Absolutely Essential: Bioethics and the Rules-Based International Order. Jonathan D. Moreno. The MIT Press. 2025.

What happens to science when the global system that has defined the boundaries of its use and abuse begins to unravel? This is the question Jonathan D. Moreno tackles in Absolutely Essential: Bioethics and the Rules-Based International Order. As the post-World War II liberal international (or “rules-based”) order enters crisis, so too does the ethical framework governing medicine and the life sciences (or “bioethics”). Deeply rooted, for Moreno, in Enlightenment values such as individual rights and the consent of the governed, bioethics is inseparable from the political order that shaped it. This is the book’s central argument.

Moreno warns of a crisis not only for science itself, but also for the relationship between science and the state.

As with his previous work, Moreno’s book makes a distinctive and ground-breaking contribution. A number of scholars, such as Sheila Jasanoff, Jennifer Hochschild, and Henk ten Have, have explored the political debates surrounding bioethics, and Annie Jacobsen’s Biological War: A Scenario (2026) takes the reader inside a biological attack. Moreno’s book, however, brings bioethics squarely into the study of international politics and international politics into bioethics.

Antagonism between science and the state

Moreno warns of a crisis not only for science itself, but also for the relationship between science and the state. Bioethics, he shows, has always been both a moral and a political project. It has helped legitimise scientific authority while sustaining a tacit bargain between the state and the life sciences: scientists enjoy broad autonomy as long as they do not “embarrass” political authorities or jeopardise national security. As the rules-based order weakens, Moreno argues, both scientific authority and the state-science relationship face growing uncertainty.

Scientific autonomy depends not only on expertise, but also on public confidence and institutional legitimacy.

Recent debates in the United States suggest that these tensions are already visible. The highly politicised scrutiny of Anthony Fauci – who invoked the Fifth Amendment over 100 times before a GOP-led Senate committee investigating COVID-19’s origins – reflects a growing strain between scientific experts and political authorities. Rising vaccine scepticism points to a broader erosion of trust in scientific institutions. Together, these debates reveal the fragility of the bargain Moreno describes. Scientific autonomy depends not only on expertise, but also on public confidence and institutional legitimacy.

Nuremberg and the history of bioethics

If Moreno’s book is a story of collapse, it is the collapse of an unfinished construction. It is the story of a system that gave rise to bioethics while never fully institutionalizing its principles. The history Moreno recounts was shaped by lofty ideals and the heroic efforts of individuals like Leo Alexander, the psychiatrist who helped expose Nazi Germany’s medical atrocities and drafted the ethical principles, including informed consent, that became the foundation of the Nuremberg Code. But it was also shaped by outsized egos, self-serving bureaucracies, and the overprioritisation of national security. Much of the responsibility lies with the very actors credited with building the postwar order. Yet blaming them alone misses a larger point: bioethics is not a purely Western project, and its future cannot depend on Western states alone.

The contradictions were present from the very birth of modern bioethics. The Nuremberg Trials produced the Nuremberg Code, which established voluntary consent and the protection of human subjects as fundamental principles for scientific research. However, these principles were never fully embedded in the international system. The same powers that prosecuted Nazi physicians for atrocities committed in the name of science made strategic compromises elsewhere. After World War II, the United States granted immunity to Japanese physicians involved in the Imperial Japanese Army’s biological warfare program, including the infamous research facility Unit 731, in exchange for access to their research. Many of these scientists escaped prosecution because Washington viewed their findings as valuable during the emerging Cold War. Many later assumed influential positions in Japan’s medical and public health establishment, including at the National Institute of Health, where some served for decades.

The challenge of global bioethics

The problem was not only selective accountability. It was also the failure to create a genuinely universal bioethical order. Although Moreno does not discuss the 1949 Khabarovsk Trial, in which Soviet authorities prosecuted Japanese officials for biological warfare crimes, the episode suggests that alternative approaches to accountability existed, or at least were attempted. During the Cold War, however, the United States viewed the Soviet Union primarily as a strategic rival rather than as a partner in shaping shared scientific or ethical norms. Geopolitical divisions, along with the West’s reluctance to recognise alternative sources of ethical authority, prevented such experiences from contributing to a broader international conversation.

Rather than evolving through a genuinely global conversation, bioethical principles remained anchored largely in Western institutions and assumptions.

In this sense, the postwar order missed the kind of dialectical exchange across political and cultural boundaries that Nobel laureate economist and philosopher Amartya Sen describes adaptation, and the refinement of ideas as essential to mutual critique. Rather than evolving through a genuinely global conversation, bioethical principles remained anchored largely in Western institutions and assumptions. By failing to cultivate wider international ownership, the “rules-based” order asked others to accept norms they had little role in shaping.

None of this absolves other states of responsibility. Moreno shows how countries with different political systems have struggled to reconcile scientific ambition with bioethical constraints. Moscow’s state-driven biological research and controversies surrounding its COVID-19 vaccine development reveal how political priorities shape scientific practice. China’s experience with human subjects research in genetics highlights similar tensions. The case of He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist whose 2018 CRISPR experiment resulted in the birth of gene-edited children, demonstrates the challenges of enforcing ethical boundaries amid intense scientific competition. He was sentenced to three years in prison, but the episode exposed broader questions about oversight, accountability, and the pressures driving biomedical innovation.

A framework for the next frontier of science

The challenge, then, is not simply to preserve a Western-created bioethical order. It is to build a genuinely universal one: a system capable of confronting past failures while strengthening commitments to human dignity, accountability, and responsible scientific advancement.

Perhaps what most constrains global bioethics is not the system’s erosion or failure, but its partial success. It created a workable consensus without fully building the institutions needed to sustain it. In an era when biotechnology is becoming central to global competition, a “good enough” bioethics will not be enough. The moment demands a more ambitious vision: one that moves beyond preserving past achievements to creating a truly global framework capable of guiding science’s next frontier.

Such a goal may appear lofty, even unrealistic. Yet history shows that ambitious visions can inspire agency. The Nuremberg Code itself was born from a seemingly impossible aspiration: to transform the horrors of wartime medical experimentation into universal principles governing scientific responsibility. The lesson is that a grand vision is not a barrier to change but often a necessary condition for it.

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

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Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity. Valena Beety. The New Press. 2026.

The justice system throughout the world claims to safeguard the rights of each person. Yet, historically, it has privileged some while disempowering others, which still applies today. The American criminal justice system has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world: in 2025, 1.8 million people were imprisoned. Despite making up five per cent of the global population, the US holds 20 per cent of the world’s prison population. Marginalised communities have a higher chance of incarceration, with people of colour (POC) vastly overrepresented in the prison population. Studies account for this through the socio-economic disadvantages and racist discrimination faced by POC in the US, in particular Black Americans. Imprisonment disproportionately impacts already disadvantaged groups, producing and reproducing marginalised subjectivities within existing structures of inequality.

Pink crime and intersectional injustice

Pink Crime byValeena Beety explores the fallacy of equal access to justice within the US criminal legal system, focusing on marginalised genders and sexual identities in context. Beety uses Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality as a theoretical foundation to analyse how overlapping identities rather than separate or “single-axis” forms of discrimination shape criminalisation. Feminist legal scholars have long examined how law can reproduce gendered power relations, while reproductive justice scholarship has highlighted the ways in which reproductive bodies are subject to state regulation and surveillance. Dorothy Roberts’s Killing the Black Body, for example, demonstrates how race and gender shape the regulation of Black women’s reproductive lives. Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch draws attention to the historical control of women’s reproductive capacities and the devaluation of reproductive and care labour.

Beety shows how women and members of the queer community are often imprisoned over no-crime convictions – where the actual crime never occurred, such as acts of self-defence, stillbirths and miscarriages, or accidental deaths.

Beety enters into this discourse with the aim of exposing the various intersections of identity-based discrimination that can lead to convictions. Pink Crime is distinctive in its exploration of gendered and sexual criminalisation, and racial inequalities, LGBTQ+ experiences within the US criminal system, reproductive justice, and the use of forensic science to legitimise these processes. Her concept of “pink crime” captures how gender, sexuality and social norms shape notions of innocence and guilt. In particular, she shows how women and members of the queer community are often imprisoned over no-crime convictions – where the actual crime never occurred, such as acts of self-defence, stillbirths and miscarriages, or accidental deaths. She explores how these convictions disproportionately impact women and queer people, where the interplay of identity, homophobia, misogyny, and racism remains central.

