’t backed by capacity. These examples probe whether moral theory can stand up to what history throws at it. 

While quantitative data can guide us, it is limited, and no chart can account for the weight of making moral choices when lives are at stake.

Parry treats effectiveness not as something we judge after the action, but as something we must consider before it begins. Using case studies from Libya, Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, he explains that airstrikes carried out from a distance often lead to more civilian deaths than missions that also include on-the-ground peacekeeping and rebuilding efforts. But while quantitative data can guide us, it is limited, and no chart can account for the weight of making moral choices when lives are at stake. Helping rebel groups can shift the balance but may also make wars last longer. Parry uses examples such as Libya and the former Yugoslavia to show that outside support to rebel factions resulted in escalated violence and drawn-out wars, sometimes worsening conditions for civilians rather than ending them quickly. 

Sanctions might pressure governments, but they often hurt ordinary people the most. Sanctions on Iraq (1990s) led to devastating humanitarian consequences for civilians, contributing to malnutrition, lack of medicine, and increased mortality. Recent sanctions against regimes like Iran, North Korea, and Russia have demonstrated that leaders can bypass restrictions, but ordinary citizens pay the highest personal price in reduced living standards and access to essentials. As case studies from Bosnia and Syria show, safe zones and aid routes can save lives, but sometimes leave countries emptied of the people they need to recover. 

Centring human lives 

Parry’s writing succeeds in centring human lives throughout. He uses technical terms sparingly, and when a phrase like “reasonable prospect of success” does show up, it’s quickly grounded in real-life examples instead of abstract language. At times, there’s even a flicker of humour, though Parry is careful never to make light of the suffering. At one point, he compares states with unclear motives for intervention to gangsters who save someone to boost their own image The reflection questions at the end of the chapters push readers to examine the core ideas rather than just absorb them. 

The book does have certain key absences. African Union missions are mentioned only briefly, and private military contractors stay mostly outside the discussion. Those looking for detailed proposals like Security Council reform or international courts won’t find them here. Even something as practical as a note on casualty data is missing, and the growing link between climate disasters and state responsibility is touched on only lightly. But these omissions seem deliberate. The Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention doesn’t hand down verdicts, but opens space for careful moral argument to take shape. Philosophy and political theory students will find it a solid starting point, and researchers in ethics, international relations, or conflict studies will see how its questions stretch into deeper work. For policymakers, it outlines the moral stakes behind decisions usually framed in technical language. What lingers most is its insistence on patience and on balancing moral urgency with thoughtful comparison before action begins. I left the book with more questions than I expected: Who is accountable when humanitarian coalitions fail to deliver? What remains when the cameras leave? Parry offers no final answers, but he makes it harder to ignore the questions that matter.

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: Mosul, Iraq, March 2006. Source: Picryl.com

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How Africa Eats: Trade, Food Security and Climate Risks. Edited by David Luke. LSE Press. 2025.

Africa is facing a troubling rise in food insecurity, with more than one in five people unable to access sufficient nutritious food. In How Africa Eats: Trade, Food Security and Climate Risks, edited by David Luke, scholars and practitioners explain why, by focusing on the trade-related drivers of hunger on the continent. Compiling research undertaken by the African Trade Policy Programme at LSE’s Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa, the book’s ten chapters converge on a central message: without a sharp focus on trade policy, African countries will remain mired in food insecurity, and climate change will only magnify the challenge. 

The roots of Africa’s food insecurity  

The volume begins by tracing food insecurity in Africa to a deep-seated structural imbalance: an agricultural sector focused on exporting raw commodities whilst relying heavily on imports of consumable food. Today, 82 per cent of African countries’ basic food comes from outside the continent, and 16 African countries spend over 40 per cent of their export revenue on food imports. 

Every country’s domestic support allowance is tied to the value of its agricultural production. This automatically constrains African nations, whose production values are low compared to wealthy countries.

The authors argue that stagnating export volumes and values, compounded by the mounting pressures of climate change require a rapid and fundamental shift in the continent’s trade make-up. Through extensive data visualisations, they bring fresh urgency to the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis which contends that over time, the price of primary commodities declines relative to that of manufactured goods, due to differences in income elasticity of demand. The book’s early chapters establish the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis as an observable reality, underscoring the vulnerability of African economies locked into commodity-export dependence, and pointing to the urgent need for structural transformation.

The paradox of subsidies 

Subsequent chapters focus on trade flows and regulations within and outside the continent. A standout contribution is the chapter devoted to the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) legal framework. Authors Van der Ven and Luke frame their analysis in a profound yet under-appreciated paradox: “subsidies in countries that can afford them contribute to global food availability but disincentivise production in poorer countries through price suppression.” 

