Judging. Ross Cranston. Oxford University Press. 2025.

Open justice and the art of judgecraft 

“Open justice” is a fundamental principle of our justice system. It captures the idea that justice should not only be done but should also be seen to be done. It is a vital element of the rule of law and a safeguard to democracy, and is about far more than simply ensuring the public can access court proceedings (though that is important). Open justice also demands a transparent justice system: the public should know what this system is doing, how it is doing it, and why.

If the UK Government’s controversial proposal to limit jury trials comes to pass, it will be even more important that we understand the influences and pressures on a judge, often either misunderstood or simply out of sight.

At the centre of the social imaginary surrounding the justice system is the judge: a powerful figure who presides over the courtroom with (hopefully) a firm but fair hand. And if the UK Government’s controversial proposal to limit jury trials comes to pass, it will be even more important that we understand the influences and pressures on a judge, which are often either misunderstood or simply out of sight. Court observation and reading judgments only take us so far. To really understand the judge, we need to examine the art of judgecraft.

In Judging, former judge of the Queen’s (now King’s) Bench Division Sir Ross Cranston helps us do just that. He defines judgecraft as, “the art of judging, the successful employment of practical skills associated with good judging […] It is judgecraft which ensures the success of the judge in court, the efficient processing of their caseload, the making of good decisions, and the advancement of their reputation” (195). There is a practical side to judgecraft, but there is also a value-laden side.

The judge’s three values

The first half of the book is dedicated to the consideration of three values – independence, impartiality, and integrity – that are fundamental to a judge’s work. While these values, “may have taken a ‘taken for granted’ quality in particular situations” (195), Cranston’s comparative approach reveals that the enactment of these values is contested territory.

For example, in his discussion of judicial integrity he contrasts the mandatory (for federal judges) codes of the United States with the Guide to Judicial Conduct in England and Wales. What might explain the disparity? Cranston points to the difference in cultural expectations, including the fact that state judges are elected in the United States, but appointed following recommendation of the Judicial Appointments Commission in the United Kingdom. This illustrates how a contingency of different social norms and practices shapes how a judge enacts what should be universal values. As he points out, the political nature of elections means that judges in the US have been shown to “tailor their judgments, especially in criminal sentencing and appeals, to improve their electoral prospects, adopting a harsher approach to criminal defendants” (326).

It is not just social factors, but also the judge that introduces contingency. In his chapter concerning impartiality, Cranston considers the test for apparent bias. When accused of bias and asked to recuse herself (ie step down from hearing a case), a judge must ask herself whether a “fair-minded and informed” observer would consider her to be biased. If yes, she must recuse herself; if not, she will continue to hear the case unless an appellate court overturns the decision. The problem is that this is a legal fiction – there is no such person. Moreover, this fictional character is supposed to not share the viewpoint of the judge but, at the same time, it is the judge who decides on a case-by-case basis “what the fair-minded and informed observer would think about any given situation” (80).

This fallibility of this mechanism was perfectly captured in a case in 2020. In what she thought was the privacy of her chambers, Mrs Justice Judd criticised a mother in family proceedings. Unknowingly, she was still connected (via her laptop) to a remote link through which all the parties could hear her. The judge declined to recuse herself; the Court of Appeal found that she ought to have done (though, if their reference to the decision being “finely balanced” means anything, the Court of Appeal may also have struggled with the question of bias). 

What if the judge being asked to recuse himself doesn’t recognise something that makes him biased against a party or their position?

All this feeds into concerns about unconscious bias. What if the judge being asked to recuse himself doesn’t recognise something that makes him biased against a party or their position? The problem is not unique to judges, but the stakes are higher given their responsibility. Cranston points to research in England which asked lawyers about racial bias from the bench. Respondents reported that “unconscious bias plays a major role in the justice system”. In one example from the Magistrates’ Court, a “black British youth of no previous convictions […] [was] convicted on obscure reasoning’ by ‘two old posh white ladies” (see page 13 of the report).

A jury will also have both conscious and unconscious bias. But it comprises 12 randomly selected people who must defend their judgement to each other. If jury trials are indeed reduced, we will be left with a system wherein one person need only persuade themselves.

The judge’s practice

Values are all well and good, but the public and parties don’t see them. What they do see is a judge’s management of a case, and in the second half of the book Cranston seeks to explain how a judge goes about this task. Here is where Cranston makes his most profound contribution to understanding the justice system and, thereby, open justice itself. He painstakingly considers how a good judge should, and a bad judge fails to, manage a case. From dealing with litigants-in-person in a way that’s fair to all parties (represented and unrepresented), to the delivery of ex-tempore (oral) judgments, Cranston sets out the concerns a judge needs to keep in mind.