Across seven chapters, Beety successfully demonstrates the interconnectedness of different forms of criminalisation in the US, reinforced by state surveillance and loopholes in the Criminal Legal system. The chapter “Punishing Pregnancy” does this exceptionally well, discussing abortion and foetal rights extensively and high-profile Supreme Court rulings such as Roe v. Wade and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which provided important precedent on the right to abortion for women in the US. The former gave women the liberty to choose whether they want an abortion, and the latter is a highly criticised case that revoked 50 years of precedent giving women the right to abortions. The overturning of Roe v. Wade has removed access to safe abortions as a right in the US. Some states have banned it completely, partially, or imposed restrictions on it. This 2022 ruling continues to impact, and generate discussion around, reproductive rights. 

Wrongful convictions in context

Beety grounds her argument in testimonials of innocent people wrongfully convicted using coercive interrogation techniques and false confessions. One such case is that of Melissa Lucio. A Latina woman living in Texas, she was put on death row for the alleged killing of her daughter, who, according to her, fell from stairs. After the death of her child, she was immediately put into a five-hour interrogation, where she repeatedly stated her innocence, but the authorities kept pressing for a confession. The officials also ignored Ms. Lucio’s vulnerabilities – most notably the shock and grief of her daughter’s death, along with her history of trauma caused by previous experiences of sexual and domestic violence. These factors led Dr. Gudjonsson, a leading scholar around forced confessions, to conclude that Lucio’s case presents a “very high” and “exceptional” risk of factors that induced her to falsely confess to causing her daughter’s death.

Beety’s in-depth analysis shows the difficulty of proving innocence in courts when backed by ‘junk science’: unreliable claims that are presented as scientific, but in fact lack objectivity and are based largely on stereotypes. A prominent example of this is shaken baby syndrome.

A deeply unsettling aspect of no-crime convictions is their gendered nature. There are many cases where women, often the primary caregivers within families, become suspects precisely because of the care labour they perform. The legal system can twist this caring role into false evidence of guilt and convict women of crimes they did not commit. Beety’s in-depth analysis shows the difficulty of proving innocence in courts when backed by “junk science”: unreliable claims that are presented as scientific, but in fact lack objectivity and are based largely on stereotypes. A prominent example of this is shaken baby syndrome, which Beety explores in the case of Tasha Shelby. After her baby died by falling from a bunk bed, Tasha was accused and convicted of capital murder through shaking her baby to death. This chapter shows how baseless pseudoscience can be employed to infringe on the liberties of vulnerable people, and Beety’s how figures of institutional authority, including doctors, police, and Child Protective Services in the US, have repeatedly reinforced each other’s biases. Dr. Leroy Riddick, whose evidence convicted Tasha, decades later decided to retract his statement on this theory. Tasha remains in prison, a stark reminder of how difficult it is to reconsider a case and address judicial errors, despite convincing evidence.

Biopolitical control of women and queer people

Chapters four, “Punishing Queer Identity”, and chapter six, “Punishing Queer Families demonstrate another facet ofpink crime: how the law discriminates against queer people for not fitting into heteronormative and gender-normative categories. In Holloway v. Arthur Andersen (1977), a court dismissed a transgender plaintiff’s sex-discrimination claim, who was fired after she requested a name change at her job. The ruling maintained that “sex” discrimination entails only a traditional biological distinction between men and women, and does not include transsexuality. Rather than examining the merits of her claim, the courts treated her queerness itself as a defect; Her identity was deemed a “sign of severe psychopathology” and she was labelled “immature” and “crippled.” Beety shows how the vocabulary of these laws incriminates queer identity, where they become the perpetual suspects or deviants who need psychiatric attention. This, in turn, makes it difficult as a queer person to navigate any legal process or seek redress.

This policing of certain bodies has only increased through the overturning of Roe v. Wade and recently through social media’s artificial intelligence health monitoring apps that sell people’s data. By policing pregnancy and monitoring natal care, prosecutors are increasingly using social media to “catch” such “bad mothers” to incriminate them under foetal personhood laws of homicide, a belief that embryos deserve legal rights, which then criminalises abortions. Beety shows how this legal ambiguity provides no clear distinction between miscarriage, abortion, or foetal harm.

Pink Crime’s meticulous analyses of individual cases and critiques of the legal system reveal the need for a structural change in the US criminal legal system. Its research has implications beyond the US context, when countries like the UK are moving to restrict the rights of the trans people

In the post-Dobbs era’s direct impact on abortion rights, Beety also highlights how the stripping of women’s bodily autonomy can lead to severe surveillance concerns for queer individuals planning parenthood or seeking gender affirming care. Such policing recalls Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, which describes how states exercise power by regulating and managing bodies and populations in increasingly invasive ways. Overall, Pink Crime’s meticulous analyses of individual cases and critiques of the legal system reveal the need for a structural change in the US criminal legal system. Its research has implications beyond the US context, when countries like the UK are moving to restrict the rights of the trans people. Her book asks readers to make an urgent inquiry beyond the binaries of innocent or guilty, Black or white, and instead calls for a form of solidarity that resists legal and social control over all bodies.

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

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Inequality: The View from Manywheres. Séamus A. Power. Cambridge University Press. 2026.

In Inequality: The View from Manywheres, Séamus Power enters an important debate on inequality in an even-handed way. As an anthropologist and cultural psychologist, he is uniquely equipped to take this on. His “view from manywheres” means that he considers multiple viewpoints on an issue, which is a major strength of the book. Instead of hammering on one thesis like one of his interlocutors, Thomas Piketty, “manywheres” shifts back and forth between arguments that view inequality as either needing to be eliminated (à la Thomas Piketty), or as a normal part of both economic growth and the associated decline of absolute poverty.

Protests often occur not in the worst of times economically, such as during the 2008 financial crash, but when times are booming as people feel that only certain people are benefiting […] they feel ‘relative deprivation’ when comparing themselves to others

How people view their economic systems

In Parts I and II, Power is balanced on capitalism, presenting and sympathising with critiques of it from Piketty and people like geographer Danny Dorling or sociologist Michael Savage, but ultimately defending it as the best solution to getting people out of poverty, despite the inequality it produces. After he lays out the virtues and vices of capitalism, he then gives us interesting case studies on people’s attitudes to their political economic systems in various countries, including his native Ireland. He observes that protests often occur not in the worst of times economically, such as during the 2008 financial crash, but when times are booming, like in Ireland from 2013-2015, as people feel that only certain people are benefiting. They feel “relative deprivation” when comparing themselves to others – a basic and crucial human tendency, as Power explains in the book. 

In a chapter on populism, Power describes it as: “a backlash to growing economic inequality, feelings of relative deprivation, fears for the future, and exploitation of a desire for hope and clarity in those who are or feel impoverished and incapable of pursuing their human capabilities in unequal societies.” In general, the focus on economic discontent, which likely reflects his European context and his presumably left-leaning audience, may not resonate with readers based elsewhere. The authoritarian populist right has become the main alternative to mainstream parties in many areas of Europe and most recently in Latin America and South Asia. Except for a few cities like Mamdani’s New York, socialism in the US is a losing proposition. Inequality doesn’t seem to bother Americans as much, with a strong subset of the population, many lower-income, supporting a corrupt billionaire president. Their anger is directed more at the cultural elite than the economic elite, and they see Trump as defending their values.

Drivers of political leanings and aspirations

When he does address the US, he states that the US “rust belt” label is “a perfect representation of the stagnation and feelings of deprivation felt by many people living there.”  This seems a little out of date and too simplistic. Major coastal states like Massachusetts and California are now losing population to the interior because of high costs and poor governance. The Midwest, the South and the intermountain West are now seen as among the most attractive places to live because of their low cost of living, low taxes, and low unemployment. Overall, the US has been doing better economically than most of Europe, with Britain and France now poorer than the poorest American states, even though the US has a higher generational poverty problem. 

Not all people are driven by material aspirations. Many prioritise things like sociality, family and locality over the mobility and dislocation that often follows the pursuit of economic opportunities.

His equality-difference paradox chapter at the end of Part II is arguably the strongest and most interesting part of the book. The paradox reveals something that most economists, including people like Piketty miss: diversity itself contributes to inequality. Not all people are driven by material aspirations. Many prioritise things like sociality, family and locality over the mobility and dislocation that often follows the pursuit of economic opportunities. It is not just capitalism that causes inequality, but the diversity of people, and this diversity is not always bad.

Could “pluralistic capitalisms” work?

