Dichotomies in Media and Communication Theory. Bart Cammaerts. Routledge. 2026.

How the internet fostered subcultures

The internet has been described as a revolutionary, disruptive technology that has created a global networked information society and paradigmatic shifts in all walks of life. Such techno-optimist discourses are often deemed overly technologically deterministic, but they are highly prevalent and salient in business-oriented literature, in macro-economics, as well as in sociology, political science, and media and communication studies. One of the most defining characteristics of the contemporary new media and communication environment shaped by the internet is the “convergence of specific technologies into a highly integrated system” according to Castells. This has a material side to it, but also a cultural dimension, which is encapsulated in what American media scholar Henry Jenkins termed “convergence culture”. Convergence culture has, however, disrupted and complicated the distinction between mainstream and alternative media.

The many affordances of the internet – to publish freely and cheaply, to enable the transnational exchange of information, to connect groups and individuals, its horizontal architecture, and the strength of weak ties – stimulated innovation within subcultural movements.

The internet originated from a productive collaboration between military power and academic interests, but clearly pertaining to a mainstream agenda. Subsequently, the internet was enthusiastically embraced and further developed by various countercultures that we could denote as “alternative”. The techno-hippies and -punks of the 1970s and 1980s, fuelled by a hacker and cracker subculture, embraced and subsequently popularised cyber-anarcho idioms and values such as: “Information Wants to be Free”, “Mistrust Authority”, “Promote Decentralization”, “Do It Yourself”, “Fight the Power”, “Feed the Noise Back into the System”, and “Surf the Edges”, as posted on the San Franscisco-bay area Bulletin Board System (BBS) called the “Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link” or WELL. These slogans expressed an alternative digital imaginary and libertarian counterculture which played a constitutive role in the shaping the internet.

Soon enough the many affordances of the internet – to publish freely and cheaply, to enable the transnational exchange of information, to connect groups and individuals with each other in communities of interest and action, its horizontal architecture, and the strength of weak ties – stimulated innovation within subcultural movements. They also enhanced these movements’ ability to organise, communicate, mobilise, attack, and circumvent.

The very idea of a ‘free’ internet, as advocated by the alternative cyberpunks and lodged into the popular imagination, has paradoxically fuelled a mainstream business model based on the commodification of users’ sociality and their digital footprint

This stimulated what the Feminist American philosopher Nancy Fraser called “subaltern counterpublics” and the American sociologist Todd Gitlin “public sphericules”, which arguably became much easier to establish online than offline, removing geographical and temporal barriers. BBSs exemplified this capability, facilitating connection, debate and the exchange of information between individuals with similar interests, and relating to various subcultures. Today we still see remnants of this in sites such 4Chan or Reddit. The alternative DIY print-culture phenomenon of the Fanzines became eZines and Web 2.0 also gave rise to the phenomenon of weblogs or blogs, as well as an explosion of bottom-up “citizen” journalism. Also noteworthy in the alternative sphere is the development of a Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) movement, partially undermining proprietary software development.

When capitalist interests took over

However, just as the American sociologist Daniel Bell predicted in his book on the post-industrial society, dominant interests and capitalist power would eventually – with some help from the US government and the EU – fully appropriate the internet and commodify the information society, bringing it firmly in line with capitalist interests and wealth creation. In stark contrast to the myth of the internet being a level-playing field of equal opportunities, the commercialisation of the internet led to an extreme and global oligopolisation accelerated by network effects characterised by a “winner-takes-all” logic. This was achieved through two old models of media monetisation, namely subscription advertising, often combined. Subscription models are platforms designed to counter the illegal downloading of media content such as Netflix and Spotify, but also the ways in which alternative platforms encourage donations by their audiences. The advertising model is more prevalent, however, because of the free culture ideology that accompanied the emergence of the internet.

In the age of social media and big data, the advertising model has become both more sophisticated and more insidious. The privileging of data extraction models and the commodification of our sociality and everything this reveals about us, led to an era of “surveillance capitalism”, whose “mechanisms and economic imperatives have become the default model for most internet-based businesses”. The very idea of a “free” internet, as advocated by the alternative cyberpunks and lodged into the popular imagination, has paradoxically fuelled a mainstream business model based on the commodification of users’ sociality and their digital footprint. As a result, capitalism today does not only feed off our collective labour, but “every aspect of every human’s experience”.

Mainstream or alternative media?

This symbiotic dynamic between mainstream and alternative in the convergent internet era opens a range of profound questions around the continued usefulness of the categories of alternative and mainstream today. Do we consider social media platforms to be alternative channels of distribution for alternative voices and content, or are they quintessential mainstream, corporate controlled platforms? Or both? While self-management, autonomy, and independence from State and market were deemed quintessential characteristics for alternative offline media, this has been seriously undermined – and near impossible to achieve – on the internet. Atton already asked in the early 2000s whether it even “makes sense to talk of alternative media in cyberspace?”.

It is increasingly difficult to ascertain what constitutes mainstream media and what alternative. Does it refer to the nature of the content, the way it is presented, or the platform/publication it is distributed through?

When it comes to mainstream media, the emergence of social media platforms and online podcasts has also had a destabilising impact for the category of “mainstream”. What we considered mainstream media – newspapers, radio, television – is increasingly called “legacy” media to differentiate between “old” and “new” forms. Ultimately, social media platforms are also mainstream corporate spaces. At the same time, all newspapers and broadcasters are also active online, and mainstream celebrities, pundits, and journalists are increasingly setting up their own podcast operations. Furthermore, commercial tensions have emerged between social media companies and legacy media corporations, mainly because the former have eaten up a large portion of the advertising revenue of the latter. Additionally, social media also thrive on and capitalise the circulation of content produced by legacy media. Tied to this, consumption patterns and practices of news and information have also changed considerably.