In essence, Cranston explains what it is like to be a judge. This is the hidden side of the justice system – hidden not because of a conspiracy but because judges are often constrained in what they can say, and too busy to say what they are unconstrained from saying. Cranston is not the first judge to try to unveil the work of judging. Lord Bingham considered the position of judge as juror in chapter one of The Business of Judging (2000); Richard A. Posner conceived of the majority of American judges as legal pragmatists; and Her Honour Wendy Joseph KC has written two books about the work of a criminal judge. What makes Cranston’s contribution unique is that he combines the internal with the practical, and he can do so effectively because, being retired, he is unconstrained by the usual limits on a judge’s speech.

Taking a deep dive into the art of judgecraft, Cranston reveals the true face of the judge: a human being like anybody els

Indeed, the constraints on a judge’s speech are stark. Cranston points to two examples: one from the United States, where a judge’s ruling was overturned on appeal in part because he had discussed the case with reporters, and one from South Africa, where Chief Justice Mogoeng “expressed a view taken to be contrary to the government’s official policy on the Israel-Palestine conflict” (136). In England and Wales, judges are not strictly bound by silence, but the guidance is clear that they must keep their silence on a wide range of matters. As a very recent case shows, even the “liking” of a LinkedIn post may be enough to spark allegations of misconduct.

In taking a deep dive into the art of judgecraft, Cranston reveals the true face of the judge: a human being like anybody else. Far from being “enemies of the people”, they are the people. It’s easy to forget this, in part because so much of a judge’s work and internal life is invisible. By placing this in public view, Cranston has opened up the justice system. Whether we like what we see is for us to decide.

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

Read an interview with Ross Cranston from the January 2026 edition of LSE Research for the World magazine, What makes a good judge – and why it matters now.

Main image: Stained glass Roundel with Justice (ca.1510), artist unknown. Open access courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Cloisters Collection, 1983.

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Nomadic Indigenous Peoples and the Law: Self-Determination, Land Rights and Gender Justice in India. Indrani Sigamany. Routledge. 2026.

Law and historical injustice

Considering the layered history of development-induced displacement in India from the colonial times to today, one can situate Indigenous groups (Adivasis) firmly on the other side of development. Although people belong to tribe now comprise less than eight per cent of the population, they make up 40 to 50 per cent of the communities who are displaced. Among these are mobile and nomadic indigenous communities who are more vulnerable, as their mobility patterns are at odds with the governmentality of the state. Conservation policies (like the Forest Act of 1927 and the Forest Conservation Act of 1980) are most often at odds with the rights of persons inhabiting these forests, and other factors come into play within tribal groups, such as gender.

The book departs from other works that centre formal legal recognition by focusing on mobile and nomadic communities, who are often overlooked.

It is these nuances that Indrani Sigamany’s book Nomadic Indigenous Peoples and the Law try to unravel. Her work is situated between three main scholarly conversations: first, global Indigenous land rights and law (see Anghie, 2023; Mutua and Anghie, 2000); forest law and Adivasi dispossession in India (see Gadgil and Guha, 1992; Galanter, 1968); and feminist political ecology (see Agarwal, 1992; Xaxa, 2004). The book departs from other works that centre formal legal recognition by focusing on mobile and nomadic communities, who are often overlooked. Sigamany employs a critical theory approach and an Indigenous-positionality approach, with a deep engagement with the Forest Rights Act (FRA) 2006. The book argues that advancing substantive rights is crucial, but access to justice is mediated by other factors like administrative injustice.  

Chapter one undertakes an evolution of forest-based legislation from colonial to post independence times focusing on how these acts transformed common forest lands into state property and criminalised shifting cultivation practices. These legislative actions have had a devastating impact on indigenous communities. Sigamany points to the inconsistency of, and contradiction between, the growing international legal instruments on Indigenous rights and land laws (for example, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People 2007), and the national experience of tribal and indigenous communities (54). The author argues that although the FRA was enacted to undo the “historical injustice,” its implementation is fraught with administrative barriers, legal incompatibilities, and political tensions, which ultimately limit the transformative potential of the act. Thus, she questions whether the promise of justice is being realised through FRA, and whether administrative justice delivers for indigenous communities. Chapter one traces the historical trajectory of forest-based laws, and the proceeding chapters probe how these manifest in the experiences of the mobile communities. 

Is all land god’s land? 

Mobile indigenous peoples, who are usually pastoralists move with their herds through specific grazing corridors, and these corridors may not agree with the boundaries of the nation-state. Maldhari herders of Mera district, Gujarat (“Mal” means livestock and “Dhari” means owner) migrated through Afghanistan in the past, but after independence, they were limited to the borders of India and thus, their usufruct rights (the right to use and enjoy communal lands for the grazing of the herds) shrank. Being nomadic, they do not own any land; they have a saying that “all land is god’s land”, rejecting ideas of individual property ownership.  