Against this backdrop, they unpack the rules and intricacies of the WTO Agreement on Agriculture and related mechanisms with clarity and precision, exposing an over-arching framework that systematically disadvantages all but a handful of countries. For instance, every country’s domestic support allowance is tied to the value of its agricultural production. This automatically constrains African nations, whose production values are low compared to wealthy countries. As a result, just four WTO members (the EU, Japan, USA, and Mexico) hold 88.4 per cent of the total allowances for trade-distorting agricultural subsidies known as the Final Bound Total Aggregate Measurement of Support (FBTAMS). 

A chapter on the expected impact of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) underlines the importance of dismantling non-tariff barriers, improving infrastructure and cross-border coordination

However, as the chapter goes on to explain, unfair rules are only part of the story. Many African countries struggle to make full use of the allowances and preferences they do have, such as those under the “Development Box” due to institutional, technical and financial constraints. Compounding this, reductions in global subsidies could drive up the cost of food imports for Africa, especially since any increase in local production would take time.  
 

How global trade rules disadvantage Africa

The story of global trade rules stifling Africa’s agricultural exports is re-told through the lens of bilateral trade in a separate chapter by Vinaye Dey Ancharaz. Ancharaz examines the continent’s evolving relationships with key partners, from the EU and the US, to rising players like Brazil, India, and China. We see how even preferential access schemes like the EU’s Everything But Arms concession and the US Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) fall short of expectations. While these arrangements offer duty-free access to African exporters, in practice they are undermined by exceptions and complex non-tariff barriers. For example, the EU applies temporary restrictions on imports of sugar, fruits, vegetables, poultry and meat, which are already aided by subsidies and tariff protection. These “special safeguard measures” are permissible under WTO rules. Non-tariff barriers, especially those related to food safety and hygiene are also major hurdles. To illustrate, the author provides the striking example of baby squash and courgettes from Zambia, which were considered for export following the enactment of AGOA in 2001, but received the green light more than seven years later. 

Conflicting policy interests and staple food vulnerability

The chapter also addresses recent developments on regulations to curb climate emissions and improve sustainability which risk morphing into a new form of trade protectionism. Using the EU’s Deforestation Regulation (2023) as a case in point, the author invites readers to consider whether climate goals can be pursued without deepening global trade inequities. In a similar vein, a chapter on the expected impact of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) underlines the importance of dismantling non-tariff barriers, improving infrastructure and cross-border coordination to realise the full benefits of an already largely liberalised continent. 

A chapter titled “What Africa Eats – the basic foods” by Olawale Ogunkola and Vinaye Dey Ancharaz provides valuable insights on the eight most widely consumed foods on the continent by calorie intake. The consumption, production, trade, and climate vulnerability profiles of each one is analysed in detail based on publicly available data from the Food And Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Yams turn out to be the only staple for which production keeps pace with consumption. For every other major food source, (cassava, maize, rice, wheat, poultry, meat, and fish) demand consistently outstrips production and yields are far below the global average. Based on this, the authors position improvements in productivity as core to Africa’s food security strategy, conceding that in some cases (meat for instance), this may compromise climate resilience. 

Alternative ways to secure quality food 

In focusing on caloric sufficiency however, the authors sideline nutritional quality. Hidden hunger is widespread across the continent and centring the analysis on calories leads to a framing of food security that prioritises quantity over quality. Considering the nutritional makeup of the African plate could open the door to more holistic policy responses. Investing in indigenous crops like millets, sorghum, and legumes, for example, offers a double dividend: these foods are nutrient-dense and well-suited to the continent’s changing climate. Unfortunately, the authors seem to dismiss such actions as too modest, arguing instead for shifts in trade policy to drive transformation.  

The volume provides a rich account of how trade flows and frameworks shape food insecurity across Africa.

Given the authors’ emphasis on import dependency, it is also surprising that no reference is made to food sovereignty movements which advocate for more local control over food systems to reduce reliance on volatile global markets, while also enhancing nutrition and livelihoods. Such perspectives are essential for the continent’s long-term resilience.

Overall, the volume provides a rich account of how trade flows and frameworks shape food insecurity across Africa. It offers pragmatic guidance to practitioners and policymakers interested in the continent’s food future. In a policy space peppered with difficult trade-offs, competing interests, and inertia, the authors succeed in identifying several actionable levers for reform. These include African countries advocating for a special safeguard mechanism to protect domestic producers from import surges, signing the WTO Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies, and participating in discussions on repurposing subsidies to improve environmental outcomes. How Africa Eats makes a key contribution to the scholarship. I hope it sparks deeper engagement with the structural drivers of food insecurity on the continent and generates the strategic policy responses it calls for.

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 Great Betrayal: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in the Middle East. Fawaz A. Gerges. Princeton University Press. 2025.

