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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Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000. Avner Greif, Joel Mokyr, and Guido Tabellini. Princeton University Press. 2026.

Europe and China’s economic histories

Why do the roots of the modern world lie in Europe, not China? This question is at the heart of a new book by three eminent economists and economic historians (Avner Greif, Joel Mokyr, and Guido Tabbellini), one of whom (Mokyr) was a co-recipient of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on innovation-led growth. The book takes its cue from Kenneth Pomeranz’s 2000 book The Great Divergence, though the authors immediately suggest alternative terms such as “the great reversal” to describe Europe overtaking China from a less advantageous position, or “the great bifurcation” as a more accurate description of how the politics, economics, and culture of Europe and China snowballed in two such different directions.

The authors rightly push for a deeper explanation as to why Europe turned into the laboratory of the world while China did not.

The mystery is why Imperial China – which for much of the past millennium was the more academically and technologically advanced civilisation – was overtaken by Western Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries following the industrial revolution. The authors situate their thesis within the existing literature, arguing that previous answers simply push the question back a level. The most straightforward response – “the industrial revolution happened in Europe, not China” – is no answer at all, and the authors rightly push for a deeper explanation as to why Europe turned into the laboratory of the world while China did not.

Access to energy resources, whilst initially a more promising avenue, proves just as fruitless an answer; both Europe and China possess coal deposits, after all, and coal existed under the ground in Europe for centuries before it was harnessed to power industrial technology. The question is therefore what caused Europe to develop and adopt new technologies that would ultimately raise living standards far above the historical norm.

Religion and kinship networks

The authors’ answer, perhaps surprisingly, boils down to Christ versus Confucius. In other words, different forms of social organisation that found their bases in theology would focus the orientation of economic life. In Europe, this was the corporation. In the authors’ telling, the Catholic Church, as the original universalist organisation which was in principle open to all, played a prominent role as the model for later corporations. It was the corporation that allowed entry to newcomers not bound by ties of family or personal loyalty. This widespread dispersal of human and financial capital, in turn, allowed for the uptake of new innovations at scale. Moreover, the Catholic Church’s interdictions against incest and support for nuclear families led to a more atomised society in which strangers had to learn to cooperate.

In China, meanwhile, economic life was organised by kinship networks at the local level, providing access to employment and security for much of the population. Clans provided the social basis of trust necessary for markets to function, and even acted as tax collectors for the state, whose power in practice often did not extend far beyond the imperial centre. The influence of the kinship network was reinforced by a Confucian culture emphasising deference to one’s elders, and by rigorous civil service exams which rewarded knowledge of ancient texts rather than critical thinking. Taken together, there was little incentive for young Chinese to question authority, learn from others, and engage in innovative thinking, when their social and economic life depended on not doing so. 

The book is an impressive work written by three academics at the top of their field. While little of what is offered is new, it presents a remarkable synthesis of previous research by the authors as well as that of numerous scholars in the field of economic history. Indeed, it is difficult to do justice to the vast breadth of scholarship on offer, as the book enters into dialogue with myriad voices to digest the economic, social and political evolution of Eurasia over the past millennium. It is an example of interdisciplinary scholarship at its finest, using work across different fields to create a coherent and contextualised portrait of multi-regional development across time. Much work in the social sciences is conducted within academic siloes, so bringing these voices together is itself refreshing and important. It is also highly readable and, perhaps surprisingly for a book with multiple authors, the book speaks with one voice, barring a few moments of repetition.

What caused the industrial revolution?

The authors take pains to stress that there is nothing inherently superior about Europe which led to the rise of the corporation and hence to the industrial revolution; that the conditions mapped out are necessary, rather than sufficient, for industrialisation to occur. The origins of the Great Divergence turn out to be not so great; more a form of cultural dead-reckoning, where slight differences between two civilisations with broadly similar social parameters at the end of the first millennium accumulated to produce astonishing differences by the end of the second.