In this fluid context, it is increasingly difficult to ascertain what constitutes mainstream media and what alternative. Does it refer to the nature of the content, the way it is presented, or the platform/publication it is distributed through? And what remains of the strong democratic origins of alternative media being truly independent, bottom-up, horizontal, and implicated in human rights struggles?

This is an edited extract (pp. 141-144) from Dichotomies in Media and Communication Theory
by Bart Cammaerts, published by Routledge, 2026 © reprinted here by permission.

Bart Cammaerts will speak about the book at a public LSE event from 6.30pm to 8pm on Tuesday 31 March 2026. Find details and register to end.

Note: This extract 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: Tomas Martinez on Unsplash.

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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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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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Seeing is Disbelieving: Why People Believe Misinformation in War, and When They Know Better. Daniel Silverman. Cambridge University Press. 2024.

When making political judgements, citizens must confront an array of false or inaccurate information held or spread intentionally (disinformation) or unintentionally (misinformation). Such information, if not filtered out as false, informs how we evaluate everything from political candidates to climate change. Misinformation can even foment violence. As such, academics from a range of disciplines have recently examined the power of misinformation and considered ways to reduce its influence across countries ranging from India to the United States. They have studied misinformation about topics as diverse as vigilante violence against minorities, health care, climate change, and science denialism more broadly. 

Misinformation in conflict contexts 

Despite the burgeoning research into the topic of misinformation broadly, there is strikingly little work on misinformation in conflict contexts. In Seeing is Disbelieving: Why People Believe Misinformation in War, and When They Know Better, Daniel Silverman makes an important contribution to our understanding of people’s beliefs amidst war. In doing so, he also contributes to a vibrant literature on civilian attitudes in and about war. Regular people’s beliefs in factual inaccuracies about the war matter, he argues, because these beliefs likely play a role in larger conflict processes and outcomes. Silverman focuses on inaccuracies about civilian targeting; a wealth of evidence indicates that indiscriminate civilian targeting can drive civilians to support the opponents of the perpetrator (see, for example, Kocher et al. 2011 and Lyall et al. 2013). 

Beliefs in factual inaccuracies depend on, first, whether people have firsthand or local information about the relevant events and, second, whether they have incentives to seek accurate information

In this book, Silverman argues that beliefs in factual inaccuracies depend on, first, whether people have firsthand or local information about the relevant events and, second, whether they have incentives to seek accurate information. Individuals that live near violence have local knowledge, and they seek accurate information because their lives may depend on it. In contrast, people far removed from the violence have only information from partisan media, and they do not need accurate information so instead rely on directional motivated reasoning. Silverman therefore hypothesises that, compared to individuals living close to violence, those living at a remove from conflict will hold more inaccurate beliefs and be more vulnerable to believing misinformation.  

A mixed-methods approach 

Silverman uses a creative mixed-method approach to test this argument. First, drawing on Pew surveys fielded between 2009 and 2012, he finds that concerns about how discriminate US drone strikes are shape opposition to that drone campaign. Second, drawing on work with Kaltenthaler and Dagher (2021), Silverman analyses an original survey of Iraqis to examine their agreement with factual misperceptions about Coalition airstrikes. He finds that Iraqis who have lived in areas close to the violence are less likely to agree with the incorrect claims. Further, the effects of prior attitudes toward the US on belief in misperceptions are more limited among those who have been exposed to the violence. Finally, using data from 179 semi-structured interviews with Syrian refugees living in Turkey – collected by Schon (2020) – Silverman finds that individuals are more likely to believe that they are able to discern true from false information when they have been more exposed to conflict. Silverman also briefly explores some qualitative information from the interviews which demonstrates that proximity to conflict events was crucial for many people’s development of a clear understanding of the war.  

Self-reported truth discernment cannot necessarily measure agreement with misinformation

The book uses data from three different countries, lending credence to the generalisability of the argument. However, while the chapter on Iraq (chapter four) contains a careful experiment which directly tests the larger argument of the book, it isn’t clear how the sections on Pakistan (chapter three) and Syria (chapter five) test the key theory. Chapter three shows that concerns about civilian harm shape support for US drone strikes, and drone strikes themselves shape attitudes toward a range of political actors; these findings don’t directly concern misinformation. Chapter five focuses on people’s confidence in their ability to differentiate true from false information. But presumably people who believe untrue information also believe that they are capable of discerning the truth; indeed, there is some evidence that people who believe they can “do their own research” are also more likely to agree with falsehoods. As such, self-reported truth discernment cannot necessarily measure agreement with misinformation.   

Challenges for research in a conflict zone 

Conducting quantitative political opinion research in conflict zones is quite difficult, sometimes necessitating the use of imperfect measures like those discussed above. Given such challenges, the book would have been greatly enriched by more extensive qualitative work entailing language skills, fieldwork, and/or text analysis. For example, in the discussions of war-related misinformation in Pakistan (Chapter three) and Iraq (Chapter four), there seem to be no direct citations from the sources promoting the misinformation or even news stories in Urdu, Arabic, or Kurdish. Non-experts in the region would have benefitted from a much more developed discussion of the relevant misinformation.  

Readers would also stand to benefit from qualitative insights developed in interviews or focus groups conducted by the author on the precise topic of the book. Conversations about, for example, where people receive their information from and who they choose or choose not to believe, would be profoundly informative. Silverman suggests toward the end of the book that the next step in this research agenda is a more in-depth exploration of the role of cognition and psychology in susceptibility to wartime misinformation, but it seems as though interviews or focus groups could have helped further this precise research agenda. 

Those criticisms aside, I recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding misinformation or civilian attitudes in conflict. As media continues to fracture, misinformation will play an ongoing role in politics around the world; this book helps us understand some of the factors that lead people to believe 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: Jose HERNANDEZ Camera 51 on Shutterstock.

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Open Secrecy: How Technology Empowers the Digital Underworld. Isak Ladegaard. University of California Press. 2025.