In Part III, Power lays out “three possible futures”: a status quo of increasing inequality, a counter-reaction to that in the strengthening of leftist control of the economy that will ultimately leave people worse off, and his favoured approach of “pluralistic capitalisms.” This involves a nuanced approach drawn from his “view from manywheres” but given a prescriptive basis through Martha Nussbaum’s human capabilities approach. Basically, he argues for “fairer forms of capitalism that centre on creating, maintaining, and developing people’s human capabilities” that don’t just focus on wealth, but the whole range of human experience. 

Because he ranges so widely, most readers will likely agree and disagree with different parts of the book. Some of the works Power highlights on inequality and poverty aren’t the strongest. The 2009 book by Kate Pickett and Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level, has been heavily criticised (along with Piketty’s work) on methodological and statistical grounds, to the point that its main claim that inequality itself somehow contributes to poor health cannot be supported. The book’s popularity among the left is more a reflection of the popular narrative it plays into. Sociologist Matt Desmond’s work is popular for the same reason and for its vivid portrayal of poverty, but lacks nuance on the issue. It sticks to standard left-leaning approaches rather than a fuller picture of poverty grounded in not only structures, but also subcultures and generational family dynamics (such as children having few good or stable family role models) that redistribution alone won’t cure. Socialisation into middle-class habits of saving and planning is crucial for success, but not all children experience this. 

The challenge inequality presents

The book could be seen by those on the left as too idealistic in its measured, hopeful approach that sensible regulation can adjust capitalism to reduce inequality. The underlying question is, why are people doing generally well, yet still so dissatisfied? Power’s partial answer is perceptions of fairness involving inequality. It would go beyond the “inequality” scope of his book to delve deeply into wider answers, which likely involve the growth of the internet and social media and, relatedly, frustration with the political rulers (which can emanate from both the right and the left). 

Power’s value pluralist ‘manywheres’ approach has to be the best starting point of any analysis.

Power’s value pluralism “manywheres” approach has to be the best starting point of any analysis. He comes down sensibly accepting growth, with lots of reasonable qualifications, such as needing to find a way to distribute it more equitably. But the challenge is great, and future writing on this subject would benefit from delving more deeply. Attempting to address global inequality requires going beyond economic considerations to an exploration of, for instance, how deeper “moral foundations” such as care, fairness, authority and purity (which is related to the work of Power’s PhD advisor Richard Shweder) affect people’s outlooks and political leanings in an era where various populisms will likely only become stronger.

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

Read an interview with the author in LSE Research for the World Magazine The limits of inequality: why feeling poor matters in an age of abundance.

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Climate Hegemony: Confronting the Politics of the Environmental Impasse. Laurie Parsons. LSE Press. 2026.

Climate Hegemony begins with a question familiar to anyone working at the intersection of environmental policy and political power: why, after decades of scientific consensus, international agreements and growing public concern, do carbon emissions continue to rise? Laurie Parsons’ answer in this book is not the most common. The problem, he argues, is not denial, insufficient data, or even corporate lobbying in a simple sense. It is something more structural and, in a way, more troubling. He believes that the very frameworks through which climate change is understood serve to narrow the range of responses considered possible. Climate discourse does not describe the impasse; it produces it.

The opening section examines how metaphors – ‘the war on climate change,’ ‘we are all in this together,’ ‘future generations’ – do not simply communicate climate science but actively shape which policy pathways appear legitimate.

Parsons has spent close to twenty years researching the nexus of economy and environment in Cambodia, where he has lived for extended periods across two decades. That embedded experience shapes the book in important ways. This is not a text that reaches for Cambodia as a convenient case study. It is one in which the country’s farmers, fishers, garment workers, village chiefs, and ministry officials drive the analysis. Their testimonies reveal the distance between how climate change appears in a policy bulletin and how it appears to those living through it.

Hegemony, metaphor and structures of climate thinking

The book’s theoretical framework draws on Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxist conception of hegemony, extended through Foucault’s notion of regimes of truth. For Parsons, climate hegemony rests on three foundations: constructed objectivity, apparent universality, and a sense of necessity. Against this the book proposes three counter-pillars: subjectivity, partiality, and choice. Each is developed across empirical chapters grounded in Cambodia, tracing connections from village-level experience upward to global governance.

The opening section examines how metaphors – “the war on climate change,” “we are all in this together,” “future generations” – do not simply communicate climate science but actively shape which policy pathways appear legitimate. When sufficiently embedded, such metaphors quietly erase differentiated responsibilities between a subsistence farmer in Prey Veng and a major fossil fuel conglomerate. Drawing on Lakoff and Johnson’s work on conceptual metaphors, Parsons calls this a “metaphorical fallacy” – the point at which a metaphor ceases to function as a comparison and begins to function as a fact. This gives it a distinctly political edge by showing how these fallacies operate in the service of particular interests.

The climate migrant as empty signifier

The book’s most compelling contribution is its deconstruction of the figure of the climate migrant. Rather than debating the numbers – estimates of climate-driven displacement range from tens of millions to billions – Parsons interrogates the category itself. The climate migrant, he argues, functions as an “empty signifier”: sufficiently vague to unite otherwise opposed political coalitions, from liberal humanitarians to securitisation advocates, while remaining untethered from the complex realities of actual mobility under environmental stress. Despite being one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries, Cambodia’s own labour migration policy contains no reference to environmental push factors, which is a pattern mirrored globally, where UK climate finance flows to geopolitically strategic regions rather than the most vulnerable ones.

The testimony of Yay Mom, an 87-year-old beggar from Prey Veng province, is emblematic of the book’s method. Displaced by agricultural mechanisation, changing rainfall patterns and the stigma of her informal livelihood, she fits no clean policy category. It is precisely her ambiguity that makes her analytically useful. Her story exposes how the climate migrant category captures only those whose mobility is deemed “problematic,” rendering invisible the far larger number of people whose movements serve national economic goals.

Narrative, water and the politics of complexity

The second section turns to how narratives cut through environmental complexity in ways that consistently favour politically expedient pathways over effective ones. The Tonle Sap Lake – Southeast Asia’s largest freshwater lake, with fish stocks now estimated at 80-95 per cent below their levels of two decades ago – is the central case. Media coverage, including a much-publicised moment in which television presenter Jeremy Clarkson underwent a climate “conversion” on the lake’s desiccated banks, has framed this as a straightforward story of climate change. Parsons shows it is nothing of the sort.

Climate change functions as an empty signifier – one that displaces intractable political questions onto an atmospheric process over which neither local nor national governments bear direct responsibility.

The lake’s decline reflects at least six converging pressures – upstream Chinese dam construction, industrial overfishing, garment factory pollution and the burning of floating forests among them. Yet government policy has focused on small-scale enforcement actions against local fishing communities, and more specifically against ethnic Vietnamese floating villages that make a politically convenient target. The crackdowns announced by then-Prime Minister Hun Sen between 2019 and 2022 performed environmental governance while advancing a longstanding nationalist agenda. Climate change, Parsons argues, functions here as an empty signifier – one that displaces intractable political questions onto an atmospheric process over which neither local nor national governments bear direct responsibility.

The politics of knowledge, ignorance and climate

The book’s final section, on choice, is its most original. Parsons develops the concept of “thumbnail knowledges” – areas of understanding that are familiar enough to feel solid but too shallow to withstand scrutiny – to explain how gaps in environmental knowledge are not incidental but agentive. The geography of rainfall stations in Cambodia, concentrated near provincial capitals and urban centres rather than in the agriculturally critical areas most prone to drought, reflects political and administrative priorities rather than hydrological ones. Drought warnings, when issued at all, travel down formal administrative hierarchies without reaching the farmers who need them. Data sharing on Mekong water flows is constrained by geopolitical tensions, particularly around Chinese dam operations, which can release billions of tonnes of water with no advance notice to downstream countries.

While the proposed alternative of building climate knowledge from the ground up is intellectually persuasive, translating that insight into concrete governance reform remains an open question

Climate Hegemony is not without its tensions. The theoretical framework is occasionally deployed more as assertion than demonstration – the concept of the empty signifier recurs across multiple chapters without always making its connection to the empirical material explicit. The Cambodia focus, while richly productive, also raises questions about generalisability that the concluding chapter gestures toward without fully resolving. And while the proposed alternative of building climate knowledge from the ground up is intellectually persuasive, translating that insight into concrete governance reform remains an open question the book acknowledges but does not answer.