Maldharis conventionally had a communal way of living. But these traditional practices were nearly eliminated with the coming of the dairy development initiative, the White Revolution in 1970. Their grazing lands also shrank due to sale of gauchar (pastoral) lands by the government to the private individuals and industries and violations by private individuals. All these losses of lands also had a gendered consequence, as it increased the workload of Maldhari women. For example, women now have the new task to gather fodder in addition to cooking and laundry. Women also lost the control of marketing the milk produce because of the encroaching dairy cooperative, thus losing their economic independence. Sigamany then looks at the Dhangar pastoralists of Ahmednagar, Maharashtra and illuminates how the economic foundations of their pastoral life were altered because of erosion of gauchar lands integration into capitalist markets.  

Traditional gairan (grazing fields) were re-allocated to private individuals and industries by the government, giving meagre compensation to those who were displaced.

Traditional gairan (grazing fields) were re-allocated to private individuals and industries by the government, giving meagre compensation to those who were displaced. The Government also declared their grazing field an Indian conservation area. These case studies expose India’s neoliberal capitalist system, in which the needs of the economic elite supersede those of tribal communities left marginalised and unprotected by the state (84). Only some take a legal route to assert their land rights, with many barriers to accessing the required knowledge and resources. Maldharis favoured political action, but Dhangars were introduced to the necessary legislation by an NGO (85), and the book reveals the key role of NGO support in seeking redress.  

Nomadic women and struggles for self-determination

Chapter three problematises the gender within Indigenous communities, arguing that tribal women face double discrimination of being tribal and female within an oppressive patriarchal culture. Whenever there is a threat to forest-based livelihood and loss of lands, it is experienced more acutely by women, as their productive and reproductive roles are closely interlinked with forest lands. Based on the case studies of Raika camel herders and settled Adivasi Forest community of Bhasla of southern Rajasthan (87), where active struggles for their lands were led by women, Sigamany unpacks the dichotomy of dual representation of women as victims and of women in control of their lives.

Chapter four attempts to broaden the frame by bringing in self-determination of tribal communities. By taking the examples of people who make a living from producing tendu patta (a type of cigarette) and their struggle against displacement, Sigamany shows how legislation is used to access justice. She showcases, how through NGO support and mobilisation, communities tried and succeeded to gain control over the tendu trade and transitioned from labourers to owners via a cooperative model. Similarly, in Amba village, communities were threatened with displacement when a survey order was passed which could change the status of and prohibit them from inhabiting it. The process became important as Gram Sabha (the general governing body of Gram Panchayat, a basic governing institution in Indian villages) participation was undermined and free prior and informed consent (FPIC) was not taken. The author terms this an example of “administrative injustice”. The lack of commitment by the administration has harmed forest communities and has ultimately complicated the use of legal mechanisms for forest rights (137). 

Can rights-based frameworks coexist with market-led growth?

Sigamany’s book is an excellent critical reflection on the debates surrounding mobile indigenous peoples and their land rights, illuminating the contested nature of justice and how it is negotiated at ground level, either politically or legally. However, there are some areas which merit reflection. For example, can rights-based frameworks coexist with market-led growth? There are also questions that arise from the tensions between collective rights of the indigenous communities and individuality of women. For example, while collective land titles are seen as an emancipatory response, they can also reproduce internal and gendered hierarchies regarding participation in decision making and control over resources. 

Nevertheless, her scholarship stimulates us to broaden our horizon regarding access to justice via rights-based frameworks and most importantly, it rejects the binary framing of laws as being either futile or emancipatory. As she argues, substantive rights like FRA are a welcome tool to secure legal redress for land violations, but it must be strengthened with other factors like administrative justice. This book will appeal to scholars and students of gender studies, human rights law and Indigenous studies, and it invites further research on the intersection of justice, mobility, and conservation governance.

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: PradeepGaurs on Shutterstock.

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The Women’s Library is the oldest and largest library in Britain devoted to the history of women’s campaigning and activism. It was officially opened in 1926 as the Library of the London Society for Women’s Service and was renamed the Fawcett Library in 1957 in memory of Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and The Women’s Library in 2002. It moved to LSE in 2013 and has remained there since.

Throughout its history, encompassing different names and locations, the Library has remained faithful to its original aims: to preserve a history of the struggle for women’s suffrage and to provide access to materials that can be used by contemporary women’s rights campaigners. It contains an array of personal and organisational archives, books, journals, pamphlets, zines, audio-visual, objects, textiles and visual materials relating to campaigning and activism from the late 19th century onwards.

It is striking how much the development of the library depended upon the long-term work of determined women

To mark its 100^th anniversary, a new exhibition at LSE explores its collections from the viewpoint of researchers and their current engagement with the materials, and celebrates the figures who created, maintained and expanded the Library in its early years. It is striking how much the development of the library depended upon the long-term work of determined women: the first official librarian was Lahore-born Vera Douie who managed the Library for over 40 years.