Like publicity and privacy, openness and secrecy are two sides of the same coin. The closer you look at the qualities of each, the more they blur into one another. And as the open, participatory culture of the early 21st-century Internet developed, it brought shadow into being as well. In Open Secrets: How Technology Empowers the Digital Underworld, sociologist Isak Ladegaard uses a vast trove of scraped communication data to examine subcultures that have sprung up in the 21^st century. His case studies include online drug markets, censorship-evasion developers, and white supremacists; he is interested in how these communities survive and spread in opposition to the states that surround them. Compared to the many qualitative and journalistic studies of these groups, Ladegaard’s work stands out for the range and depth of his data collection – it is very hard to study these groups over time in this way. Since the seemingly siloed subcultures of online forums, trolls, and hackers spilled into the mainstream, we are still finding out how our social tools of identity, anonymity, privacy, and publicity have shifted. Fieldsites in secret online communities are a great place to explore this.  

Open secrecy produces new forms of community through ‘the combination of mass communication and anonymisation tools, which enabled people to operate on public websites, with verifiable, secure pseudonyms, and build things together, broadcast ideas and emotions, develop personal ties, and foster communities’.

The rise of open secrecy 

The concept of open secrecy is central to Ladegaard’s analysis; he argues that the “network society” described by Manuel Castell is breaking down the socially atomised late, or liquid, modern society theorised by Zygmunt Bauman and Anthony Giddens. (It is a little hard to tell Ladegaard’s exact influences, because Open Secrecy seems written for a more popular audience and avoids detailed theory discussion outside the footnotes.) Open secrecy produces new forms of community through “the combination of mass communication and anonymisation tools, which enabled people to operate on public websites, with verifiable, secure pseudonyms, and build things together, broadcast ideas and emotions, develop personal ties, and foster communities” (14). Ladegaard believes that liberal modernity has advanced to such a degree that these communication tools now undermine its hegemonic states. In the space that is produced, these shadowy and “openly secret groups have organisational capacities that we associate with modern states – they can initiate and maintain large-scale projects with strategic coordination, even when contested by powerful forces such as law enforcement” (12). These groups, sheltered so, can develop their own state-like status.  

In his case studies, Ladegaard first looks at similar edgy online communities as Gabriella Coleman’s research on hackers and Whitney Phillips’ on trolls. He focuses on darknet economies like the Silk Road, and its successor. He describes the community of brokers, users, and distributors that formed around what could have been bare, economic transactions. He describes their halting attempts to create shared norms around identity verification, at first foregoing more technical encryption-signing options but turning to them in moments of market crisis caused by widespread cryptocurrency thefts or scams and exchange closures. In other cases, server disruption created digital migration movements or shared use of “information hub” sites. These practices developed, Ladegaard explains, “not despite legal pressure but because of it” (74).  

Radicalisation and evading censorship 

Next, Ladegaard examines computer users evading censorship in China through virtual private networks and “firewall ladders” like Shadowsocks. Those tools generated developer communities around them, communities that need to determine the direction of their projects and do so through a state of almost complete shared anonymity, due to the legal risk of their work. Something about that risk and the specific community produces a public that claims apolitical values even as it performs political action. As Ladegaard explains, “They support open-source development, which embraces collaboration, the sharing of ideas, decentralized power, and independent thinking, and they use open secrecy to reclaim the information access that the state withholds. But they don’t conceptualise their own tenets and actions as ‘political,’ articulate collective goals or demands, or link their efforts to construct and maintain a censorship-circumvention infrastructure to bigger ideas about state governance and legitimacy” (111). Finally, Ladegaard looks at far-right radicalisation on Stormfront website versus the newer Gab platform. His data shows how users of Gab go through a more rapid radicalisation process but he also looks at cosy “hygge” content sharing – how users sharing recipe recommendations in one part of a community make calls for genocide in another.  

The data Ladegaard works with is immensely interesting, and improved by additional qualitative work that brings out social detail, like a moment of realization he describes after hearing a fellow researcher’s experience of being scrutinized during their fieldwork at a far-right event. In some cases, however, the careful methodological attention the quantitative sections of the book received does not carry over. That is visible in places where Ladegaard uses interviews to make “just so” stories about the rationales behind his data and historical details, e.g., an odd reference from Phillip Zimmerman, a cryptographer notorious for his open-source encryption tool Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). Zimmerman is well-known in the community but to use his words to attest to how durable encryption is odd – almost any cryptographer would say the same. There should also be a source more current than 1998 to tell us whether PGP should still be used for encryption (43). In other cases, a historical sense of the anonymity and identity would have erased some claims to sociological novelty but allowed for more nuance. Many subcultural, or anonymous, communities have contended with disapproval from their wider society and developed means to sustain themselves in those conditions, from oppressed classes to strangers meeting on Bulletin Board Systems to Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum’s analysis of obfuscation techniques in, among others, Tor and BitTorrent users.  

Open secrecy for empowerment or control? 

Those complications are necessary, because we do need a better understanding of open secrecy – its new configurations in the current moment. Ladegaard argues that “open secrecy is a value-neutral force of liberation that renders conventional social control strategies ineffective” (13). As a result, his argument for addressing the inadequacies of state sovereignty, in light of modernism’s declining, unifying force and the cracks expanded by open secrecy, is a renewed commitment to an idealised public sphere: “One proposed solution is for moderates to take a deep breath and go back in and together crowd out the loud extremists – which are in a minority – and thus collectively make the digital public square a place for cordial good faith debate” (235). Recalling Habermas, our degraded digital public square can become a panoply of “digital coffeehouses or saloons” with their own pro-social norms.   

Open secrecy continues to hide them from democratic accountability but takes on a different value, as elected officials edit their statements after-the-fact or hide conversations from public accountability laws by using encrypted chats.