These limitations should not diminish the book’s achievement. Alongside work by Kasia Paprocki, Farhana Sultana and Andreas Malm, Climate Hegemony makes a genuine contribution to a growing body of scholarship that insists on treating climate change as a political phenomenon rather than a technical one. What distinguishes Parsons’ contribution is the granularity of its empirical grounding and the persistence with which it holds multiple scales in view simultaneously – from the net lengths used by desperate fishers on the Tonle Sap, to the rhetorical conventions of a UK parliamentary hearing on climate migration, to the investment decisions of multilateral development banks. The threads between these scales are not always visible, but Climate Hegemony makes a persuasive case that pulling on them is the most important intellectual task facing climate scholarship today.

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

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Majority State Ownership of Oil and Mining Sectors in Africa: The Resource Curse Undermined. John James Quinn. Routledge. 2025.

In the 1980s, a young Peace Corps volunteer in Zaire named John Quinn found himself stranded at Kisangani airport with no flights to Kinshasa in the offing. As it happened, then-President Mobutu had commandeered the plane for an impromptu shopping spree in Europe. Having seen firsthand the consequences of leaders who conflate the private and public spheres, Quinn spent much of his subsequent academic career explicating the corrosive effects of government-controlled firms.  His recent book Majority State Ownership of Oil and Mining Sectors in Africa: The Resource Curse Undermined serves as a capstone on those decades of research. It offers a concise summary of how and why independent African countries took wildly different trajectories, then closes with informed speculation about where they may head in the future. 

Resource nationalisation’s promise 

Having long watched colonial powers drain wealth from their lands, in the 1960s new nations from Angola to Zambia saw a direct path to development: nationalisation. If resources like oil, cobalt, and copper belonged to “the people,” then naturally the government should acquire the companies extracting that bounty. Instead of paying dividends to foreigners, profits would pay for local services and infrastructure. And what better way to build human capital than by ensuring jobs went to locals? But when those neat, optimistic plans collided with reality, the results ranged from deleterious to catastrophic. 

Instead of the profit motive, patronage determined the allocation of jobs, investments, and currency. Tribe mattered more than expertise in hiring. Instead of reinvesting profits, inept management frequently raided the coffers. And while their misallocation certainly enabled personal corruption, they also wasted actual government spending by subsidising loss-making firms in other sectors. Direct control over the nation’s primary exports meant that the government allocated foreign currency according to its needs, not the market’s. Seizing these firms allowed ruling parties to avoid compromising with opposition groups over mundane necessities like taxes, while rendering the property of every citizen less secure. All this occurred during the Cold War, with the Soviets urging nationalisation and the Americans acquiescing for fear of losing allies. 

Across Sub-Saharan Africa, Majority State Ownership status correlated with slower economic growth, less wealth, stagnant agriculture and manufacturing, more conflict, and diminished civil rights […] But Quinn highlights two inconvenient truths: First, official statistics can obscure as much as they reveal, and second, establishing casualty demands far more than showing a difference on average. 

Having outlined the incentives and mechanisms that doomed “majority state ownership” (MSO) of oil and mineral exports, Quinn tallies the damage statistically. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, MSO status correlated with slower economic growth, less wealth, stagnant agriculture and manufacturing, more conflict, and diminished civil rights. Economists have used the term “resource curse” for decades to summarise these trends. But instead of simply affirming the narrative, Quinn highlights two inconvenient truths: First, official statistics can obscure as much as they reveal, and second, establishing casualty demands far more than showing a difference on average. 

Unpacking the data on state vs private 

Economist studying the effects of resource booms have long observed “Dutch Disease,” when growing exports drive up the value of a currency, rendering agriculture and manufacturing less competitive. But how to test this theory for countries with a fixed exchange rate, whether a peg to the dollar or membership in the CFA frac zone? Here Quinn resorts to both the real exchange rate (which accounts for prices) and black-market rates. Likewise, a surge in world prices can stimulate production of any commodity, so the book’s analysis of agriculture covers both value-added and volume. Of course, some statistics do not just mislead but simply lie: Rwandan and Ugandan gold exports reflect smuggling, not production.   

While Cameroon’s years of one-party rule from 1966 to 1990 were hardly idyllic, Nigerians suffering recurrent coups might well have envied their neighbours’ stability.  

While Quinn’s deft handling of the numbers makes his thesis credible, he wisely admits that observational data at the country level will never yield precise cause-and-effect inferences. The regimes that opted for control of natural resources typically chose other “inward-oriented policies” across their economies. By using MSO status as a proxy for those policies, the book’s case studies yield convincing insights. Cameroon and Nigeria share a 2,000-kilometer border and a history of reliance on oil exports, but the former allowed its petroleum industry a relatively free hand while the later opted for state control. From 1966 to 2000, Cameroon’s per capita GDP grew at 1.6 per cent per year. A dispiriting outcome but consider the alternative: Nigeria shrank by 2.5 per cent annually per capita in those years. It went from being a major exporter of cotton, palm oil, and cocoa, to a net food importer. Cameroon privatised their banana industry and saw exports soar. And while its years of one-party rule from 1966 to 1990 were hardly idyllic, Nigerians suffering recurrent coups might well have envied their neighbours’ stability.  

When a huge trade surplus left China with excess foreign currency, lending those funds abroad allowed it to earn a return without sparking domestic inflation. Those same investments also provided employment for Chinese nationals and ensured continued access to natural resources.

While researchers have long warned students that “correlation does not equal causation,” the “Causal Revolution” that swept the social sciences in recent decades imposed new rigor on sweeping claims like “State ownership of natural resources inhibits economic growth and democratic progress.” And throughout the book, Quinn provides a litany of confounding factors. In Equatorial Guinea, the Nguema family’s pervasive reach would have rendered any firm, public or private, complicit in state corruption. Droughts in the Sahel battered farms regardless of who owned the mines.  Better management at copper mines in Zaire would not have prevented the loss of rail access when Angola and Mozambique descended into civil war. Such factors will aways prevent neat counterfactuals. But Quinn refuses to succumb to epistemological nihilism because the anecdotal and statistical evidence, while imperfect, is overwhelming. Whatever allure it held in 1960, the nationalisation of oil and mining sectors failed in social, economic, and political terms. 

The boom in Chinese investment 

Although many countries’ petroleum industries remain under state control, since 2000 much of Sub-Saharan Africa has moved towards trade, privatisation, and openness to foreign investment. The results compelled economists to publish research papers with titles like “What Is Driving the ‘African Growth Miracle’?” But no sooner had markets triumphed than state-led development reappeared in the form of surging Chinese investment. Quinn provides a concise and objective summary of China’s actions and motivation: when a huge trade surplus left China with excess foreign currency, lending those funds abroad allowed it to earn a return without sparking domestic inflation. Those same investments also provided employment for Chinese nationals and ensured continued access to natural resources. China became Sub-Saharan Africa’s largest import and export partner in 2006 and 2012, respectively.  

In February of 1960, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan delivered an epochal speech to the South African parliament: 

“The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact…. As I see it the great issue in this second half of the 20th century is whether the uncommitted peoples of Asia and Africa will swing to the East or to the West.” 

A lifetime after Macmillan’s address, the issue remains salient. Near the book’s close, Quinn concedes that quick privatisation cannot substitute for genuine institutional reform. But recent news suggests that perhaps Africa will achieve both: a private Nigerian refinery became the world’s largest exporter of aviation fuel on its way to a blockbuster public offering. Quinn has written a valuable primer on state ownership in Africa’s economic past. It’s now up to African leaders to make sure it stays there.

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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Nonauthoritarian Authority: Cities, Materiality, and the Aesthetics of Power. Julian Brigstocke. LSE Press. 2026.

Defining authority

We are living in a moment marked by the challenged legitimacy of traditional authorities and the emergence of new forms of authority exercised by market actors, social media influencers, algorithms, and other non-human agents. Authority at once a deeply contested yet indispensable part of contemporary political and social life. Julian Brigstocke’s Nonauthoritarian Authority intervenes into this issue. It brings a spatial sensibility to contemporary debates and redirects them away from familiar oppositions between anti-authoritarian and neo-authoritarian perspectives.

The book offers a wide empirical and historical range, from 19th-century Paris to 20th-century Hong Kong to contemporary Brazil, alongside other contemporary urban everyday life, and develops an account of authority as embodied, dispersed, and affectively constituted. In so doing, the book engages in and extends debates on non-coercive forms of authority, exemplified by works including The Notion of Authority by Alexandre Kojève(1942), Authority by Richard Sennett (1980), Quasi-things: the paradigm of atmospheres by Tonino Griffero 2017 and others.