You can listen online to an oral history of her memories about the library produced in 1975 as part of a suffrage history interviews project. Below is a reading list of books to accompany the exhibition, shedding light on the powerful history of the Library and the women behind it.

Enterprising Women: The Garretts and their circle. Elizabeth Crawford. Francis Boutle Publishers. 2002.

Elizabeth Crawford’s Enterprising Women sheds light on the networks of women who fought for the vote and, after winning it, continued to work after with campaigning organisations such as those preserved in the Library. The book focuses on the women of the Garrett family, providing a fascinating account of how members including Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Emily Davies made pioneering achievements for women in such diverse fields as education, medicine and interior design.

Turning the Tide: The life of Lady Rhondda. Angela V. John. Parthian. 2013.

The exhibition celebrates some of the many campaigning organisations who contributed to improving the lives of women. These include the work of the Six Point Group founded by Lady Rhondda in 1921 to press for changes in the law of the United Kingdom in six areas: improving legislation on child assault;  legal rights for widowed mothers; legal rights for unmarried mothers; equal rights of guardianship for married parents; equal pay for teachers and equal opportunities for men and women in the civil service.

Angela V. John’s fascinating biography of Lady Rhondda, Turning the Tide, reveals that she was the director of over 30 companies and the first woman president of the Institute of Directors in the 1920s. She also founded Time and Tide magazine, an influential, all-female produced publication which played a key role in covering politics and the arts in the interwar period.

Housewives and Citizens: Domesticity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1928-64. Caitriona Beaumont. Manchester University Press. 2013.

Many of the campaigning organisations archived in the Women’s Library were small grassroots groups run by dedicated volunteers, often from their own homes. Caitriona Beaumont’s Housewives and Citizens is an excellent insight for anyone interested in these groups. It focuses on six organisations in the period 1928-64: the Mothers’ Union, the Catholic Women’s League, the National Council of Women, the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (whose records are held by LSE) and the National Union of Townswomen’s Guild.

Many of these published journals which included calendars of events and articles on campaigns, which are rich sources of information on women’s local, regional and national activism. The LSE Digital Library has recently added the Townswoman, a journal published by the Townswomen’s Guild.

A Bookshop of One’s Own: How a Group of Women Set Out to Change the World. Jane Cholmeley. Mudlark. 2024.

Feminist book publishing is a key theme in the exhibition, (including the work of the Sheba Press which became a pioneering publisher of Black women. A Bookshop of One’s Own is a riveting account of the women who set up and ran the famous Silver Moon bookshop on Charing Cross Road, written by one of its co-founders, Jane Cholmeley. The bookshop championed women’s and feminist writing, like that of Sheba. Watch a YouTube video of or read a Q&A with the author from 2024 detailing the trials and tribulations and the grit and optimism required to open a bookshop in 1980s London despite a lack of business experience and funding!).

For more recent accounts of journal publishing by feminists. I would also recommend the Liberating Histories website which provides detailed timelines, research bibliographies and teachers notes of iconic and recent feminist magazines ranging from Spare Rib to Red Rag.

Chrystal Macmillan, 1872-1937: Campaigner for Equality, Justice and Peace. Helen Kay and Rose Pipes. Edinburgh University Press. 2024.

The exhibition also emphasises the long history of feminist internationalism, as many organisations engaged in international campaigning and forged alliances with their peers overseas. This historical biography by Helen Kay and Rose Pipes celebrates the achievements of Chrystal Macmillan, a remarkable woman who was one of the founders of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She was also an organiser of the 1915 International Women’s Congress at The Hague, which urged political leaders to use mediation to stop World War One.

Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel. Rachel Holmes. Bloomsbury. 2020.

Did you know that suffrage campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst was also politically involved in Ethiopia? In 1935 she campaigned against the Italian invasion of the country and in the 1950s moved there permanently, working ceaselessly to improve social conditions and writing a detailed history of the country as well as founding a newspaper.

This was one of the great surprises I discovered from a recent biography of Pankhurst by Rachel Holmes which offers a highly readable insight into the achievements of her long, impactful life, including those that have been less examined. Watch a video of the author speaking about the book at LSE library.

Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles. Imaobong Umoren. University of California Press. 2018.

An LSE author who has also emphasised the long history and importance of transnational feminist connections is Imaobong Umoren, based in the Department of International History. Her book, Race Women Internationalists, which won the 2019 Women’s History Network Book Prize, focuses on the lives of American Eslanda Robeson, Martinican Paulette Nardal, and Jamaican Una Marson, exploring how they created and used global networks to campaign against colonialism, fascism, sexism, and racism.in the 20^th Century.

I hope these recommendations have inspired you to explore the exhibition and Women’s Library itself. During March, look out for links I will be posting on Instagram of other recommended resources available via LSE Library, including databases of articles and primary resources. LSE staff and students can book one-to-one advice sessions for further help researching women’s history resources.