What does the reversion of China to an autocracy with strict censorship and weak rule of law mean for the future stability of Chinese economic growth? Will the political integration of Europe act as a barrier or a spur to further growth and innovation

This focus on contingency is admirable and humbling. There is, however, a risk in such broad analysis. If the developments recounted here merely created the possibility for the industrial revolution, but did not cause it directly, then what did? One answer, which the authors do not put forward, is that given the right material and intellectual conditions and the right constellation of economic and social forces pushing in the same direction, it was not a question of “if” but “when”. But again, we are pushed back a level, as this leaves us wondering not why it happened, but why it happened when it did.

The book is tantalising as the central question inevitably leads one’s mind to numerous branch questions which the authors either do not address, or do touch on but do not answer. Some questions are historical: the role of slavery probably merits a larger place in the narrative than the authors credit, and the portrait of the Catholic Church as a progressive institution is hardly uncontroversial. Other questions, to which there is no certain answer, concern the future of geopolitics. Despite the anti-corruption drives of Xi Jinping, what does the reversion of China to an autocracy with strict censorship and weak rule of law – especially with a lax attitude towards property rights – mean for the future stability of Chinese economic growth? Will the political integration of Europe act as a barrier or a spur to further growth and innovation? It is, perhaps, correct that the authors leave it to readers to draw their own conclusions.

One path, not two, to prosperity

But the book’s title is, arguably, inaccurate. The economic rise of modern China occurred for many reasons, including the Chinese diaspora acting as a bridge between China and the rest of the world (specifically foreign capital investment), which the authors identify as central. However, the industrialisation of China could only occur because of the prior industrialisation of Europe and those parts of the world colonised by it, notably the United States. The Chinese miracle of the late 20th and early 21st centuries was therefore historically dependent on the rise of Europe as an industrial power in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Chinese miracle of the late 20th and early 21st centuries was therefore historically dependent on the rise of Europe as an industrial power in the 18th and 19th centuries.

This is to make the point that, in world historical terms, there is only one path to prosperity.  That the first stage of this path took the form of multiple historical processes working themselves out across several centuries in Medieval and early modern Europe should not lead to charges of Eurocentrism or an outlook of European exceptionalism. It should make us acutely aware of how historically contingent our current mode of living is: it suggests no single individual, nation, institution, resource or idea can claim a monopoly on the process of human development, much less on where that process will take us.

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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Renegotiating Patriarchy: Gender, Agency and the Bangladesh Paradox. Naila Kabeer. LSE Press. 2024.

Renegotiating Patriarchy: Gender, Agency and the Bangladesh Paradox by Naila Kabeer examines positive social change in Bangladesh over the past 50 years, in particular the factors that enabled significant and rapid gains for women in areas like health, education and employment within a deeply patriarchal society.

Read an interview with the author about Bangladesh’s development and what drove its gains in gender equality.

The Troubling State of India’s Democracy. Dinsha Mistree, Šumit Ganguly, and Larry Diamond (eds.). University of Michigan Press. 2024.

In The Troubling State of India’s Democracy, editors Dinsha Mistree, Šumit Ganguly and Larry Diamond assemble work by leading scholars assessing the conditions of India’s democracy across three dimensions: politics, the state and society.

The book provides a thorough analysis of ideological, institutional and social shifts towards nationalist authoritarianism under Modi but is not without hope for India’s future, wrote Abidullah Baba in his review.

Desi Queers: LGBTQ+ South Asians and Cultural Belonging in Britain. Churnjeet Mahn, Rohit K. Dasgupta and DJ Ritu. Hurst & Company, London. 2025.

Desi Queers: LGBTQ+ South Asians and Cultural Belonging in Britain by Churnjeet Mahn, Rohit K. Dasgupta and DJ Ritu documents the experiences and activism of South Asian queer communities in Britain.

Filling a crucial gap in diasporic queer historiography, the book’s compelling narrative foregrounds “Desi Queer” community-building and resistance against the backdrop of racialised and homophobic state policies, wrote Kanchan Panday in her review of the book. 

Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India. Mukulika Banerjee. Oxford University Press. 2022.

Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India by Mukulika Banerjee explores how agrarian life in rural India creates values of citizenship and active political engagement that are essential for the cultivation of democracy.