The Middle East is a global centre of economic and political gravity, a site of great struggles over power, land and resources involving actors from around the world. Across a century of state building, the Middle East has been beset by major crises, from post-war instability in Iraq to civil war in Syria, from the Arab Spring and its aftermath to the rise and fall of ISIS and Iran-Saudi rivalry over control of the region. The Arab-Israeli conflict has been most prevalent on the international stage since Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023 and Israel launched its response which has killed thousands of Palestinians and pushed many more to the brink of starvation. Beyond Gaza, war and conflict, sectarian violence, foreign intervention and elite capture have created miserable conditions for people throughout the Middle East, who have been systematically denied self-determination, representation of their voices, and just and effective government. Analysts, strategists and scholars of various disciplines have sought explanations for this pattern, and Fawaz A. Gerges, a prominent intellectual of Middle Eastern studies, takes his turn at the task in a new book. 

The post-war state structure that Arabs inherited was incapable of delivering intermediary services between states and their populations

At the centre of The Great Betrayal are several core questions: What explains the chronic instability in the Middle East? How do we make sense of the foreign interventions in the region’s internal affairs that perpetuate geo-political rivalries, rampant militarism and political authoritarianism? To find answers, Gerges delves deep into the grassroots perspectives of watershed moments in Middle Eastern history, from the first years of the colonial era through the present day. To make the story of the Middle East more accessible to non-specialists, the author adopts historical-sociology as an effective analytical framework, built around the interaction of three key forces within the context of prolonged conflicts. First, the repeated intervention by foreign powers. Second, domestic authoritarianism, and third, the agency of everyday people in the region. The first two mutually reinforcing forces help to explain why ordinary people suffer exclusion from representative government and basic human rights protections.

Colonial interference and anti-colonial responses 

According to Gerges, mainstream discussion of the Middle East has mainly focused on rulers and elite politics. This tendency has led to a distorted view of societal currents and makes us oblivious to the desires of ordinary people. Gerges argues that Western powers have repeatedly intervened in the region’s politics, driven by imperial ambitions and the desire for military and economic expansion. The West has presented Arab-Islamic world as “exotic, irrational, and inferior cultural other in need of a civilizing mission” (5). The repeated pattern of intense foreign intervention in the region’s internal affairs has had a deleterious impact on political, economic, and social affairs. The borders of some Middle Eastern states and their institutions were set up by white men in smoke-filled tea rooms in Western capitals, without ever intending to ease their grip – the “original sin” (the title of his first chapter) that has caused continuous instability. He argues that colonial projects such as the Sykes-Picot agreement and Balfour declaration disempowered the region to ensure its impotence and submissiveness to foreign powers.

Even after the decolonisation process, interventions have persisted, prolonging colonialism under different names and disguises thereby creating dependencies. The West’s repeated betrayal of the Arab world convinced many that sinister conspiracies are a constant feature of their politics (49). The post-war state structure that Arabs inherited was incapable of delivering intermediary services between states and their population. A lack of institutional capacity, along with emphasis on strengthening security institutions, allowed the colonial powers to pave the way for the advent of populist strongmen in regional politics. In the aftermath of this precarious period, two radical forces came to dominate Arab politics: nationalism and Islamism. The anti-colonial struggle fuelled these anti-hegemonic ideologies and, as a result, they gained more sheen in 1930s and 1940s. The authoritarianism at the heart of the imperial framework paved the way for the political authoritarianism of the post-independence Arab state system (65).  

The rise and fall of Arab nationalism 

The end of the colonial era was a moment of immense hope in the Middle East with the promise of establishing a new social contract between the people and their rulers. Taking the example of Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country, the author introduces the concept of foundational myth, which holds that the Arab people are a unified community entitled to a physical state. This provided post-independent states with a new raison d’etre and motivation to replace the colonialist agenda. But Arab nationalism is frequently regarded as a “misnomer”, since the idea of an Arab nation, as a single unified political entity could not accurately represent the many realities and historical experiences of the Arab world. Shared traits like language and culture have not been enough to forge a cohesive Arab nation as a single political entity. Perhaps the central weakness of Arab nationalism is its inconstant definition as a concept: Arab nationalists have defined nationalism according to the flow of the political tide. 

The book not only stimulates critical thinking but also bridges the gap between academic scholarship and real life means of effecting change, pointing to the Syrian people’s success in overthrowing the Assad regime in 2024, against all odds. 

Ultimately, Gamal Abdul Nasser lost power, Arab nationalism failed, and this failure undermined the Arab state system and deepened the legitimacy crisis. Gerges contends that territorial nationalism could have thrived had the ruling elite pursued a social contract with its citizens – a sort of open society based on rule of law. Efraim Karsh argues that the endemic instability in the Middle East stems from the failure of local political elites to internalise state nationalism combined with their continuous subscription to notions of imperialism. These notions have often been endorsed by western political and intellectual circles that have viewed them as beneficial to their own interests. 