This feels like an optimistic view, to say the least. It is exactly the values baked into social media platforms like Gab, for engagement and enragement, that give them their power. And as Nathaniel Tkacz critiqued open government ideals that go back to Karl Popper’s 1962 The Open Society and Its Enemies, “the logic of openness actually gives rise to, and is perfectly compatible with, new forms of closure.” That is, falling back on ideals for openness often simply moves and obscures where power is working. This poses a problem for Ladegaard’s conception of “open secrecy” as inherently opposed to state power. For example, what happens when shadowy groups actually secure state power for themselves, as far-right groups have done through, eg, the US Trump administration’s adoption of the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 program and pardoning of January 6^th seditionists? I would argue open secrecy continues to hide them from democratic accountability but takes on a different value, as elected officials edit their statements after-the-fact or hide conversations from public accountability laws by using encrypted chats (consider the US “Houthi PC Small Group” scandal from earlier this year, where an Atlantic journalist was added to a Signal chat were bombstrikes on Yemen were being coordinated).  

Addressing these old problems in new forms will require new answers. I finished Open Secrecy convinced of the importance of its subject matter but wishing that Ladegaard had gone further with its theoretical development. Open secrecy seems to be a condition for the production of new states with a deep hold on their subjects but little currency in the wider world. How they relate to larger states, whether they destabilise or shore them up in new ways, seems at the core of the anxiety they produce, and answering that question should be our next step.

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: Yudhistirama on Shutterstock.

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The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What If It Can’t? Nick Couldry. Polity. 2024.

How social media companies have taken the “space of the world” 

“Between two and three decades ago, humanity made a huge mistake…We handed over to business the design of our social world. This is something we should have never done.” Is it too late to rectify this mistake? So asks professor of communications and social theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Nick Couldry, in The Space of the World. The book is a captivating read, and the first in a trilogy, Humanising the Future, proposing an alternative vision of how to build our digital spaces. 

Situated at the crossroads of media theory, social theory and political philosophy, the book contributes to ongoing discourse regarding the repercussions of social media for democracy, ethics and human solidarity. Positioning himself as a social theorist, Couldry nudges us to reflect on how social media platforms have fundamentally shaped modern social and political life. More than that, the book invites us to imagine a future beyond the current profit-driven social media landscape owned by a few Big Tech companies. The future he imagines is one where social media is without toxicity, that fosters solidarity and promotes oneness of humanity. Across seven chapters, Couldry contends that commercially driven social media platforms have taken over the very “space of the world” where humans conduct social and political life. This digital arena is now a key place where we form relationships, discuss and contest ideas and mobilise politically. Big Tech’s takeover of the space deliberately undermines our capacity for coming together to take collective action for humanity’s survival, for example, in the face of climate disasters, so Couldry argues. 

Living with, through and in social media 

Couldry outlines three key arguments around how these companies shape the space and the impacts it has on our society. Firstly, he writes that unlike in the early days of the Internet in the 1990s, when it was merely a tool to exchange information, modern social media platforms now organise the very conditions under which people live and interact. To drive this point, Couldry notes that most of us now live our lives “with social media, through social media, in social media”, sharing every aspect of life from milestones to trivial matters. In short, social media has now become the space where we love, celebrate, grieve, repent, argue and live. 

Platforms already exist which are not-for-profit, do not feature ads, extract user information or use algorithms to increase content engagement. […] For such platforms to be successful, a fundamental factor is a society’s ‘cultural will’ to reject the commercially driven platforms we have come to know and embrace a paradigmatic shift.

Secondly, Couldry suggests that our shared social space is distorted because the primary motive of Big Tech is user engagement and profit maximisation. This distortion of shared social space, according to the author, leads to a host of socio-political problems ranging from polarisation and mistrust to the formation of an attention economy , weakening democracy and fostering competition over cooperation, consequently making it harder for people to accept and recognise what connects us. This inability to recognise a shared humanity and future makes it difficult to cultivate solidarity, which Couldry argues, risks our in the face of climate change. Couldry draws from several events in recent memory to illustrate how social media fosters polarisation over solidarity. From fuelling racist attacks against migrants in Europe to rise in caste-base abuse in South East Asia and promotion of hate speech against minority Muslims in Myanmar, the author contends social media has been at the centre of all these events. 

The scale of the challenge in taking on Big Tech 

What can we do to counter the far-reaching influence of these tech companies and their effects of weakening solidarity as humanity faces grave existential threats? Couldry calls for a radical shift in how Big Tech operates social media platforms to enable public discourse that serves democracy instead of the vested interest of few elite businesses. He envisions digital infrastructures that are designed to foster wellbeing and that ensure accountability and transparency and humanity’s common good. 

But one wonders if such a mammoth task is practical and achievable profit-driven infrastructures and platforms are so well established. Given the immense commercial opportunities and cut-throat competition among Big Tech to win user attention, several questions arise: who will take the moral lead to redesign their current social media platforms, forgoing billions of dollars in profit? Even if alternatives exist, what would their viability and sustainability be in the face of mainstream social media platforms who can afford to spend millions to promote their products and services? 

An alternative vision for social media 

Couldry reminds us that several platforms already exist which are not-for-profit, do not feature ads, extract user information or use algorithms to increase content engagement. One such platform is Mastodon, a decentralised social media where user experience is not driven by Big Tech’s algorithms but by conscious choice of what one wishes to engage and interact with. For such platforms to be successful, Couldry argues that a fundamental factor is a society’s “cultural will” to reject the commercially driven platforms we have come to know and embrace a paradigmatic shift. Additionally, this shift would require handling the technical complexities involved in running these platforms smoothly. 

The Space of the World is a thought-provoking piece of work that deepens our understanding of digital technology’s impact on day-to-day life. It asks us to consider the implications of our almost mindless use of social media and to imagine what a radically new social media landscape might look like and its possibilities for fostering collaboration and empathy. Events such as the 2025 Gen Z uprising in Asia – in which young people, frustrated by perceived corruption, took to social media to topple their governments – show what is possible. On the other hand, the January 6^th Storming of the US Capitol epitomises how a single social media post from influential figures can catalyse political polarisation and extremism.  