The book provides a rich and nuanced perspective on the complexities of politics and citizenship in rural India, according to Kishor K. Podh’s review.

Political Economy of Social Change and Development in Nepal. Jeevan R. Sharma. Bloomsbury. 2021.

Political Economy of Social Change and Development in Nepal by Jeevan R. Sharma explores how Nepal’s political economy has been transformed since the 1950s.

Combining Nepal’s development journey and social change, this book offers a fresh and standout contribution that will be an important guide for social scientists seeking to understand Nepal, wrote Sushav Niraula in his review.

Development Challenges of Pakistan: Constraints and Choices. Jamil Nasir. Palgrave Macmillan. 2025.

Development Challenges in Pakistan: Constraints and Choices by Jamil Nasir explores why Pakistan struggles with sustaining economic growth compared to nations in Southeast Asia. Combining economic, political and sociological analysis, Nasir identifies inequality, weak governance and untapped human capital as key factors.

Though dense in style and leaving some areas underexamined, this well-researched book puts forward valuable policy reforms for inclusive, sustainable development in Pakistan, wrote Sajjad Ahmed in his review.

A Woman’s Job: Making Middle Lives in New India. Asiya Islam. Cambridge University Press. 2024.

In this excerpt from A Woman’s Job: Making Middle Lives in New India, Asiya Islam examines the lives of educated young women working in precarious jobs in Delhi’s service sector.

The book’s rich ethnography explores how these women navigate work, home life, gender norms and class dynamics amidst socio-economic transformation and globalisation.

Kashmir at the Crossroads: Inside a 21st-Century Conflict. Sumantra Bose. Yale University Press. 2021.

In Kashmir at the Crossroads: Inside a 21st-Century Conflict, Sumantra Bose analyses the conflict in Kashmir from its origins to the present, considering the influence of colonial legacies, the rise of Hindu Nationalism and global interventions.

Bose makes an urgent, compelling contribution to the understanding of one of South Asia’s most critical political issues, wrote Ajit Kumar in his review.

Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh. Kasia Paprocki. Cornell University Press. 2021.

Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh by Kasia Paprocki explores climate change adaptation in the Khulna region of Bangladesh, a place extremely vulnerable to the threats posed by the climate crisis.

This study deserves wide acclaim for its refreshing take on how the ideologies surrounding climate change and climate victims today reproduce and intensify rural dispossession, wrote Nikhil Deb in his review.

Waiting for Dignity: Legitimacy and Authority in Afghanistan. Florian Weigand. Columbia University Press 2022.

In Waiting for Dignity: Legitimacy and Authority in Afghanistan, Florian Weigand examines the legitimacy of state power and other authorities in Afghanistan.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews with Afghans, the book makes an invaluable contribution to the understanding of politics and power in Afghanistan and to the broader field of conflict resolution studies, according to Hossein Mousavi.

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

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AI, Automation and War: The Rise of a Military-Tech Complex. Anthony King. Princeton University Press. 2025.

AI and modern warfare

Is artificial intelligence (AI) about to automate warfare? With near-weekly prognoses by prominent public figures – from Henry Kissinger to Stephen Hawking – about the demise of the human combatant, you would be forgiven for believing so. The implications of this potential transformation are huge, both for the strategic questions it raises for militaries about how future wars will be won or lost, but also for the moral questions raised by machines making life and death decisions. Indeed, these latter concerns have already prompted prominent voices in the AI research community to call for a ban on autonomous weapon systems.

For Anthony King AI, Automation and War: The Rise of a Military-Tech Complex, the problem with these visions of fully automated warfare is that they fetishise AI as a discrete technology (20) and ignore its organisational aspects. King proposes an alternative, sociological approach to AI in warfare. Foregrounded by this approach is the “ecology” (ix) of novel and unusual working practices required to sustain AI as a viable technology in military settings, as well as the institutional transformations – i.e. within armed forces and defence ministries – required to accommodate those practices.