A dynamic, sociological addition to the scholarship 

Much of the traditional, Western-centric, scholarship on the Middle East has focused primarily on state-centric and orientalist framework, reducing the Middle Eastern politics to deterministic understanding. However, Gerges’ analysis is more dynamic and sociologically grounded, offering readers a critically balanced perspective of the regional dynamics at play. The author’s methodology of interlinking historical events with contemporary socio-political dynamics and postcolonial critique deepens our understanding of the region. Gerges shows how popular agency and collective memory create changing forms of resistance and potential democratic transform, while demonstrating how the past ruptures and betrayals reverberate in contemporary politics. From Nasser’s promise of social justice to Anwar Sadat’s neoliberal turn, to Hosni Mubarak’s police state, Gerges weaves different threads together to form a coherent narrative of political struggle, oppression and enduring public resistance. As a whole, the book not only stimulates critical thinking but also bridges the gap between academic scholarship and real life means of effecting change, pointing to the Syrian people’s success in overthrowing the Assad regime in 2024, against all odds. 

According to the author, the political structure of the Middle East was engineered, and as such, is reversible. Today there is a multifaceted struggle in the region, and it is more than territorial. It is ideological, cultural and institutional, and is unfolding among a multitude of actors, including conservatives, Islamists, nationalists, and everyday citizens. There is an urgent need to envision a new Middle East, one that is free from colonial power structures and overly deterministic post-colonial understandings. If realised, it could act as a vital counternarrative to the ideologies of extremism and settler colonialism. Gerges pins his hopes for achieving it on the young Arab population who demand to be treated not as subjects, but as citizens.

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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They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence. Lauren Benton. Princeton University Press. 2024.

Violence under the guise of peace

With the advent of colonisation, European colonial powers launched sustained campaigns of violence against Indigenous communities across regions, including Latin America, the Pacific and South Asia. Despite the widespread killing, displacement, and extermination of native populations, these actions were disassociated from the category of war. Instead, they were framed as necessary interventions in the service of peace, order or civilizational advancement. This ideological framing served to obscure the reality of sustained military violence and normalise it within a legal and moral discourse of humanitarianism and order. Fast forward to the present: in 2025, following US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that the United States was not at war with Iran. Despite the violation of Iranian sovereignty and the targeting of critical infrastructure, the confrontation was carefully framed as a limited, defensive operation intended to avert a greater catastrophe. Israel also said it struck Iran in self-defence. This contemporary insistence on the non-warlike character of military intervention echoes the historical rhetoric of empire.  

At the core of Benton’s argument is the claim that imperial violence was frequently disavowed as war.

Lauren Benton’s thought-provoking new book reveals how contemporary international practices are haunted by imperial legacies that normalise violence under the guise of peace. She argues that to understand the “underlying logic of small wars in the present, we need to understand the rhythms and rationales of imperial violence in the half millennium before the twentieth century” (xiii, xiv). While previous scholarship on empires and wars has focused on themes such as frontier governmentality and the making of the modern state, empire and the treatment of indigenous sovereignty and property, and the “savage wars of peace” underpinning American power, Benton goes further. Drawing on an impressive array of case studies and legal-archival research, she traces the persistent entanglements between colonial forms of warfare and the modalities of contemporary global violence. Placing imperial wars at the centre of a new history of global order, she dismantles the conventional dichotomy between war and peace, revealing instead a continuity wherein violence, far from being exceptional or anomalous, has been routinely framed as peacekeeping, order-making, or protective intervention. 

Disavowing imperial violence as warfare 

At the core of Benton’s argument is the claim that imperial violence was frequently disavowed as war. Across early modern and modern imperial contexts, actors engaged in violent conquest while simultaneously denying that their actions constituted warfare. This disavowal was not merely rhetorical but operated through legal categories that framed such violence as lawful, moral, and necessary. Benton’s enquiry focuses on what she calls “imperial small wars”: limited, often undeclared, forms of violence such as raids, punitive expeditions and skirmishes. Far from being marginal or irregular, these operations constituted the primary grammar of imperial expansion. She identifies “serial small wars as components of conquest” (18) and, according to her, these small wars were not aberrations; they were structural to imperial rule, enabling forms of violence that were scalable, routinised, and legally codified. Central to the functioning of these small wars was a “global regime of plunder” that forms the first part of the book. Households as a legal entity were at the centre of this regime of plunder. These spaces served as both legal entities and sites of coercion, allowing the domestication of captives and the extension of state violence into intimate and quotidian domains. Captivity as a tool of imperial control was “represented as a more humane alternative to slaughter thereby reinforcing imperial claims to moral superiority” (64). 

Benton’s work compels a rethinking of foundational categories – peace, war, legality, protection – that underpin the modern international system.

The second part of the book focuses on how small, distant wars shaped European conduct to war. She introduces the concept of “armed peace” to describe the legal authorisation of continuous, small-scale violence in the service of imperial order. This regime “mapped clear pathways from lawful interventions with modest objectives to brutal campaigns of dispossession and extermination” (101). The expansion of naval patrols, frontier policing, and disciplinary expeditions was legally sanctioned under doctrines of self-defence, subject protection, and public order. These justifications were elastic, allowing rapid escalation from isolated clashes to campaigns of extermination – all without the formal declaration of war. Crucially, Benton situates law not as an external limit on violence but as its enabler. She dismantles the liberal teleology that casts international law as an evolving check on state power, arguing instead that law historically served to rationalise, legitimise, and structure imperial violence. 