The book pluralises authority by widening both the range of entities considered capable of exerting it and the methodological repertoires through which it can be perceived and analysed.

In her 1961 work Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt distinguished between authority and coercion, violence, or force and insisted that authority should not be conflated with “authoritarianism” in its popular sense. Brigstocke takes this conceptual clarity as a key point of departure. He further develops a sustained rethinking of authority through dialogue with speculative philosophy to reinterpret the totality of experience, feminist new materialist theory to foreground material relationality, decolonial aesthetics to challenge the authority of the colonial order through aesthetic resistance, and emerging work in authority studies to rethink how authority is constituted, negotiated, ad transformed. In doing so, the book pluralises authority by widening both the range of entities considered capable of exerting it and the methodological repertoires through which it can be perceived and analysed. This includes a mixed-methods approach that combines archives, interviews, and ethnographic observation with experimental methods, including biosensor data, to trace dispersed and emergent forms of authority.

Theorising non-authoritarian authority

Adopting a playful yet rigorous approach, Brigstocke draws on a range of theoretical traditions and methodological perspectives to develop a positive account of authority in the present. The book’s central ambition is to experiment with ways of thinking about authority beyond singular, hierarchical logics, exploring the possibility of an egalitarian “non-authoritarian authority” compatible with a plural and heterogeneous world. Across empirical, conceptual, and temporal terrains, the author explores how authority can coordinate socio-spatial relations through forms of voluntary deference grounded not only in trust, respect, and expertise, but also in augmentation, attunement, and attention, in both conscious and unconscious ways. Building on this argument, the author reconceptualises authority as a relational and spatial achievement rather than a fixed or sovereign form of power.

Brigstocke illustrates how authority emerges through everyday interactions, mutual recognition, and shared expectations rather than formal enforcement

Deriving from the Latin augere (“to augment”), authority is defined by its capacity to enlarge shared life through voluntary guidance that preserves agency. Distributed across human and nonhuman actors, it is embodied, affective, and enacted through habits, care, and repetition, while remaining provisional and open to revision. This perspective highlights how authority is produced through spatial practices that create, sustain, and reshape the commons, the shared relations, spaces, and experiences that make collective life possible. For example, at the contested borders of favelas, authority is enacted through care, where the emotional labour of de-escalating tension coordinates collective life without relying on coercion. In a very different setting, the Bristol and Bath Railway Path, Brigstocke illustrates how authority emerges through everyday interactions, mutual recognition, and shared expectations rather than formal enforcement.

Agency beyond the human

Brigstocke subverts the conventions of academic writing through a self-reflexive style that continually questions its own authority. The text also draws readers into the practice of lectio divina, an ancient Christian tradition of contemplative reading, inviting them to use the text to explore their relationship with life. In a further departure from anthropocentric enquiry, the author dares to conduct an interview with sand, reclaiming the etymological sense of the interview as a mutual “glimpse of one another” and, in doing so, contesting the assumption that humans alone constitute social and political life.In chapter nine, Brigstocke invites the reader to adopt the perspective of sand itself, a striking imaginative move that can be applied in other contexts.

The author’s invitation to give voice to sand expands the field of agency beyond the human, fostering an attunement to a range of nonhuman “lures” understood as aesthetic and relational modes of engagement with nonhuman temporalities. However, the authority of nature apparent in disasters like disease outbreaks, earthquakes, or hurricanes, it is relatively straightforward to recognise something like an authority of nature, yet such phenomena more commonly lead us to scientific expertise rather than to an acknowledgement of a non-authoritarian authority exercised by non-human agents. While this framework offers a powerful way of decentring human exceptionalism and foregrounding relationality, it risks flattening ontology in which human beings are not accorded distinctive moral standing relative to other entities. This point that lies at the heart of broader debates on new materialism: different entities operate through distinct material and causal mechanisms, and that human action is distinguished by purposive consciousness, reflexivity, intentionality, and causal efficacy.

Overall, the book shifts the discussion of authority away from ontological and epistemological registers toward an aesthetic one. Brigstocke argues that what is at stake is not primarily the nature of reality or the limits of knowledge, but rather how reality presents itself to the senses, including a “sense for reality” that shapes what becomes available for selection, judgement, and evaluation. An aesthetics of authority is, at its core, an ethos of creativity and experimentation: both in how authority is followed and practised, and in how the very composition of the “we” is continually formed and re-formed.

Being uncomfortable in the world

Chapter seven develops this argument through an experimental methodology that combines urban fieldwork with quantitative measures of electrodermal activity (EDA), used to register the activation of the sympathetic nervous system in situ revealing the embodied experience of authority through emotional states such as fear, stress, and comfort in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Crucially, the chapter shows that authority does not necessarily depend on explicit consent; instead, it often operates through nonconscious and affective registers of responsiveness. This complicates standard distinctions among coercion, manipulation, and voluntary agreement, while offering a complementary account of how authority is sensed and lived.

Discomfort fosters heightened attentiveness and becomes central to a renewed spatial practice of non-authoritarian authority, one that may also resonate with our shared condition of not fully feeling at home in the world.

Overall, the book contributes to a reconceptualisation of authority as provisional and experiential, challenging Weberian notions of authority as legitimate domination. The book pushes beyond understandings of authority as institutionalised command grounded in rational-legal, traditional, or charismatic legitimacy, and closely associated with bureaucracy, coercion, and discipline as sources of power. It extends this line of thought by presenting non-authoritarian authority as an emergent form grounded in what is described as “a practice of being uncomfortable in the world” (53).

Such discomfort, the author suggests, fosters heightened attentiveness and becomes central to a renewed spatial practice of non-authoritarian authority, one that may also resonate with our shared condition of not fully feeling at home in the world. This powerful and deeply critical engagement with authority literature will appeal to scholars seeking new horizons across the social sciences and humanities, as well as readers drawn to experimental and speculative modes of academic thought and writing. It will also be an inspiring read for scholars of the commons and commoning, offering a fresh perspective on authority as a relational and collective practice.

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

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The Migration Question: Politics, Economics and the Failure of Border Security. Leila Simona Talani and Matilde Rosina. Oxford University Press and Hurst Publishers. 2026.

To begin with, what prompted you and your co-author Leila Simona Talani to write The Migration Question?

Migration is one of today’s most polarising and controversial topics. It has the power to define elections, referenda and international relations across states. We see on one hand domestic publics asking for more restrictions on immigration, but on the other hand, people risking their lives to migrate to safety.

This is the backdrop that pushed us to write the book. In it, we consider the big questions of migration, such as why do people migrate, and can deterrence policies work? We also try to debunk some of the myths around the topic, because there is a lot of misinformation about migration.

Only around three per cent of the world’s population are migrants. And not only is the proportion so low, but it has been pretty much stable at that level for the past 50 years.

One interesting example is that, despite the amount of attention that migrants get in the media and in political discourse, only a small proportion of the world’s population are migrants – most people tend to spend their lives in the countries where they were born. In fact, only around three per cent of the world’s population are migrants. And not only is the proportion so low, but it has been pretty much stable at that level for the past 50 years.

Highlighting these kinds of gaps between representation and reality was one of our key motivations.

How did you research the book?

We drew on a range of sources to research and write the book. We conducted interviews with stakeholders such as policymakers, judges, prosecutors, both at the national and EU level. We conducted surveys with migrants and refugees, and we also looked at policy documents and legislation to examine the policy changes over time. Finally, we complemented all this with statistics on migration, crime, and other factors.

It was very important to us to both review the established academic evidence and to bring in the views of different stakeholders, including migrants.

There are lots of different perspectives on migration, and yet, you arrive at some conclusions through your research into some of the big claims made about migration and the impacts of migration policies. For example, you look at policies that try to deter migrants from coming to a country. Are those policies effective?

Deterrence policies are the basis of many policies on migration that we see today across Europe and North America. The idea behind deterrence supposes that people are rational decision makers, so that if we increase the costs of migrating, people will, in theory, decide not to migrate but to stay home.

Deterrence policies tend to serve domestic politics over policy outcomes – the demands of the local electorates more than the reasons why people migrate.

What we find is that deterrence policies often fail, and this is due, mainly, to four factors. First, although these policies increase the cost of the journey, they don’t address the root causes of migration, the structural factors pushing migrants to leave. Second, when deterrence policies have some kind of impact, they tend to divert routes. So, for instance, people may be diverted onto other sections of the border, rather than be deterred from entering.