The Space of the World’s attempt to shift the focus of conversation from content moderation or managing misinformation on digital platforms to a total redesign of architecture of social interaction makes it a novel and worthwhile contribution to the existing literature.

Overall, Couldry takes a negative view of social media, focusing on its downsides and harms. This bleak outlook ignores that social media has been an agent for good in society, for example in creating awareness around the rights of people living with disabilities, providing voices to marginalised groups such as LGBTQ youth and helping to demand transparency and accountability in governance. That criticism aside, The Space of the World’s attempt to shift the focus of conversation from content moderation or managing misinformation on digital platforms to a total redesign of architecture of social interaction makes it a novel and worthwhile contribution to the existing literature. It prompts anticipation for the second book in the trilogy, Corporatising the Mind ,which will deal with one of the most pressing issues of our times: the intersection of human and artificial intelligence and its consequences for the future of humankind.

 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.

Nick Couldry’s research has also been featured in an LSE YouTube video, What is data colonialism?, an episode of the LSE iQ podcast, Is AI destroying our planet? and an LSE Research for the World article, Are we giving away too much online?

Main image: MOCH ARIYA ERLANGGA on Unsplash.

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Dogwhistles and Figleaves: How Manipulative Language Spreads Racism and Falsehood. Jennifer Mather Saul. Oxford University Press. 2024.

Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism. Tamar Mitts. Princeton University Press. 2025.

Extremist political rhetoric as strategy 

Facing waning support and platform bans, the American far-right political movement QAnon decided in 2020 to extend its conspiracy theory narrative to include claims of a global child trafficking ring, supposedly led by US liberal elites. It did this by hijacking the #SavetheChildren hashtag, used in a legitimate anti-trafficking campaign by an organisation of that name, and turned it into covert extremist messaging – a devious appropriation that, for QAnon, yielded an energising membership spike.  

[These two] books on hate and manipulation in political discourse provide a multidisciplinary perspective on how extremist rhetoric, despite social and institutional guardrails, succeeds both offline and online.

To philosopher of language Jennifer Mather Saul, this tactic resembles the increasingly common manipulative uses of harmful political speech that flout norms against falsehoods in public discourse. For political scientist Tamar Mitts, who studies hate speech in social media, the #SavetheChildren example illustrates how extremist groups strategically shift their online messaging to skirt content moderation. Considered together, these views, offered in their respective recent books on hate and manipulation in political discourse, provide a multidisciplinary perspective on how extremist rhetoric, despite social and institutional guardrails, succeeds both offline and online. In doing so, Saul and Mitts collectively underscore the urgency of this challenge as well as the complexity of addressing it. 

Weakened norms and hateful speech 

For Saul, examining political rhetoric in Dogwhistles and Figleaves: How Manipulative Language Spreads Racism and Falsehood, this urgency stems not solely from the sharp upswing in harmful political speech, but from the degree to which that rhetoric has become normalised. This normalisation, she argues, has resulted from a shift in the social expectations that have long constrained actors from openly expressing racist beliefs and false ideas. And it’s the weakening of these norms, she claims, that facilitates political manipulation – particularly of malleable groups that, though they may accept these norms, can nevertheless be convinced to support political actors who spread lies and espouse racist ideologies. It’s a problem, of course, that matters beyond deceptive vote-getting: once “the unsayable becomes sayable,” as Saul reminds us, history has shown that “increasingly hateful language is often a precursor to violence and even genocide” (2).  

Dogwhistles and figleaves

Though Saul examines a range of falsehoods, from conspiracy theorist hashtags and emojis to compliance lies and political bullshit, her primary focus is on dogwhistles and figleaves. Dogwhistles, she explains, are strategic communicative acts comprising two layers of meaning:  one is understood broadly by an out-group, and the other targets an in-group for whom the secondary layer conveys a coded message that activates their political or racial biases. (Think, for instance, how the term inner city, to the general population, would refer to an urban space while to racists it covertly references the marginalised groups that historically have lived in those spaces.) Often a dogwhistle is paired with a figleaf, which, as its name suggests, “provides cover for another utterance that [otherwise] would be recognised as racist” (71) – for instance, calling a racial slur, once spoken, a joke or attaching to extremist insinuations the tag phrase or that’s what people are saying. Used together in political discourse, dogwhistles and figleaves, Saul argues, form “a powerful mechanism for changing standards of acceptable utterances” (86), one that makes it easier for false and racist language to circulate and thus “play an important role in dividing the populace and inflaming divisions” (104).  

The digital resilience of hate groups 

Such speech, we’ve come to know, readily proliferates on social media. Platforms, in response, have upped their efforts to remove such content and, in egregious cases, de-platform those who propagate it. Yet, as Mitts explains in Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism, militant and hate groups like the Islamic State and the Proud Boys have shown remarkable digital resilience, subverting content moderation policies to continue spreading hate and attracting support. Studying the online behaviour of such groups, she shows how they leverage divergences in content moderation across platforms to thrive online. Mitts couples these insights with threshold analyses of content moderation frameworks, implemented across platform sizes, regime types, and geographical contexts, to argue that “militant and hate organisations’ online success centres on their ability to operate across many platforms in parallel – a phenomenon not well captured by current legislation” (5).  

Critical to this success, Mitts shows, are three communication tactics: migrating, mobilising, and messaging. First, when militant organisations get banned from one social media platform, many simply move to another. Though seemingly arbitrary, these migrations are in fact careful calculations in which organisations, exploiting the differences in content moderation policies across platforms, weigh the trade-off between two key communication goals: authenticity and impact. That is, they accept operating on a platform with a smaller audience and reach – Gab or Parler, for instance, instead of Facebook or YouTube – if that platform’s more lenient moderation policies allow them to retain more of their violent, hateful, and thus for them, authentic content.