Pre-emptive violence against perceived threats 

Another important contribution of the book is the notion of the “protection emergency”, which “created a legally permissive environment for imperial small wars” (182). These were moments, often manufactured or exaggerated, when imperial actors invoked imminent threats to justify extraordinary violence. Field commanders, operating with quasi-legal authority, were empowered to interpret events, identify enemies, and initiate military responses. Hence, the “navy and army officers were not just military commanders but also legal agents” (100). These protection emergencies institutionalised pre-emptive violence, enabling settler populations and military authorities to cast Indigenous resistance as rebellion and thereby exclude such actors from legal protections afforded to combatants. Benton’s archival case studies, from the British Pacific campaigns to settler violence in Australia and North America, effectively show how such legal fictions transformed small wars into genocidal undertakings under the pretence of lawful governance. 

Reappraising the purpose of international law 

In sum, Benton’s work compels a rethinking of foundational categories – peace, war, legality, protection – that underpin the modern international system. Far from being superseded, the logics of imperial small wars continue to shape contemporary military doctrine, legal reasoning, and political discourse. The book also offers a critique of the liberal narrative that portrays international law as a progressive constraint on violence, contending instead that law has historically served as both a mask and a mechanism for the exercise of imperial force. By throwing light on the continuities between imperial and modern violence, Benton shows that the fiction of peace continues to license the reality of war. The book is an essential read for anyone interested in the history of international law, global empires and international relations.

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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Nationalism: A World History. Eric Storm. Princeton University Press. 2025.

Eric Storm’s Nationalism: A World History arrives at a critical juncture, as nationalist sentiments increasingly dominate political and public discourses around the globe. From Brexit and rising populism in Europe to intensified nationalist rhetoric in China and India, nationalist ideologies have vigorously reclaimed their prominence in global politics. Storm’s comprehensive study thus proves exceptionally timely, addressing incisive questions: How are national identities historically constructed? What political, social, and cultural forces underpin nationalist movements? And why does nationalism continually undergo transformations across historical epochs? 

A global-historical study of nationalism

Storm adopts a distinctly global-historical approach, consciously diverging from traditional Eurocentric narratives and explicitly rejecting methodological nationalism as the tendency to interpret historical developments primarily within the isolated framework of nation-states (6). His insistence on a global perspective provides a substantial corrective, illuminating previously neglected connections and comparative insights. Engaging deeply with established debates in nationalism studies, Storm situates himself within a sophisticated theoretical dialogue. He aligns with primarily modernist theorists such as Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm, who closely associate nationalism with processes like industrialisation, mass education, and societal standardisation. Yet he enriches this viewpoint by thoughtfully integrating pre-modern identities and significantly expanding upon Benedict Anderson’s influential concept of “imagined communities”. By exploring nationalism’s global diffusion through interconnected transnational networks and detailed comparative case studies rather than isolated national contexts, Storm paints nationalism as a multifaceted, historically fluid, and globally pervasive phenomenon. This methodological shift enables Storm to uncover broader structural patterns and dynamics, greatly enhancing the analytical depth and explanatory power of his narrative. 

Through his vivid discussion of the American and French Revolutions, Storm highlights the profound ideological shift towards political-territorial identities centred on citizenship, popular sovereignty, and constitutionalism – ideals forming a blueprint for subsequent nationalist movements globally. 

Storm structures his narrative around four interconnected arguments, each underpinning essential aspects of his global-historical analysis. First, nationalism is neither innate nor inevitable; rather it is a socio-political construction emerging historically under specific conditions. Second, the evolution of nationalist identities is not linear but marked by discontinuities triggered by political upheavals and cultural transformations. Third, nationalism must be viewed through a global lens, acknowledging distinct regional expressions and trajectories that transcend European models. Fourth, nationalism historically undergoes profound transformations – from liberal and emancipatory beginnings through increasingly exclusionary and chauvinistic forms, culminating in contemporary identity-driven and neoliberal iterations.

The contested revolutionary origins of nationalism

Storm’s analytical discussion begins by thoughtfully addressing longstanding scholarly debates concerning nationalism’s early conceptions and revolutionary origins (Chapters One and Two, “Early Conceptions of Nationhood” and “The Birth of the Nation-State, 1775-1815”). Eloquently navigating between the modernist positions of scholars like Gellner and Hobsbawm and the primordialist arguments advanced by Anthony D. Smith and Caspar Hirschi, Storm charts an integrative path. He rejects simplistic assumptions about ethnic or cultural continuity linking medieval identities directly to modern nationalism, instead emphasising the situational, ambiguous nature of early conceptions of “natio” and “patria”. Detailed explorations across European contexts demonstrate that these early identities provided cultural, political and legal scaffolding that later nationalist discourses selectively adopted and transformed. Through his vivid discussion of the American and French Revolutions, Storm highlights the profound ideological shift towards political-territorial identities centred on citizenship, popular sovereignty, and constitutionalism – ideals forming a blueprint for subsequent nationalist movements globally. 