Note: This article 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: National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies procession with Frances Balfour, Millicent Fawcett, Emily Davies and Sophie Bryant, 13 June 1908. Credit: The Women’s Library collection by LSE Library on Flickr.

The LSE exhibition The Women’s Library at 100: celebrating a century of collections, curated by Patricia Owens, Kelly Bosomworth, Grace Heaton, Lyndsey Jenkins, Claire Cunnington, Caroline Derry, Nazmia Jamal, Angèle David-Guillou, and Gillian Murphy, runs from 2 March to 30 September 2026.

A launch event for the exhibition will take place next Thursday 12 March from 5 to 8 pm at LSE – find details and register.

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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.

Main image: Ben Houdijk on Shutterstock.

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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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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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Preventing Violence: The Past, Present and Future of the Public Health Approach. Keir Irwin-Rogers, Luke Billingham, Alistair Fraser, Fern Gillon, Susan McVie, and Tim Newburn. Policy Press. 2025. 

In 2018, London briefly overtook New York in monthly homicide rates. The media storm forced a significant shift in British criminal justice policy. After years of “tough on crime” rhetoric, the Home Office abruptly changed tack, announcing that serious violence would no longer be treated solely as a police matter but as a “public health” crisis. It was a promise to move away from reactive punishment and towards prevention, treating violence more like a contagion to be cured than as a sin to be punished. But five years on, has the reality matched the rhetoric? 

In Preventing Violence: The Past, Present and Future of the Public Health Approach, a team of leading criminologists offers the first comprehensive audit of this experiment. Drawing on the massive “Public Health, Youth and Violence Reduction” (PHYVR) project, the authors convey a verdict that is both empathetic to the practitioners involved and witheringly critical of the political context in which they operate. They argue that while the language of public health has been successfully institutionalised, its implementation remains fragile, contradictory, and often hobbled by a refusal to address the deep structural inequalities that fuel this violence. 

Adapting the “Scottish Miracle” of violence prevention

The book begins by framing its analysis within the context of the 2024 UK General Election and the Labour Party’s pledge to halve serious violent crime, leading to an analysis of the historical influence of Scotland. The authors deconstruct the so-called “Scottish Miracle,” a term coined by the media to describe a period between 2006 and 2015 during which Scotland experienced a staggering 48 per cent drop in violent crime and a 38 percent decline in murders. This success story became the blueprint for leaders in England and Wales, such as Sadiq Khan and Theresa May, who formally adopted the public health approach in 2018 and 2019. 

Scottish practitioners treated violence as a symptom of a failure in well-being rather than just a criminal justice failure. In England, however, VRUs were grafted onto a landscape scarred by a decade of austerity, where the social infrastructure required to prevent violence, such as youth clubs, mental health services, and secure housing, had been systematically dismantled.

But the authors argue that the transmission of the “Glasgow model” south of the border was imperfect. While England replicated the administrative machinery by establishing 20 regional Violence Reduction Units (VRUs), it largely failed to import the underlying social philosophy. In Scotland, the work was embedded in a deep-rooted “penal-welfarist” tradition that focused on the “needs” of children rather than their “deeds.” This culture helped the Scottish practitioners to treat violence as a symptom of a failure in well-being rather than just a criminal justice failure. In England, however, VRUs were grafted onto a landscape scarred by a decade of austerity, where the social infrastructure required to prevent violence, such as youth clubs, mental health services, and secure housing, had been systematically dismantled. Using the “Four Is” framework, the book lets us in on an imbalance; while the UK government has invested in interventions and institutional coordination, it has also neglected the macro-level inequalities that fuel violence, and this narrow focus means that, instead of addressing the root causes of the crisis, policymakers are often left perpetually managing its symptoms. As the authors remark, you cannot import a policy mechanism without also repairing the social safety net that supports it. 

Feeding the data-hungry beast 

The most compelling section of the book (Part II) takes us inside the newly formed VRUs. By conducting candid interviews with directors, the authors, in fact, identify the friction between the long-term logic of public health and the short-term spasms of politics. A public health approach is indeed generational work; it involves changing norms and healing trauma. Yet, VRU directors described being trapped on a treadmill of short-term funding cycles, often pushed to show immediate success to secure next year’s budget. One director vividly described this as the need to “feed the data-hungry beast,” noting that the demand for quarterly reductions in knife crime inevitably pushes units away from “upstream” prevention (tackling root causes) and back towards reactive, “downstream” interventions. 

This short-termism has led to what the authors call “interventionitis.” This is the tendency of policymakers to believe that deep-seated social problems can be solved by commissioning a patchwork of specific, time-limited “interventions,” a mentoring scheme here, a sports club there, rather than addressing the structural conditions of young people’s lives. 