According to her analysis, large-scale governmental interventions like the EU Digital Services Act have shown limited effectiveness in removing harmful content, as have efforts, predominantly in the US, to incentivise social media platforms to self-regulate.

Having moved to smaller platforms, these groups then seek to mobilise supporters similarly drawn to less moderated spaces. It’s a calculus in which what’s lost through migration in audience size is gained from access to individuals more susceptible to extremist propaganda – typically those aggrieved over narratives of political animus and cultural displacement. Alternatively, to remain on highly moderated platforms, extremist organisations will simply shift their messaging. Whether softening their content away from violence towards, as in the case of the Taliban, governance and civilian affairs or using covert language of the type Saul documents, this shift allows extremist groups to elude moderation and thereby reach larger audiences – or simply steer them to a less-moderated space. In the case of the Islamic State, Mitts shows how they have even hidden propaganda in appropriated content or added digital noise to text and images to throw off the artificial intelligence moderation algorithms deployed by large platforms. 

The challenges of content moderation 

To fight such sophisticated and formidable resilience, Mitts sees convergence – inter-platform cooperation and alignment to moderate content – as a potentially powerful countermeasure. Yet she never fully commits to it as a solution. According to her analysis, large-scale governmental interventions like the EU Digital Services Act have shown limited effectiveness in removing harmful content, as have efforts, predominantly in the US, to incentivise social media platforms to self-regulate. Further, while instances of cross-platform convergence have reduced the official online presence of extremist groups, their unofficial presence, through unaffiliated accounts disseminating their content, remains largely unaffected by moderation.  

Importantly, Mitts also highlights the collateral damage of content moderation and how convergence can compound it. These risks range from the inadvertent removal of non-harmful content – an error which occurs, she notes, at a higher rate for historically marginalised groups – to the misuse of the domestic terrorism classification in moderation policies as a means, by governments, to suppress dissent. These challenges appear to explain Mitts’ support for a public-private approach in which “governments put pressure on platforms and civil society organisations […] make concerted efforts to facilitate collaboration between them” (155). It’s a strategy that resembles certain frameworks for combatting disinformation: pragmatic, institutional, and thus evidencing a persisting belief in liberal rationality. Amid normalised celebrity politics, a splintered public sphere, and a strained social contract, it’s a belief some might see as bullish.   

Political lies in the attention economy

Despite the emergence of the so-called post-truth era, “political lies,” as Saul reminds us, “are nothing new” (116). Nor is it news that political actors, whether from the centre or the extremes, have long used harmful language to galvanise and divide, exploiting existing societal and cultural rifts. Disagreements, for instance, over what even constitutes harmful speech, covert or overt, exacerbate the challenges of moderating it, a problem thus far not readily solved by AI. What’s changed, then, are the incentive structures that, as social and political philosophy scholar Adam Gibbons has argued, make bad language good politics. The harmful content that both Mitts and Saul examine has become so ubiquitous because, to put it bluntly, it trends so well in our emotion-fuelled attention economies. 

Should we continue working to understand those grievances, together with their root causes, or risk validating them in doing so? Do we struggle to shore up not only the rules but also the norms that deter speakers from producing and circulating propaganda?

And given the fragile balance between preventing harm and protecting free speech, as Saul and Mitts in their own ways each reaffirm, it’s little surprise that content moderation has become a partisan issue. Equally unsurprising, but arguably more urgent, is the point that Mitts and Saul, employing diverse methods at differing scale levels, jointly arrive at: that it’s the aggrieved who are most susceptible to propaganda. And so, as the aggrieved increasingly manifest their resentments beyond language through violence, the ways that Saul and Mitts multiply attend to the intersections between harmful speech and manipulation are among their most timely contributions.  

A turn in the fight against hateful content

But what’s next? Should we continue working to understand those grievances, together with their root causes, or risk validating them in doing so? Do we struggle to shore up not only the rules but also the norms that deter speakers from producing and circulating propaganda? Is the solution to be found, as Saul advocates, in the kind of pre-bunking inoculation strategies that have shown some success in combatting misinformation? Or do we instead, as scholar of philosophy and language Marina Sbisà has suggested, attend to the ethical responsibility of the listener to reject harmful speech? These debates might be as fraught, interminable, and necessary as any the public sphere has thus far afforded – ones that, despite its deep flaws and widening fractures, just might warrant its protection and preservation.

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: Andrii Yalanskyi on Shutterstock.

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

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

Nuclear survivors and anti-nuclear resistance 

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

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

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

Disability and gender in activist movements 

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

Resistance through art beyond the visual 

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

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

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

Imagining anti-nuclear futures 

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

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

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

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Story Tech: Power, Storytelling and Social Change Advocacy. Filippo Trevisan, Michael Vaughan and Ariadne Vromen. Liverpool University Press. 2025.

Claire Anderson lives with a muscular dystrophy, a condition that affects her mobility and strength. She was diagnosed at 14 years old, and she uses a wheelchair. In a video recorded from her house, for Every Australian Counts, she shares the daily challenges of living with a degenerative condition, such as cooking for herself and needing to fundraise to make her front door accessible. Claire is one example among millions of the power of a story in advocacy campaigns. She featured as part of a two-year campaign for the National Disability Insurance Scheme, which was introduced in Australia in 2013.

This case study is one of many explored in Story Tech: Power, Storytelling and Social Change Advocacy, published in February 2025 by Filippo Trevisan, Michael Vaughan and Ariadne Vromen. In this open-access book, the authors unveil the strategies behind storytelling for advocacy campaigns, discussing how new technologies are being incorporated by organisations, the tensions between these new features and the challenges associated with the power and control of these narratives. Dr Filippo Trevisan is an Associate Professor of Public Communication at American University, Washington, DC; Dr Michel Vaughan is a Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science; and Professor Ariadne Vromen is Head of the Division of Political and International Studies at the University of Glasgow.