Building upon this political-institutional foundation, Storm emphasises nationalism’s cultural dimension, particularly prominent during the Romantic era analysed in Chapter Three. Here, nationalism emerges not merely as a political project but as an emotionally resonant cultural movement embedded deeply in everyday practices – language, education, literature, and commemorative rituals. Storm’s global comparative perspective demonstrates how romantic nationalism simultaneously emerged across diverse regions, from Europe to Latin America, underscoring nationalism’s cultural resonance and adaptability. This profound emotional and cultural embedding, Storm argues, significantly contributed to nationalism’s global diffusion and its lasting societal legitimacy. 

The ambivalences of nation-building

Chapters Four and Five (“Nation-Building, 1848-1885” and “Nationalist Radicalization, 1885-1914”) vividly illustrate the institutionalisation of nationalism and its inherent tensions. Storm reveals how national identities were deliberately crafted by political elites through compulsory education, military conscription, administrative reforms, and infrastructural modernisation. He captures the dual nature of nation-building – as both a progressive modernisation project and a source of exclusion and internal conflict. Drawing on meticulously selected case studies, including Germany, Italy, Japan, and various colonial empires, Storm shows how nationalist institutions simultaneously fostered unity and reinforced marginalisation. His analysis underscores nationalism’s intrinsic tension and ambivalence, its capacity to unify politically while creating profound internal divisions. 

Contemporary nationalism, despite – or precisely because of – neoliberal globalisation’s emphasis on open markets and transnational flows, has re-emerged powerfully through identity politics, populist mobilisation, and cultural anxieties.

Storm’s analysis reaches its climax in Chapter Six (“The Clash between Extremes, 1914-1945”), examining nationalist ideologies’ radicalisation amidst imperialist rivalries, social Darwinist ideologies, and revolutionary advances in mass communication. His global-historical framework effectively elucidates how nationalism turned into violent exclusionary doctrines exemplified by the World Wars. Storm situates these global conflicts within broader nationalist dynamics, revealing nationalism’s potency as an ideological instrument capable of mass mobilisation, racial exclusion, aggressive expansionism, and unprecedented violence and disruption. By integrating European experiences into a wider global narrative, Storm emphasises nationalism’s destructive capacity while illuminating broader historical patterns. 

In the final two chapters, Storm skilfully analyses nationalism’s persistent evolution in post-war contexts. Chapter Seven insightfully examines nationalism as a primary driver of modernisation, state-building, and decolonisation, particularly within newly independent postcolonial states like India, Indonesia, and various African nations. Storm adeptly demonstrates nationalism’s ideological flexibility, simultaneously underpinning progressive modernisation efforts while generating internal tensions along ethnic, regional, and social lines. Drawing from diverse global examples, Storm elucidates nationalism’s ambivalent role in shaping national identities amid postcolonial transformations. 

The rise of identity politics and populism

Chapter 8 brings Storm’s narrative into the contemporary era, critically assessing nationalism’s neoliberal adaptations since the 1980s. He argues persuasively that contemporary nationalism, despite – or precisely because of – neoliberal globalisation’s emphasis on open markets and transnational flows, has re-emerged powerfully through identity politics, populist mobilisation, and cultural anxieties. His global comparative perspective insightfully reveals how nationalist rhetoric, strategically deployed amidst economic uncertainty and perceived cultural threats, serves as a resource for political mobilisation, societal cohesion, and cultural resistance to globalisation. Thus, Storm clearly illustrates nationalism’s resilience, adaptability, and persistent appeal amidst rapidly changing global conditions. 

Nationalism: A World History represents a major scholarly contribution, providing nuanced insights into nationalism’s complex historical dynamics, transformations, and global resurgence. The book enriches current debates by synthesising modernist and global-historical approaches, offering valuable comparative analyses and challenging Eurocentric perspectives. Furthermore, it opens promising avenues for further research – particularly intersections of nationalism with gender, technological change, and environmental issues, areas still relatively unexplored in current scholarship. This sophisticated yet accessible study is highly recommended for scholars, students, and general readers interested in understanding nationalism’s enduring global resonance. Ultimately, Storm shows how nationalism functions simultaneously as a potent political ideology and a pervasive social and cultural force, continuously reshaping societies worldwide.

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

Main Image Credit: Illustration of The execution of Robespierre and his supporters on 28 July 1794 via Wikimedia Commons.

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The post A global history of nationalism first appeared on LSE Review of Books.