The military-tech complex

For King, the most significant of these is the “unlikely alliance between tech companies and defence ministries, between military professionals and civilian experts” (viii). For want of capital and in-house expertise, military organisations of predominantly Western states are turning increasingly to commercial actors to provide data services, including AI. But unlike the legacy prime commercial model – where states dictate requirements through formal procurement methods – the emerging “military-tech complex” (as King names it) originates from informal, bottom-up relationships. It requires civilian personnel to embed within armed forces to support the constant refinement of AI and related software applications.

More than automating warfare, AI’s real appeal to militaries is for supporting human decision-makers in complex tasks like mission planning and targeting.

King’s hope is that the book “persuades some scholars to focus less on automation and technology and more on organisation and expertise” (ix). On that measure the book succeeds. It makes a convincing case that, more than automating warfare, AI’s real appeal to militaries is for supporting human decision-makers in complex tasks like mission planning and targeting. Particularly interesting here is the policy literature King marshals demonstrating that militaries have played down the future role of AI for automation. Instead, they see AI as a tool to help make sense of the copious data collected on the modern battlefield to support decision-making.

That said, it is unclear which scholars the book exists to persuade. It is true that debate on military applications of AI initially focused heavily on the issue of automation, only recently – and belatedly – turning to the issue of AI for decision support. But serious scholarship has long centred on the implications of AI-driven automation for the human role in the use of force. Driving this is the insight that what military personnel can do with AI is dependent on what has already been done by other actors – including commercial software engineers.

This underpins a vibrant research agenda across several disciplines examining who these actors are, how they can be relied upon and what their responsibilities and obligations are. King somewhat glosses over this at the book’s outset by presenting existing debate as a binary between AI automation optimists – for whom human combatants are a thing of the past – and AI sceptics – those who think that the technical limitations of AI will leave it ill-suited to use in war. This framing misses whether scholars of military AI haven’t already taken a sociological approach to the subject and, if so, whether King’s approach extends it.

Silicon Valley’s politics

The sociological approach has clear value for its potential to shine a light on the political implications of the emerging military-tech complex. As King highlights, since technologies can “never be separated from the interests, understanding, and purposes” of their creators (60), it follows that a clear-eyed account of the emerging institutional arrangements needed to support AI should also attend to the values and beliefs of those civilian experts involved in this. Silicon Valley looms particularly large here. King describes the recent shift in Silicon Valley’s politics, from holding a “radical libertarian, globalised ideology,” to a techno-nationalist position driven by a concern “with competition from China and with the security and prosperity of the US” (71-72).

In the short- to mid-term, this shift means an increased willingness of Silicon Valley to work with militaries which in turn means a transformation of military procurement to align with the tech sector’s product development cycles. But the longer-term implications are left unexplored. King is cautious about speculation and champions an empirical approach focused on how AI is being used and implemented by militaries in the present and the near future (18). But how exactly AI technologies embed the “interests, understanding, and purposes” of Silicon Valley, and how those values can be negotiated in a defence context goes unexamined. This omission will be felt especially strongly by those interested in the European defence context wherein the negotiation of Silicon Valley’s latest political shift has become a salient question amidst an increasingly fractured trans-Atlantic alliance.

The firms comprising Silicon Valley remain strategic actors with commercial interests. Investment in AI R&D is astronomical, and the soft budget constraints and blurry metrics of success makes defence a highly desirable customer for the tech sector.

There are also difficult methodological questions to unpick, such as whether (and which) values are sincerely held by commercial tech providers. King’s suggestion that Silicon Valley’s political conversion results from a concern for the security and prosperity of the US doesn’t explain why this shift has entailed anti-democratic and anti-liberal elements. It also underplays the economic imperative. The firms comprising Silicon Valley remain strategic actors with commercial interests. Investment in AI R&D is astronomical, and the soft budget constraints and blurry metrics of success makes defence a highly desirable customer for the tech sector. Clarity about the motivations of these actors seems important for understanding the longer-term implications of the military-tech complex, particularly as the first part of that dyad becomes increasingly dependent on the latter.