Previous research, in the field of communication and collective action, has already systematised existing tools for digital storytelling and illustrated how storytelling has been mobilised in contemporary advocacy campaigns to create large-scale action networks. In this publication, the authors expand ideas from their previous work, exploring not only storytelling in advocacy, but also how new technological infrastructure is changing the way organisations collect, store, analyse and disseminate stories.

Empathy through storytelling

The authors reflect on how storytelling has always been a powerful tool in court cases and legislative changes, gaining more traction among politicians in the mid-2000s to shape their “perceived authenticity’”. But in the digital age, with the expansion of resources to share stories, storytelling has often been seen as a more persuasive instrument than scientific and data-driven evidence, independent of whether it is based on facts (Chapter one). Stories are anchored in contexts and meanings that can raise empathy and connections, attracting even people who were not initially interested in an issue to support it and sometimes advocate for it. When discussing Claire’s story in Chapter five, the authors point out how her private experience became a public act of advocacy because her narrative encourages others to think about what they would do if they were in her shoes and could not prepare their meals or lock the front door on their own.

At the same time, the authors critically discuss how selecting and editing stories strategically for a wider audience is key for mass persuasion campaigns. Analysing the case of the Marriage Equality Campaign in Australia (Chapter six), the authors used the metaphor of a “double-edged sword”: while datafied storytelling was a route to empower voices and promote self-expression, the campaign’s curation left part of the LGBTQ+ community invisible, such as queer parents and trans people. To address such gaps, the book discusses how crowdsourced stories encourage people to share their personal experiences, expanding the voices collected. But, at the same time, the filtering process of these storytelling campaigns can mute voices and reproduce inequalities (Chapters four, six and eight).

In this analysis lies the main contribution of the book. The authors underline how the current technological landscape has expanded the tools available for citizens to easily share personal aspects of their lives, as discussed by other researchers. And it moves a step further, shedding light on the software infrastructure incorporated by advocacy organisations to create a datafication of storytelling and the emergence of a “Story Tech”.

New tools for collecting stories

Through interviews with story bank managers, engineers, and executives at software firms, nonprofit technology consultants, and the review of story banking manuals, Trevisan, Vaughan and Vromen explore how advocacy organisations have been incorporating new tools offered by the market to collect and manage these stories (Chapter three). For instance, the authors discuss how market-solution digital story banks use the “big data logic” to organise and filter stories, increasing the speed at which information is processed. These software infrastructures also enable the storage of visual and audio content, which is an important advantage in comparison to traditional free tools for record-keeping, such as Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets.

The authors emphasise how this emerging infrastructure is fostering (mainly US) advocacy organisations to develop their “in-house storytelling” (Chapter two), having permanent staff members working on creating their own story database, which can be a useful tool in the long term to help them respond faster to the political shifts. Thus, even though crowdsourcing is often linked with a specific event and uses the expertise of outside communication agencies, the book shows that technology stimulates the development of “story banks” in advocacy organisations. This demonstrates the power of stories and how organisations have been incorporating technological infrastructure to constantly and actively collect this data (Chapter three).

Unconscious bias and other risks

When describing the advance of “Story Tech”, the authors also point out the risks associated with the automation of information and the reliance on algorithms developed by external software companies to help organisations search, filter and select stories (Chapter three). They mention how some stories might be privileged by the algorithms, and the risk that unconscious biases limit the stories incorporated in advocacy campaigns.

In this discussion, a research gap that could be explored is the ethics around the datafication of stories, and which data protection framework is linked with this new “Story Tech” infrastructure. For instance, some of the questions that emerged while reading the book were: do storytellers know how their story will be used and for how long it will be stored? Who has access to these stories, and how can they use them? Trevisan, Vaughan and Vromen do not explicitly answering these questions, though they offer a hint at an analytical approach in Chapter four when they indicate that storytellers want to have opportunities to provide inputs in the advocacy storytelling process.

Story Tech: Power, Storytelling and Social Change Advocacy is an engaging and accessible read for anyone interested in advocacy and how stories can be used to pursue political change. Its analysis is anchored in solid academic research, but the writing can be easily understood by a lay audience. This book is a powerful open-access tool for advocacy campaigners, storytellers and organisations who want to comprehend how storytelling has been used in social change advocacy and what new technologies are offering to actors working in this area. Anyone who wants to understand the relevance of storytelling in the current political order and how this strategy has been used to shape the public debate by progressives and conservatives will enjoy reading 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.

Image: Samsung Memory on Unsplash.

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The post Storytelling for advocacy in the digital age first appeared on LSE Review of Books.

Nation Branding in the Americas: Contested Politics and Identities. Efe Sevin, César Jiménez-MartÍnez and Pablo Miño. Routledge. 2025.

Defining nation branding

Nation Branding in the Americas takes stock of national promotional efforts undertaken in a sample of twelve representative nations from North and South America. In doing so, the authors highlight an underexamined though nearly ubiquitous set of practices that are adjacent to, but distinct from, the aims of foreign policy. The practices described in this thoroughly researched book include campaigns such as Costa Rica’s “Esencial Costa Rica”, Brazil’s “Brazil by Brasil” initiative and Canada’s promotional efforts through the organisation Destination Canada. Though each is unique, the goals of these activities are broadly consistent across the examples surveyed: namely, to attract foreign investment and businesses, increase the appeal of domestic products on international markets, and to entice students and tourists to visit the country. In addition, nation branding activities also aim to cast the governing power in an appealing, internationalist light and consolidate their power to describe to the national personality by defining its essential characteristics. 

Though at first the authors struggle to distinguish their subject from adjacent practices – like public diplomacy or efforts to bolster soft power – the book contains ample examples to convince the reader that nation branding is distinct and worthy of study. By documenting the significant lengths that governments go to prioritise these strategies, a suggestive picture emerges of the ascendency of promotional logics in international affairs. 