Exile Economics: What Happens if Globalisation Fails. Ben Chu. John Murray Press. 2025.

How do you define exile economics? Is it a new phenomenon? 

I was trying to find a phrase which encapsulated the currents in policymaking globally from the past 10 years in countries like the United States, China, India and to some extent countries in Europe, too. And there were three main currents. First, a denial of the reality of interdependence between nations. Second, the downgrading of the importance of multilateral collaboration and cooperation between nation states. And third, a striving for greater national economic self-sufficiency. 

I brought these together under one umbrella and called it exile economics, and thought, let’s try and kick the tyres of it as a concept. Importantly, exile economics isn’t the same as deglobalisation, which involves simply reversing globalisation. Exile economics instead purports to build something which is more progressive, to deliver more security and more prosperity. It aims to be something better than globalisation. The book looks at whether the promise of exile economics, and its exponents will actually deliver on this, or not. 

What factors or circumstances have caused this move towards exile economics? 

There’s been a degree of disenchantment with globalisation for quite a long time. In the US and Europe, it probably goes back to the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. But it really took off after the global financial crisis in 2008-9, where people felt vulnerable because of global interdependencies and interconnections and experienced stagnating or declining living standards. 

More recently, two big global shocks which have people feel vulnerable in a globalised economy: the pandemic in 2020, followed by the global energy crisis in 2022, which pushed up oil and gas prices and contributed to an inflationary shock in most of the world. The impact of those two events on supply chains made people feel globalisation has delivered insecurity rather than security, a cost-of-living shock rather than the prosperity that was promised. Now, there are problems with both of those interpretations, and I talk about them in the book. It’s that combination of events that have prompted people to consider whether there’s an alternative out there to the globalised economy we’ve had for the past 70-80 years.

You examine different commodities, how they’re produced and traded, how they’re impacted by global shocks, and nations’ desires for self-sufficiency on key goods. An example from the book is wheat, a staple food. How was its availability impacted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and how did nations respond to shortages? 

Ukraine is a huge wheat producer. Russia and Ukraine together provide most of the grain that countries in the Middle East and Africa import, for example, 90 per cent of Egypt’s wheat. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine meant those wheat supplies couldn’t get out of the Black Sea, and this put a rocket under global wheat prices. In the early stages of the war, it went up to about $450 a tonne for wheat, when before it had been only $300 a tonne, and many countries, fearing a global supply problem, panicked and started curbing their own wheat exports. Other countries put export controls on fertiliser as well. The lesson many countries drew from this is that it’s dangerous to be reliant on other countries for food imports, and there were calls in many countries for more self-sufficiency in food. Farmers strongly supported this idea too, because it’s obviously in their interest to get more subsidies and have more local production rather than competition from imports. 

When it was invaded by Russia in 2022, Ukraine couldn’t harvest the ample grain it produces – they had to rely on the World Food Programme to feed their own people. It shows that even if a nation produces all its own food, it could be hit by a shock.

But this a dangerously misleading lesson to draw about the about the supposed security provided by self-sufficiency in food. For a start, it’s simply not feasible for every country to do this. There’s a study from 2020 which shows that if you were to draw a hundred-kilometre circle around everyone in the planet, only 25 percent of the world’s population could feed themselves with staple foods produced within that boundary. On average, the circle would have to be 2,000 kilometres in radius to supply staple foods to everyone. That tells you that if you’re going to feed the planet, trade in food is essential. 

The second point is that Ukraine itself demonstrates why relying on domestic production does not guarantee a secure food supply. When it was invaded by Russia in 2022, Ukraine couldn’t harvest the ample grain it produces – they had to rely on the World Food Programme to feed their own people. It shows that even if a nation produces all its own food, it could be hit by a shock. It could therefore be beneficial to have imports coming in as an alternative. 

Turning to energy, another major fallout of Russia’s invasion, how did nations respond to the energy shocks? For example, what happened with policy on renewables, China’s push to invest in them and the effect of this on the global market? 

Global oil and gas prices went through the roof in 2022, and similar to the approach to food, many countries (especially in Europe) felt, we shouldn’t be reliant on other countries for our energy imports. In particular, we shouldn’t rely on an “enemy” country like Russia because we are at their mercy if they want to turn off the gas tap. This had a beneficial effect because it led to a big increase in investment in renewable energy, which a lot of politicians argued, reasonably, we have more control over. Plus, it dovetails well with the imperative of decarbonisation. 

There’s a very clear trade-off there between timely decarbonisation and self-sufficiency in renewable energy.

However, like with food, there is a false impression of self-sufficiency when it comes to renewables, because, of course, those renewable technologies often need to be imported from other countries like China, which is by far the world’s biggest supplier of solar panels. In theory, you could roll out solar energy production in Europe to make states there more self-sufficient, but it’s not realistic to have the entire supply chain in Europe given the amount of critical minerals which go into them, which are dispersed right across the planet. And crucially, China is the world’s biggest supplier of solar panels, it has such a head start in their production, and in other green technologies like electric vehicles, batteries and wind turbines. 