Third, migrants’ degree of information is regularly overestimated. We conducted surveys in Italy and France and found that two-thirds of respondents weren’t aware of any measures concerning the sanctions for irregular migration. Importantly, of those who knew about those measures, most of them learned about them only once they arrived in Europe. Lastly, most of these deterrence policies tend to serve domestic politics over policy outcomes – the demands of the local electorates more than the reasons why people migrate.

I’d like to pick up on your point that deterrence policies push regular migration into irregular migration, where people cross at different border points rather than decide not to come. Of course, this presents many dangers and problems for migrants, but you argue this also has negative impacts on people in the host country. How does that work?

Yes. Having these restrictive policies increases irregularity, with negative consequences both for migrants and receiving societies.

If low-skilled migrants have no way to enter receiving societies in Europe other than irregularly, they are forced to rely on smuggling networks. This means that they are more subject to exploitation and are highly vulnerable. Once they arrive in Europe, they cannot work legally because they don’t have a permit. This means they do not pay taxes and cannot find regular housing, and they are pushed into the margins of society. This creates a limbo where migrants cannot be regularised, yet they cannot be returned to their own country either, due to the many challenges involved with returns.

We often hear that migrants commit more crime than citizens. Our argument in the book is that where this is the case, this is a result of securitisation and restrictive policies. First, this is because migrants are marginalised and deprived of access to regular employment. Second, it is because policies that criminalise migration create an association in people’s minds that there is a link between migrants and crime, reinforcing this marginalisation process.

On the point of securitisation, one of the key moments you look at is this period from 2014 to 2016 when there was a huge uptick in the number of refugees arriving in Europe. The EU’s response was to attempt to secure its borders. But you suggest that such securitisation policymaking does not actually produce more security.

In fact, our argument is that securitisation produces more insecurity rather than more security. This is because when you have these very restrictive policies that present migration as a security threat that should be stopped, migration automatically becomes more visible. Meanwhile, the expectations that the government will be able to control migration increase.

When [restrictive, anti-immigration] policies fail, because migration has become more visible, the failure itself is more visible

Then, when these policies fail, because migration has become more visible, the failure itself is more visible. This leads to more insecurity for the receiving societies, and locks countries into a vicious cycle of insecurity.

For instance, France has had a policy to criminalise migrants for irregular migration since the 1930s. Now, they did try to get rid of some aspects of that crime over time, however, for every piece of the policy they removed, they introduced new related sanctions to assuage voters.

This shows how, although it’s easy to introduce new securitising measures, politically, it’s hard to remove them once they’re in place, generating an insecurity loop.

We hear in political rhetoric and in the media claims that migrants could be taking jobs from citizens of receiving countries, and that their arrival could have a negative economic impact, for instance through increasing the demand for social welfare. But your research contradicts these claims.

We hear very often that migrants take our jobs or lower our wages. However, the reality is that migrants mostly do those jobs that locals refuse to do.

The working conditions for migrants are usually below minimum standards, and underemployment is very common. There is a lot of exploitation, for instance, in Southern Europe, of migrants by employers, particularly in the agricultural sector in countries such as Italy. And there is no strong evidence that migrants displace local workers.

Interestingly, studies show that if we were to liberalise or remove all barriers to migration at the global level, the world GDP would increase by 150 per cent – a massive boost.

Your book discusses how right-wing populism has latched on to anti-immigrant rhetoric. Why do you think migrants, refugees and asylum seekers have become such scapegoats for this broad populist movement on the right?

Our argument is that populism doesn’t result from the presence of migrants. Rather, it is the consequence of an economic discontent stemming from globalisation and its uneven impact, both across and within countries. This discontent is hard to address politically, and migrants are easier to scapegoat – because they are foreigners, and because they cannot vote.

If the root causes of migration are related to globalisation, then only addressing the structural components of globalisation can address migration.

Often, we hear populist actors saying that we should “help migrants at home” as an easy, alternative solution. In the book, we ask whether that would be possible. The idea of the “migration hump” hypothesis is important here. Research has found that in the short term, more development leads to more emigration from countries, and it’s only in the longer term that emigration comes down. This is because with development, people’s aspirations and economic capabilities to migrate increase up to a certain point, and only later they decrease, as the opportunities in their home countries grow.

Our argument is that it’s not as easy as just helping them at home. If the root causes of migration are related to globalisation, then only addressing the structural components of globalisation can address migration. We need substantial structural intervention in the sending countries with a focus on education, research, development and technological innovation.

Those types of structural interventions would need to be huge in scale and long-term. How do you see the politics of migration playing out in the short to medium term when it seems this populist, right-wing, anti-immigrant stance has such a hold, particularly in Europe and the US? Do you think it’s possible to move towards these kinds of structural changes and shift people’s attitudes towards embracing migration?

I think for that we would need a radical change in the way we speak about migration. We need to recognise that migration is a positive force for European and North American economies, which are structurally dependent on foreign workers.

Crucially, we need more open, legal pathways to tackle the exploitation, marginalisation and risks that come with the irregular journeys. Better legal pathways would benefit both refugees and economic migrants. And receiving countries need both high-skilled and low-migrants, for their economies. Providing safe, legal routes is key to enable migration management that is more sound, more humane, and more effective.

Note: This interview gives the views of the participants 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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Queer Conflict Research: New Approaches to the Study of Political Violence. Jamie J. Hagen, Samuel Ritholtz and Andrew Delatolla. Bristol University Press. 2025.

For scholars of Queer Conflict Studies, Feminist International Relations (IR) and Queer International Relations IR, Queer Conflict Research: New Approaches to the Study of Political Violence is both a homecoming and a departure. In this expansive volume, the editors, Jamie J. Hagen, Samuel Ritholtz and Andrew Delatolla chart the emerging field of Queer Conflict Research, which examines how the logics of gender and sexuality shape queer experiences, production, and study of political violence, peacebuilding, and security.

Charting queer conflict research

 Situated at the intersection of feminist security studies (FSS), queer IR, and conflict studies, the volume builds on the work of predecessors such as Cynthia Enloe, Cynthia Weber, Dianne Otto, and J. Ann Tickner, advancing queer conflict research as a distinct conversation on political violence. However, in a very queer fashion, the editors begin by underscoring that they do not seek to police the boundaries of queer conflict research (1, 2). This sentiment reverberates throughout the collection. 

Comprised of contributions from 19 scholars, the volume consistently foregrounds the plurality of approaches, methods, epistemologies and lived experiences that constitute the field (212). In doing so, it demonstrates that these differences can converge, intersect, or never meet, remaining in productive tension and collectively shaping the contours of queer conflict research, without diluting the queer resistance to a fixed definition. 

Centring queer and trans perspectives expands the meaning of peace and conflict beyond state declarations and recognised conflict zones.

Detailing the significance of queerness in conflict research, the introduction illustrates how centring queer and trans perspectives expands the meaning of peace and conflict beyond state declarations and recognised conflict zones. It reveals how queer (in)security is often produced and negotiated in the intimate, social, and everyday spaces, long before armed conflict. This violence takes the forms of familial rejection, social exclusion, institutional discrimination and persecution. The introduction further emphasises epistemological conversations between mainstream political science and queer and critical approaches, focusing on productive engagement rather than disciplinary separation. Committed to the emancipatory commitments of FSS, the volume is organised around three interconnected lines of inquiry, exploring queer approaches, methods, and experiences in relation to the “what” and “how” of conflict research. 

Queer epistemologies

Beginning with approaches to conflict research, this section explores queer epistemologies by centring the politics of knowledge production and the ethical implications of the research design. Ritholtz provides what they call as a “how to think about epistemology” guide to navigate the academic landscapes that have historically dismissed or siloed queer and trans subjectivities. Identifying the creative potential of research design, they frame queer as subject, structure and method (19).

Critiquing institutional ignorance, the “politics of not knowing” Serrano-Amaya highlights the intertwined roles of academia and activism in producing knowledge while cautioning that increased visibility can homogenise queer experiences and institutionalise victimhood (55). Hagen extends these debates into a queer feminist praxis, using participatory workshops to foreground collaboration and cross-movement solidarity while addressing the neglect of queer women in the WPS agenda (61). Taken together, these chapters move beyond the “add and stir” tokenistic approaches critiqued by feminists, framing queer conflict research as a reflexive and politically situated practice of knowledge production. 

Methodologies pluralism

The collection also refuses to reduce queer research to a prescribed approach and methodology, and merely the inclusion of LGBTQ+ subjects. Evidently, the section on methods begins with Cooper-Cunningham arguing that methods are not inherently queer but rather become so through their capacity to interrogate cisheteronormative structures of power (91). With a tripartite framework of word, image, and body, he further demonstrates the potential of the visual as a method in studying queer (in)visibility and (in)security in the context of Russian state homophobia.