The cycle of punitive prevention

The book’s most damning critique is its identification of “punitive prevention.” The authors focus on a schizophrenic policy landscape where the government extends a helping hand with one arm while tightening the handcuffs with the other. And at the exact moment the government was advocating for a trauma-informed public health approach, it was, at the same time, expanding coercive police powers, such as stop-and-search, and introducing restrictive measures like Knife Crime Prevention Orders (KCPOs). The authors argue convincingly that this duality undermines the trust necessary for public health work. How can a youth worker effectively engage a young person in a “supportive” intervention if that same person was aggressively stopped and searched on their way to the meeting?  

The “Four ‘I’s” plan for preventing violence 

Ideally, a critique should offer a solution, and Preventing Violence does that with its “Four ‘I’s” framework, where the authors argue that a genuine public health strategy must operate across four levels. First, inequalities. Addressing the macro-level disparities in wealth and opportunity. The authors are unapologetic that violence is a symptom of poverty, noting that destitution in the UK doubled between 2017 and 2022. Second is institutions. They call for rebuilding the crumbling services, schools, social care, and housing that should be supporting young people rather than excluding them. Third, interventions. The authors stress the importance of delivering high-quality, proper evidence-based programs, with the understanding they are only one part of the puzzle. Fourth is interactions. Focusing on the quality of relationships and by drawing on the concept of “mattering,” the authors argue that violence often stems from a sense of humiliation and insignificance. Prevention, therefore, requires creating interactions that make young people feel they have value and agency. 

Preventing Violence is an essential corrective to the glossy government reports that often dominate this field.

Preventing Violence is an essential corrective to the glossy government reports that often dominate this field. It is written with a clarity and exigency that makes it accessible to anyone generally concerned about the safety of our streets. If the book has a flaw, it is perhaps that its tight focus on “youth violence” (a term the authors themselves find problematic) leaves less room to explore how this framework applies to domestic or sexual violence. Nevertheless, given the political context of the “knife crime crisis” that spurred these policies, the focus is quite justified. 

In the end, Irwin-Rogers and his colleagues warn that while the public health approach has become the official orthodoxy, its institutional foundations are still fragile. It risks becoming a hollow brand, a way of dressing up old policing tactics in new, medicalised language. Yet, the book also offers a glimpse of what is possible. They remind us that the best way to stop a hand from being raised in violence is not to intercept it, but to ensure the person behind it has a life that they feel is worth living.

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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Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Decolonization Struggle. Ching Kwan Lee. Harvard University Press. 2025.

The stories we tell ourselves can be incomplete without being untrue. That is one starting point of this ambitious work that situates a pivotal moment in Hong Kong’s history within a larger frame of geopolitical tension, rival capitalisms and postcolonial subjectivity. In Forever Hong Kong, Ching Kwan Lee offers something more thought-provoking than the conventional portrait of democracy versus authoritarianism. Nor do theories of inequality in global cities explain Hong Kong’s politicisation. In her view, existing approaches capture “the moment but not the movement, the appearance but not the essence of the uprising”. Instead, the core issue is the transformation of colonised subjects into historical agents, and their search for self-determination. 

Hong Kong’s double coloniality

The central claim is that Hong Kong’s protests in 2019 were a response to a “double coloniality coproduced by British and Chinese rule”. Lee argues that the decolonisation struggle has been directed not only towards political domination by mainland China but also legacies of British rule and crises of capitalism. She gives two main reasons to adopt this “decolonising” lens. The first is to understand the aspirations of a social and political movement. The second is to analyse the claims of Chinese officials that the problem of governing Hong Kong is one of unfinished decolonisation. 

The book is a story of becoming. It narrates how Hong Kong people turned themselves into historical agents in general, and decolonising subjects in particular, ‘with all their flaws, hesitations and limitations’.

Lee’s approach inevitably raises questions about how to situate the case of Hong Kong within broader histories. She reminds us that Hong Kong was not entirely outside the wave of decolonisation after the Second World War. Both expatriate and Chinese reformers in the colony demanded constitutional changes. But the city was actively detached from this trajectory when the PRC gained a permanent seat at the United Nations in 1971 and successfully campaigned to remove Hong Kong and Macau from the UN’s list of non-self-governing territories. The complicity of British and Chinese policy in perpetuating Hong Kong as a colony informs Lee’s framework of “double coloniality”. At the same time, an aversion to communist rule shaped an ambivalent relationship between the people of Hong Kong and colonial modernity. Lee also asks us to consider both coercive assimilation and the politics of difference as tools of imperial domination. 

The book is a story of becoming. It narrates how Hong Kong people turned themselves into historical agents in general, and decolonising subjects in particular, “with all their flaws, hesitations and limitations”. The puzzle is why this transformation intensified under “national” Chinese rule rather than “alien” British rule. Chapter One begins by juxtaposing foundational myths in the pre-1997 period – such as those of stability, rule of law, and free-market utopia – with the inconvenient realities that these incomplete stories ignored. Chapter Two focuses on the “interregnum” (1997-2017) when one political master had left the stage and the next had yet to establish itself. These chapters describe the conditions under which people responded to crises in the postcolony and began to make demands beyond the parameters of double coloniality.  