By situating nation branding in a historical context with analogous terms such as public diplomacy, the authors outline a period in which the notion of competitive identity come to displace notions of soft power. Particularly rewarding is the discussion that arises when the authors – each a professor whose work focuses on the intersection of media, politics and public diplomacy – apply pressure to these terms, questioning their appropriateness beyond the American context. The authors argue that public diplomacy, which includes “listening to foreign publics, advocacy of domestic policies and values, cultural diplomacy, student exchanges, and professional visits, and international broadcasting” is the preserve of nations with the resources to carry out these activities and broad strategic imperatives to do so (ie great power conflict). The term “public diplomacy” is historically specific and explicitly linked to the concept of soft power. Soft power – the authors argue – is a framework designed to explain an American response to an American problem.

Anholt stresses the difference between nation branding activities, which are commercial in nature and mirror how companies brand their products internationally, and the complex drivers of national reputation. The latter are much harder to achieve

Nation branding, on the other hand, responds to a global economic imperative. Far from being a preserve of hegemonic powers, it is carried out, with varying budgets and to various ends, across the Americas. It is specifically linked to the period of globalisation, to economic liberalisation and to freer trade. It is “an answer to the challenges of neoliberal globalisation,” in which nations must jockey to attract international investment, businesses, tourists and students exhort their citizens to be good brand ambassadors. And it is one which, as tariffs loom over world trade, might now be over?

Key figures in the story of nation branding

Over the course of this story, a few recurring characters emerge. One is Simon Anholt, the British communications advisor credited with coining the term “nation brands” in a 1998 paper, and whose consultancy, Anholt & Co., maintains the Nation Brands Index, a kind of league tables to which tourism boards, foreign ministries and trade departments the world over subscribe. Much like Darwin regretting his association with the term “evolution”, Anholt stresses the difference between nation branding activities, which are commercial in nature and mirror how companies brand their products internationally, and the complex drivers of national reputation. The latter, he argues in Competitive Identity (2006), are much harder to achieve; they are the result of a countries’ “world-friendly” policies and actions. They are often spontaneous and unbuyable actions or ideas that incline you to view a nation in a certain way: think of Cuba’s sending of 500 health workers to aid in Italy’s fight against COVID in the early days of the pandemic. 

Another oracle of the movement is Wally Olins, a British brand consultant who observed in Trading Identities (1999) that countries were taking on some of the traditional functions of corporations, and that the public-sector / private-sector division was being reconfigured through globalisation. A number of consultancies then stepped up to meet nation-states’ newfound promotional needs: one is FutureBrand, which was tasked by Evo Morales with developing a holistic “Brand Bolivia” to promote exports, attract tourism, and stoke foreign investment. (The result, Bolivia, Corazon del Sur, debuted in 2017).

Case studies from Bolivia to Brazil

Future work in this area will likely seek to derive insight more from a few exemplary campaigns rather than tackling the breadth of case studies in this book. Analysis can only be as deep as its source material, and it would take the semiotic genius of Roland Barthes to derive “good reading” from some of the marketing materials cited. However, all marketing dross, no matter how drosslike, tries to achieve some rhetorical tour de main, and this book is most interesting when the authors close-read slogans and visual cues alongside the political context in which they were selected. Sometimes, as in the case of Interbrand’s campaign for Bolivia, a misfired brand can become a magnet for political criticism. (In that case, the issue was the letters spelling “Bolivia” were too close to the Morales’ movimiento blue.) 

In others, striking a new tone with a new national branding campaign can be a deliberate attempt to move on from past governments’ image making. Lula did as much, post-Bolsonaro, by re-introducing the earlier Marca Brasil once his predecessor’s “Brazil by Brasil” campaign drew public scrutiny for its cost and apparent grammatical errors. They can also be deliberately neutral: interesting examples from the book’s first chapter cite Chile, Costa Rica, and Uruguay’s efforts to position themselves to North American audiences as reassuringly dull and stable in comparison to neighbouring states and stereotyped views.  

Nation Branding in the Americas contributes significantly to an amorphous field of study, helping to shape understanding of these practices in the fields of communications, marketing, international relations, anthropology, and cultural studies.

The chapter on the USA is one of the most interesting. Because its market dominance already secures it a measure of global influence, it is one of the few nations in which nation branding efforts must be justified – and simultaneously the one with the most contradictions to synthesise into a coherent brand. “Arrogant, brash, overly familiar, and unwelcoming.” This is how was marketing agency’s JWT’s initial report for Brand USA described the national character, but also “free, diverse, and larger than life.” How to fit all that into a slogan? If the US is the nation with the deepest ambivalence as to to how and whether it should engage the rest of the world, it is also the one whose cultural influence has been all but guaranteed by the ubiquity of its products. As such, it is also the nation whose ever-shifting orientation toward the “rest of world” in large part set the terms of the competitive identity game.

Nation Branding in the Americas contributes significantly to an amorphous field of study, helping to shape understanding of these practices in the fields of communications, marketing, international relations, anthropology, and cultural studies. The authors acknowledge at the time of writing the book that public confidence in globalisation had been undermined and justifications for national promotion “weakened.” A further volume in, say, ten years’ time might be able to assert whether the period in which citizens became brand ambassadors lasted a few decades or if promotional logics are now structurally engrained enough to withstand any shocks. I found myself wishing for an epilogue in which the authors wagered, however provisionally, some prediction – some extension of its historical framework – which could then be used to test its analysis. Whether the methods and practices of globalisation will persist without one of its main architects is a question the authors are excellently placed to address in subsequent work.

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

Image: Allen & Ginter cigarette advertisements for Costa Rica, Argentina and Brazil via rawpixel.

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The post How globalisation changed national image-making first appeared on LSE Review of Books.