Rather than separating trauma and emotions from memory and lived experiences in pursuit of ‘objective facts’, the chapter treats them as indispensable to understanding conflict

A compelling observation emerges in poetry as a method, where Delatolla disrupts the foundations of social-scientific methods and heteromasculinist linear logic of temporality, causality, and objectivity by using art, literature, and affect as legitimate sources of knowledge. Rather than separating trauma and emotions from memory and lived experiences in pursuit of “objective facts”, the chapter treats them as indispensable to understanding conflict in the context of the Lebanese civil war.

Not only does the method reveal the complex role of trauma, but it also exposes the irrationality of treating emotional detachment as a prerequisite for objectivity. Conflict is messy, contradictory, and often makes no sense. Detachment then becomes a form of epistemic violence that sanitises the realities of conflict. This critique is echoed in the conclusion, where, extending Serrano-Amaya’s argument, Laura Sjoberg reflects on the impossibility of remaining disinvested in the results of nuclear deterrence. Such detachment is implicated in invisibilising marginalised lives and sustaining institutional ignorance (207). 

Additionally, Simonetto identifies “Ruthless Archives” as hostile institutional records that preserve queer lives only through policing and pathologisation. This chapter illustrates the centrality of historical enquiry to conflict research and revealing how archives themselves reproduce political violence through surveillance and criminalisation (131). Through visual methods, poetry, workshops, archives, activist knowledge, and trauma-informed research, the volume consistently challenges conventional notions of rigorous research scholarship. It positions methodological innovations as integral to queer inquiry rather than an exception.

Ethics in practice

The final section shifts from theory and methodology to the lived experiences of conducting queer conflict research. While Nagarajan emphasises non-extractive practices, reciprocity, and community safety in research with queer community in Nigeria (174), Munhazim reflects on finding kinship, care, and chosen family in the fieldwork with the American Afghan diaspora that reshaped their own relationship with queerness as informed by Afghanness (188).

With case studies ranging from Argentine archives to American Afghan diaspora in California, the chapters illustrate the importance of contextual specificity and resist the universalisation of queer experiences.

This complicates the conventional distinctions between the researcher and researched, highlighting the relational, intersubjective, and ethical dimensions of queer research fieldwork. The concluding roundtable conversation further notes that much research on queer lives in conflict is undertaken by NGOs despite limited academic infrastructure and funding. Such conditions underscore the need for intersectional, collaborative, and context-sensitive research practices (194). 

Context, futures, and researching otherwise

Besides methods, experiences, and approaches, the collection’s diversity is also reflected in its geographical and empirical breadth. With case studies ranging from Argentine archives to American Afghan diaspora in California, the chapters illustrate the importance of contextual specificity and resist the universalisation of queer experiences. This is also evident in the volume’s generous use of endnotes, which function not merely as a site for citations but as spaces for contextualisation and qualification, reinforcing the commitment to avoiding decontextualised claims and engaging readers in adjacent conversations rather than presenting the concepts as settled or universal. 

However, a concluding synthesis of how these diverse interventions collectively reshape the study of conflict would have further helped establish the field. While refusing disciplinary closure allows Queer Conflict Research to embrace the queer commitments to fluidity and plurality, it also leaves unresolved the precise contours that distinguish queer conflict research from its neighbouring and related fields. Even so, this is more of a productive tension than a shortcoming, reflecting the editors’ commitment to plurality. 

The two resource guides in the appendices, addressing the ethical research conduct with queer communities in sensitive contexts and the researcher’s psychological well-being, further enrich the volume. They extend its queer ethical framework into praxis, making queer conflict research more grounded, responsible and accessible. The volume ends by moving towards multiple and transformative futures of queer conflict research, inviting scholars to further complicate, articulate and expand this emerging field.

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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Working Nature: A History of the Energy Economy. Daniela Russ. Verso. 2026.

Marxist scholarship argues that, within capitalism, factors of production must first be abstracted from their socio-natural context in order to contribute surplus value. Daniela Russ’s argument in Working Nature begins by unsettling the apparent naturalness of energy itself. She writes that “Human beings have no natural sense for energy” (27). Heat, light, movement, coal, falling water and electricity are not experienced as a single phenomenological category. They become “energy” only through abstraction: through the practical and intellectual labour that renders different natural processes comparable in terms of their capacity to perform work.

In this sense, energy is neither a physical substance nor a mere idea – it is a practical relationship between society and nature. Instead of offering a conventional history of energy use, Russ offers a critical history of the concept of energy and of the infrastructures forcing nature into work.

Energy as a concept

This book is a work of historical-materialist epistemology. It studies how fuel scientists, electrotechnical engineers and energy economists struggled, in their scientific practice, to make natural things perform regular, comparable work. To approach nature with the concept of energy in mind means to treat objects that are phenomenologically radically distinct – rivers, human beings, wind, coal – as if they were interchangeable in their exploitation for production.

Russ gives an illuminating account of the transition from ‘forces of nature’ to ‘sources of energy’.

Russ gives an illuminating account of the transition from “forces of nature” to “sources of energy”. This shift, which began in the 19th century, is not merely semantic. Earlier languages of force suggested active, unruly and autonomous powers in nature. By contrast, “sources of energy” imply stores of motive power that can be extracted, converted and put to use. The change marks a broader transformation in which natural forces are no longer primarily powers to be negotiated with, but resources to be objectified, standardised and commanded.

Nature resists objectification

Russ draws on Adorno’s concept of negative dialectics. For Hegel, dialectics moves towards a kind of reconciliation: contradictions develop, are mediated and are integrated into a higher form of the whole. Adorno, on the other hand, was suspicious of such “positive” outcomes. His dialectic is negative: it does not want to arrive at synthesis too quickly; it remains with contradiction, not because he is a pessimist, but because reality is itself contradictory, damaged, violent and unjust.

The concept of non-identity is crucial, capturing Adorno’s account of the friction between term and object. Terms are necessary, but objects are never exhausted by the terms with which we name them. When we say “energy”, it sounds like a clear, universal and natural thing. But this concept encompasses many different things. Negative dialectics asks: what is lost when we subsume all of this under one concept? What does this concept say, and what does it conceal?

This is precisely the leitmotif of chapters three and four, exploring the resistance of coal and electricity. Coal is often treated as a stock of energy, as if its value lay naturally in the combustible material itself. Russ complicates this view by showing how coal is heterogeneous, unstable and deeply local in its material formation. Its quality varies across seams, mines and regions; its heating value declines through oxidation and storage; its combustion depends on furnaces, airflow, pressure, temperature and technical conditions. What appears to be the calorific value of coal is is in fact produced through standards, classifications, laboratory procedures, commercial contracts, transport infrastructures and market conventions. In Foucauldian terms, it is discursively produced.

In nature, electrical phenomena appear only as rare, unstable and elusive events of charge and discharge. Stable electric current exists only within technical systems

Yet coal’s materiality unsettles this abstraction. It changes, deteriorates, combusts, resists storage and refuses to behave as a docile stock. Russ skilffully shows that commodification is not simply imposed on passive matter. Nature is drawn into capitalist abstraction, but never without remainder. If coal retains visible traces of its material origin, electricity comes closer to a universal, purified and highly commodified form of energy. But Russ shows that electricity, too, is not a given natural resource. In nature, electrical phenomena appear only as rare, unstable and elusive events of charge and discharge. Stable electric current exists only within technical systems: circuits, generators, conductors, grids and regulatory infrastructures. Electricity is therefore socially created, though not under freely chosen conditions.

This makes electricity a revealing form of “working nature”. Precisely because it appears clean and flexible, it depends on dense systems of technical mediation: central stations, urban grids, corporate expansion, state regulation and the synchronisation of production and consumption. Yet here too Russ emphasises resistance. Capitalists cannot manipulate electricity as they wish. Electrical systems must respond to the material properties of current, resistance, load, transmission and grid stability. Saying that “energy and resistance are interdependent” (46), Russ develops her central dialectical insight: the attempt to command nature never abolishes nature’s resistance, but reorganises and displaces it. This insight recalls Kate Crawford’s analysis of human and non-human work within AI systems.