A postcolonial generation 

The following chapters go inside the 2019 movement and identify a postcolonial generation as the force behind the making of a political community. Lee contrasts this with other struggles of decolonisation, which were often spearheaded by a national bourgeoisie, an exploited working class or a dispossessed peasantry. As the title Forever Hong Kong hints at, “a new temporality imposed by the new sovereign” paradoxically accelerated the cognitive rupture of a political generation from the foundations of colonial hegemony. This led a pragmatic majority to join a struggle that had been led by a minority of passionate youths. The generation that came of age after 1997 experienced disagreement and tension as the movement developed, but has retained its primacy in assembling people otherwise divided by class, gender, race and religion.  

This book raises significant questions that are not fully resolved. One is the extent to which the articulation of a decolonising subjectivity glosses over persisting or new ambivalences among the population. Lee notes on multiple occasions that individuals’ identification with decolonisation is uneven. The precise nature of this unevenness deserves further attention. The author also points out how many activists’ demands were couched in concrete terms – like universal suffrage, anti-extradition or anti-national education – rather than explicit visions of a more completely decolonial polity. Since political identification can be implicit, we need more tools to examine the non-discursive dimensions of agency and subjectivity. Lee offers a starting point with ethnographic insights on the process of action. She is concerned not with elites and their texts but with communities of action (or what citizens called 抗爭共同體, “communions in resistance”) in the birth of a political community. And yet the exact relationship between praxis, theory and subjectivity remains unclear. Clarifying this relationship would be analytically fruitful: under what conditions does repeated action lead to qualitative changes in political consciousness? It would also allow us to better understand what a legacy of resistance looks like in the absence of an overarching theory of change.  

Waves of self-determination? 

Beyond these questions are broader implications about the persistence of demands for self-determination in the 21^st century. Commentaries during the Second World War already talked about the rise and fall of self-determination. By telling a story from the mid-20^th century through to the 2020s, Lee convincingly shows that self-determination has an unfinished history that takes the form of multiple waves. She doesn’t make clear, however, whether we should understand the case of Hong Kong to be at the beginning, the middle or the end of a wider wave. Another suggestion is that Hong Kong’s experience with multiple empires makes obvious what has always been the case: that colonial domination does not hail exclusively from the West. Demands for self-determination will evolve as the world moves beyond the demise of European empires into a multipolar age. How will the meaning of equality – the concept with which Lee ends the book – change in tandem with patterns of domination? 

Does the case of Hong Kong reflect a wider trend in the emergence of political generations as primary claimants of self-determination?

The unfinished history of self-determination is not just about periodisation. It is also about the generational aspect of political identity. In addition to the role of a political generation in catalysing a movement for self-determination, Lee shows the effect of such a movement in the making of generations. In other words, she connects the sociological problem of generations with the political question of self-determination. Like recent reinterpretations of Black Atlantic world ordering and the indigenous politics of refusal, this book looks beyond statehood as the only way to assess the goals and outcomes of such movements. Instead, it draws on Karl Mannheim’s concept of a “generation entelechy”, which refers to the realisation of potentialities inherent in a cohort. The book invites us to ask: does the case of Hong Kong reflect a wider trend in the emergence of political generations as primary claimants of self-determination, alongside or in lieu of other social categories? If so, what difference does that make? And if a generation cannot access state power, through what political processes can its agency materialise in shaping its destiny?

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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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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COP30 in Belém, Brazil is underway, the 30^th effort by states to come together and agree on how to tackle climate change and turn rhetoric into action. It also marks a decade since the landmark Paris Agreement, when governments around the world pledged to limit global warming to (ideally) 1.5°C. Yet, ten years on, the reality remains sobering: greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, fossil fuel subsidies endure, and those most vulnerable to climate harm remain the least protected. 

Now is an opportune moment to take stock, and to ask: why, despite the clarity of the science and the urgency of the crisis, do we continue to fail to act at the necessary scale and speed? The five books below are insightful, provocative works illuminating the moral, political, and historical dimensions of this crisis and the contours of the struggle for climate justice. Together, they identify different branches of climate injustice – from colonialism and capitalism to contemporary geopolitics – and offer lessons on how best to address the inequalities caused by the climate crisis. 

Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis. Tao Leigh Goffe. Hamish Hamilton. 2025. 

Many in the West see climate change as something that came to public attention in the late 1980s, amid growing concern about rising greenhouse gas emissions causing extreme weather events like droughts and heatwaves. Some socially conscious individuals may draw further links between these emissions and the Industrial Revolution that led to the extreme reliance on fossil fuels to power major economies. Tao Leigh Goffe’s Dark Laboratory is an effort to show that the origins of climate change go back much further. Her sweeping historical investigation shows how colonial extraction, plantation economies, and the legal and epistemic regimes developed around them produced not only imperial wealth, but also ecological forms of dispossession that echo into our climate present.