So, there’s a very clear trade-off there between timely decarbonisation and self-sufficiency. The other point is that self-sufficiency is going to be extremely expensive, and countries and populations will bear the cost of it. The energy shocks revealed a fragility in the public consensus in favour of decarbonisation because of the costs to households and businesses. Politicians have to be very careful about adding to that cost instead of choosing to import the technologies. 

Something you discuss in the book is that the political rhetoric – including phrases like “energy independence” and “food self-sufficiency” – makes things seem simple. But this masks the complexity of the entanglement between nations, which comes through in your case studies. Why do you think there is this gap between rhetoric and reality? 

One issue is that politicians and populations have quite an outdated view of trade. You often hear discussion of trade as if it’s all in finished goods. But 50 per cent of traded goods are intermediates, parts that go into making other goods which are sent across borders to be finished. To take the car industry as one example, when Donald Trump declared he would impose 25 per cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, the car industry pointed out that actually a single component can cross the borders between Mexico, Canada and the US about eight times in the assembly of a single vehicle. If you’re going to tax it at 25 per cent every time it enters the US, that will have a catastrophic impact on the supply chain and the final price of that vehicle. 

The more I studied the practicalities of exile economics, the clearer it became that it was a false promise. 

I think there’s a real challenge to put across the complexity of these networks. Many of us think, why can’t we just produce vital things like food, energy or medicines domestically – even if there’s a cost, surely it’s bearable and ultimately worth it for the security? The reality is a lot more complicated, and the trade-offs a lot greater than people realise. 

You ultimately conclude that exile economics won’t deliver on this promise of prosperity or security that politicians would have people believe. What do you think is the best alternative strategy for nations to protect themselves against shocks 

I should say that I started out the book with an open mind. I saw the downsides to globalisation and the fragilities in supply chains that the global shocks of 2020 and 2022 exposed. I, like many others, thought maybe there could be a case for, if not deglobalisation, perhaps a downgrading of the level of interconnection between countries. But the more I studied the practicalities of exile economics, the clearer it became that it was a false promise. 

That said, there are other ways for nations to make themselves more secure in a globalised economy without retreating behind fortresses and trade barriers. I came up with three recommendations. First, nations should map supply chains a lot more comprehensively than they have in the past. Simply knowing where the vulnerabilities are is crucial. We saw that in the pandemic, where it wasn’t clear previously A, how import-reliant countries were for things like masks and personal protective equipment (PPE) and B, where these items were coming from. If we’d known that, we would have been much better prepared for the shock. 

If countries redistribute their reliance over more countries, it will make them more secure and resilient to future shocks.

The second recommendation is stockpiling. To look again at the pandemic, if nations like the UK had had larger stocks of masks, vital medicines and PPE, they would have been much more secure in the crisis. Stockpiles went out of fashion in the globalised economy because they have a cost to them. But I think that is a cost worth paying, because it protects against crises. 

The third point is diversification. To look again at Egypt’s overreliance on Russia and Ukraine for their wheat before the invasion, there are other wheat producers like France, the US, Australia. If governments like Egypt had worked with the private sector to diversify their wheat sources, their food supplies wouldn’t have been under such catastrophic pressure in 2022. If countries redistribute their reliance over more countries, it will make them more secure and resilient to future shocks.

Each of these recommendations enables resilience while remaining open to the global economy. 

But protectionism is still very much around, as Donald Trump’s actions since taking up office for the second time have demonstrated. What way do you see things going in terms of nations’ trade policy, either towards or away from exile economics? 

What I’ve seen since Trump came to power and threatened to put on his extreme tariffs is not the retaliatory measures in response, or the general collapse in trade we thought might happen. It’s an encouraging sign that even though the US is trying to excise itself from the global economy, other countries are not following suit. As we’ve seen with the new trade deal between the UK and India, or between the European Union and Latin American, nations and trading blocs are saying, we still see the benefits of globalised trade, and we’re even going to deepen international ties. So, there are signs that the show will stay on the road. 

Another hopeful sign is that, even if the global goods trade doesn’t become more liberalised, there’s a strong chance that the exchange of data and services across borders will continue. It’s much more efficient to tap into the global labour supply through Global Capability Centres. These are essentially firms in countries like India and Bangladesh which provide digital back-office services to Western multinationals. Maybe that’s what will keep trade flowing, albeit in a slightly different form. 

I can’t tell you what the future will bring – I can only outline certain possibilities, which range from the catastrophic to the relatively hopeful.

Note: This interview 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.

Ben Chu will speak about the book at a public event at LSE on Wednesday 9 July, Exile economics – what happens when globalisation fails.

Image: Me dia on Shutterstock.

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The post Globalisation in crisis – Q&A with Ben Chu on Exile Economics first appeared on LSE Review of Books.