The politics within the kilowatt-hour

The final chapter turns to energy statistics and balances. Here Russ shows how the energy economy became governable through numbers. Energy balances make coal, oil, gas, hydropower, nuclear power and electricity comparable within a single accounting framework. They enable governments, corporations and international organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to imagine substitutions between energy sources, model future demand and plan investment. (This was especially important after the oil shocks of the 1970s). But this comparability is not neutral; it depends on methodological choices about what counts as energy, how conversions are calculated, and which differences are made visible or invisible.

This chapter is pertinent to contemporary climate politics: energy balances and integrated models are central to how decarbonisation scenarios are imagined today. Russ does not propose simply rejecting such tools. Rather, she shows that they are historically produced instruments of governance. Like all models, they risk being mistaken for the reality they represent. They not only describe the energy economy, but shape what policymakers, investors and institutions consider possible. These insights extend Matthias Schmelzer’s investigation of the discursive production of “economic growth”, in which the OECD also played a central role.

Russ concludes by arguing that the energy economy is historical, but now appears quasi-natural. Under capitalist alienation, the law of accumulation is mystified as a law of nature.

Russ concludes by arguing that the energy economy is historical, but now appears quasi-natural. Under capitalist alienation, the law of accumulation is mystified as a law of nature. Yet she avoids a purely negative critique. She recognises that the concept of energy has also had a progressive dimension. It made it possible, especially in the early days of the USSR, to imagine abundance, democratic planning, relief from exhausting labour and new forms of collective life. The problem is that emancipation cannot be measured in units of energy. Productivism and the fetish of energy transition are, for Russ, dead ends.

Energy as a way of seeing

Working Nature suggests that the climate crisis cannot be addressed only by changing energy sources. Besides abandoning the growth imperative, it requires a deeper interrogation of the categories through which modern societies understand nature. Just as “growth” and “the economy” are not natural but historical forms, so too “energy” is a way of seeing and organising the world.

Energy has a history, and could have a different future.

For scholars of political ecology, eco-Marxism, environmental history and critical theory, Working Nature is a major contribution. It deepens debates on fossil capital(ism) by shifting attention from particular fuels to the category that makes fuels, currents and natural processes commensurable as energy. It also warns us that a green transition that leaves the energy concept untouched may reproduce the same instrumental, unsustainable relations within the web of life.

Russ’s book succeeds in showing that energy has a history, and could have a different future. If the energy economy is not natural, then neither are the social forms that organise it. Therefore, genuine ecological transformation must also mean rethinking the relation between nature, labour and social life – that is, both the means and purpose of a new ecological paradigm.

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: Paul J McCarthy on Shutterstock.

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The post A history of the energy economy first appeared on LSE Review of Books.

The New Censorship: How the War on the Media is Taking Us Down. Ayala Panievsky. Footnote. 2025.

New censorship under new authoritarianism

The term “New Censorship” is not, in fact, new, This is something Ayala Panievsky acknowledges in her recent book bearing the phrase with the subheading, How the War on the media is Taking Us Down (2025). While it is hard to date it with any certainty, “New Censorship” seems to have originated in 2004-2005 to describe the role that Institutional Review Boards in American universities had in supressing academic freedom. The term then became popularised in 2015 with the publication of journalist (and then-president of the Committee to Protect Journalists)’s Joel Simon’s The New Censorship: Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom (2015). Simon’s use of the term highlights how governments around the world have curtailed the freedom of the press by using digital technology to supress, survey, and intimidate journalists.

Panievsky’s use of the term shares a lot with Simon’s, but also attends to developments that have emerged in our current populist era. It builds on ideas that have been developed by such prominent figures as Chinese artist and anti-censorship activist Ai Weiwei, who recently released a book on censorship, and American journalist Sharyl Attkisson, whose 2021 book Slanted focuses on the media’s role in obfuscating facts to sell a particular narrative.

Our “right-to-know” under threat

According to Panievsky, New Censorship now describes a fully-fledged assault, carried out by pseudo-authoritarians, on the general public’s “right-to-know,”  which holds that citizens have “the right to know what the government is doing on its behalf”. This assault is fuelled and justified by a populist narrative that journalists are part of an “elite” that seeks to mislead the “real” people of a nation. Its most common form is that of a multi-pronged assault that includes (but is not limited to): the changing of legislation to weaken public media; purchasing (and therefore controlling) national media organisations; creating parallel news agencies that recount a government-sanctioned version of the “truth”; mobilising campaigns of hate against dissident journalists.

These methods of attack come back to the original aim-come-justification: of creating a national sentiment against independent journalists that paints them as traitors against ordinary citizens. Panievsky notes that this form of attack is prevalent worldwide, having been pioneered by reactionary forces in Israel and spread across the globe, from Argentina to the United States, and from Europe to India.

While many journalists (such as Raviv Drucker), academics (countless academics worldwide, including in Hungary and the United States), and everyday citizens (like Abboud Battah) have noted, documented, and indeed experienced the hostile environment created by this populist New Censorship, there are two elements of Panievsky’s chronicle that make this book the definitive starting point for any future discussions on the subject. These are Panievsky’s positioning within the debate, and her proposals for fighting back.

Panievsky paints a convincing picture of Netanyahu’s Israel as a key originator of not only the methods, but also the rhetoric behind populist New Censorship.

The Netanyahu model of censorship

At the time of publication, Panievsky was working as an academic at the University of London, a position she earned following the completion of a highly regarded doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge. Perhaps a large part of Panievsky’s academic success stemmed from her frontline work within Israeli media and politics, both as a journalist holding power to account and as a member of the political establishment (albeit briefly).

Her journalistic experience is what gives her account of New Censorship its biggest boost. She employs it to paint a convincing picture of Netanyahu’s Israel as a key originator of not only the methods, but also the rhetoric behind populist New Censorship. Indeed, Panievsky frames Netanyahu as a point of inspiration for those who admire his building of an “illiberal democracy”, with his particular brand of attacking, discrediting, and attempting to isolate those that threaten his increasingly brazen attempts at solidifying power around himself being justified as “fighting back” against “traitors” to the nation and as those working to mislead ‘normal’ people. Notable alumni of his methods include Viktor Orban, Narendra Modi, Donald Trump, and (though not in power) Nigel Farage.

The book is grounded in this lived experience, as well as dozens of interviews with affected journalists, and carefully researched observations of populist attacks on the very foundations of journalism.

The book is grounded in this lived experience, as well as dozens of interviews with affected journalists, and carefully researched observations of populist attacks on the very foundations of journalism. This work is presented as a series of arguments and demonstrations that do not aim to establish a chronological history of the New Censorship, but rather to highlight and expose the various forms that it takes. This format is arguably a disadvantage, especially for future rather than contemporary readers. It does not provide its audience with enough background information to establish the necessary context behind, and the wide reach of, the New Censorship.

Active resistance to right-wing populism and censorship

The book presents a rather grim state of affairs, with pseudo-authoritarians solidifying control over liberal-democratic politics, bullying and successfully repressing journalists and other challengers of their power. Panievsky deems it too late to stop the rise of such trends – they are already here. But that doesn’t mean that this New Censorship cannot be challenged. The concluding chapter presents a series of “action points” that everyone, from journalists to everyday citizens can take to secure our collective “right-to-know”. These actions include, but are not limited to: campaigning for journalistic freedom, finding new ways of “belonging” that are not limited to nationality; financially or vocally supporting independent media; and challenging blatant misinformation.

This conclusion is the book’s greatest strength: its absolute rejection of defeatism, a sentiment that is sorely needed amongst liberals and leftists alike in our current age of rising right-wing populism

This conclusion is the book’s greatest strength: its absolute rejection of defeatism, a sentiment that is sorely needed amongst liberals and leftists alike in our current age of rising right-wing populism. This section transforms the book from a compelling read into an essential handbook for all those concerned over the rise of authoritarian politics, no matter where they sit on the political spectrum.

Panievsky’s clear-sightedness and drive to resist those forces that seek to restrict our collective “right-to-know” is admirable – so much so that it has motivated me into taking action myself, in ways where I can meaningfully have an impact. This includes getting more active in reporting and challenging misinformation when and where I see it, both online and offline. I am also trying my hand at citizen-journalism: essentially – using my academic credentials to challenge government over-reach into our private lives, and the lives of the most vulnerable among us. I also intend to pay for all the news that I read or watch when I can afford to, to help sustain the independent news outlets I rely on. These may seem like small steps, but the more people that take such measures to resist the New Censorship and the rise of authoritarianism, the better we can protect our right-to-know from those who are keen to keep us isolated and ignorant.

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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The post A new kind of censorship in the authoritarian age? first appeared on LSE Review of Books.