In reframing the Anthropocene as a continuation of colonial practices, Goffe positions climate justice as a form of historical redress. Within this framing, domestic emissions targets and carbon budgets alone cannot account for centuries of ecological debt. Instead, Goffe invites us to see climate action as a decolonial project – one that requires transforming not only economies but also systems of knowledge, memory, and belonging.

Chaos in the Heavens: The Forgotten History of Climate Change. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher. Translated from the French Gregory Elliott  by Verso. 2024. 

Amid growing concern about extreme weather events, politicians come together with leading scientists to identify the cause, discuss solutions and try to mitigate some of the damaging impacts of climate on society. Sound familiar? Except this is not 2025, this is revolutionary France. And like with the modern climate crisis, the damage caused to agriculture by weather events in 18th-century France exposed questions about social order, governance, and justice.

The consensus around net zero is fraying under populist backlash backed by the same fossil fuel interests that caused the climate crisis.

Through this journey into history, Fressoz and Locher show that past efforts to manage climate risk mirror the tensions we face today: how to balance economic stability with environmental limits, and how to ensure that vulnerable populations are not sacrificed in the name of progress. This recognition can help guide us in idenitfying why it is that humanity struggles to deal with climate change, and also a warning that instabilty in the Earth system can quickly extend into the political system without appropriate action.

White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism.  Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective. Verso. 2021. 

A common theme in global politics, and a key reason we struggle to make progress on climate action, is the rise of anti-climate populist parties. In one of the first attempts to unpack thesse linkages Andreas Malm explores how the far-right evolved from a nationalistic obsessions with ecological “purity” to its pathlogical defence of fossil fuels and efforts to link climate action with the “woke agenda.” Across Trump’s America, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and Europe’s far-right movements, Malm and his collaborators at the Zetkin Collective show how narratives of race, sovereignty, and “the people” are mobilised to resist climate action and entrench extractivism. 

The book’s argument, made in 2021, has only grown more relevant. In the UK and elsewhere, the consensus around net zero is fraying under populist backlash backed by the same fossil fuel interests that caused the climate crisis. Malm’s analysis underscores how deeply climate politics are embedded in struggles over culture, identity, and democracy itself. For climate justice advocates, the book is both a warning and a guide: defeating the far right’s fossil fuel fascism requires not only technical decarbonisation, but a political project that links environmental repair to strong political narratives that meet the moment.

The Climate Diplomat: A Personal History of the COP Conferences. Peter Betts. Profile Books. 2025. 

Although less justice-focused than other recommendations, former UK climate diplomat Peter Bett’s account of the realities of climate diplomacy is essential reading for any climate justice advocate. Drawing on first-hand experience from successive COP summits, Betts exposes the difficulty of bringing nearly 200 nations each with divergent interests, vulnerabilities, and capacities around a table to agree on a single course of action.

The book offers critical insights into how diplomats engage with civil society, with Betts’ noting that the ability of grassroots movements and NGOs to shift the Overton window is a critical aspect of expanding the range of acceptable options permissible for states. What’s striking for climate justice activists is how little Betts engages with the day-to-day realities of climate injustice in the Global South. Although perhaps unsurprising given it was not his area of expertise, it is a useful reminder that what happens in the backrooms may not always reflect the clamour for equality occurring outside.  

At a time when trust in multilateralism is waning, this book reminds readers that though the slow, frustrating process of negotiation remains indispensable, climate justice advocates cannot leave it to diplomats to address the climate crisis.

The struggle for climate justice is not just about emissions. It is about history, power, and imagination – about who has benefited from the destruction of the Earth, who bears the costs, and who gets to decide what comes next.

Carbon Colonialism: How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown. Laurie Parsons. Manchester University Press. 2023. 

The final recommendation examines the dark side of the green transition.  Through ethnography and field work, Parsons shows how market-led responses to climate change can underwrite and conceal a continuation of the extractivist logic that underpinned some of the injustices discussed in the previous recommendations. With a particular focus on the exporting of production costs by the West to developing countries (and therefore both greenhouse gas emissions and the associated violations of human rights that come with poor models of manufacturing), Parsons reveals how the costs of the “green transition” are often borne by those least responsible for the crisis. The book’s central warning is stark: unless justice is made central to climate governance, we risk reproducing the same inequalities that created the crisis. 

In exposing these patterns, Parsons pushes us to think beyond carbon metrics and toward questions of power, ownership, and accountability. Like with other authors on this list, he suggests that the future must not only decarbonise but also decolonise to ensure justice and fairness for all.  

As COP30 unfolds, these books remind us that the struggle for climate justice is not just about emissions. It is about history, power, and imagination – about who has benefited from the destruction of the Earth, who bears the costs, and who gets to decide what comes next.

Note: This post 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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