Military AI uses and futures

AI, Automation and War effectively demonstrates how armed forces perceive the utility of AI, particularly for its use in data-driven decision-making. It is less successful at illuminating the actual utility of such uses. Discussion in the book devoted to the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF)’s use of AI to assist in identifying targets to attack (including people, vehicles, and buildings) in Gaza, is particularly illustrative of this. The IDF’s mass surveillance of Palestinians has meant that the amount of data it collects exceeds the human cognitive and institutional capacity for making sense of that data. Their solution has been to employ AI to synthesise this data and flag potential targets for review by human intelligence analysts – as in the case of the now infamous Gospel and Lavender systems. In this way, writes King, “AI facilitated dynamic targeting, which was also more accurate than targeting had been in the past” (127). But the meaning of “accuracy” is not as clear as King suggests when classificatory algorithms don’t have a single measure of it. Indeed, the word ‘accuracy’ does a lot of unacknowledged work throughout the book, and what is missing is something to help readers navigate these sorts of (often contested) claims rather than have them accept on faith alone answers to such important questions like whether AI improves outcomes.

AI, Automation and War is a corrective to the kind of speculative futurism that characterises public commentary on AI and warfare.

AI, Automation and War is a corrective to the kind of speculative futurism that characterises public commentary on AI and warfare. King’s focus on the complex integration of commercial actors, military personnel and AI technologies within defence institutions is compelling. But the book is limited in two important ways. The first is that, for all its ambition, it fails to convey exactly what makes this story so consequential, particularly for defence organisations. The second is that describing how militaries have come to use and justify AI is not the same as assessing whether that use is justified.

Future research in this area could address the ideational aspects attendant on these sociological transformations. Very little is currently known about how AI systems perform beyond testing. Examining how performance metrics are being shaped by the tech sector might help us understand how long-term understandings of success in the adoption of these systems in military settings is changing – and whose interests exactly such understandings serve.

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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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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Tribal Politics: How Brexit Divided Britain. Sara B. Hobolt and James Tilley. Oxford University Press. 2026.

Issue-based identities

What are issue-based identities and when do they emerge? Drawing on social psychology, especially social identity theory Tribal Politics introduces a framework for understanding how people come to define themselves through shared opinions on divisive issues. Moving beyond traditional political identities tied to class or party, we explain how new identities emerge around specific issues under the right conditions.

Most issues do not lead to the emergence of new political identities, but three key conditions make such an outcome more likely: issue contestation, in which conflict is clear, salient and binary, intensifying group boundaries; issue expression, in which individuals engage in behaviours like voting that reinforce their identity and commitment to a group; and issue alignment, in which the issue cuts across traditional party lines, allowing new identities to emerge outside the existing partisan structure. These conditions create a context in which opinions become group-based identities, with emotional attachment to an ingroup and hostility towards an outgroup.

How the EU rose to relevance

For decades, the EU was a low-salience issue among voters, despite being highly divisive within the upper echelons of political parties. The 2016 membership referendum changed this profoundly, because it fulfilled all three conditions: a binary choice, forced expression via voting and cross-party division. It transformed lightly held issue opinions about EU integration into new, strongly held political identities: Leavers and Remainers.

The referendum transformed lightly held issue opinions about EU integration into new, strongly held political identities: Leavers and Remainers.

The process of withdrawal, marked by intense political conflict, legal battles and parliamentary gridlock, further entrenched these divisions. As The Economist noted in the summer of 2019: “Three years after the vote, Britain has been driven slightly crackers by Brexit …. The past three years are the story of how these attitudes towards Europe – agnostic, unemotional, and in many cases only recently formed – hardened into Britain’s principal social division”.

From 2017 to 2020, three-quarters of the public identified as either a Leaver or Remainer. Even by 2025, nearly 60 per cent still held one of these identities. Moreover, these identities were not just proxies for social background. While demographic characteristics, such as education and age, were weakly correlated with EU attitudes and referendum vote, it was the act of voting that created Brexit identities. Remainers and Leavers were both children of the referendum.

Entrenched Leavers and Remainers

Disagreement is at the heart of democratic politics, so we should be sanguine about divided opinions on an issue. That sanguinity is harder to maintain when opinions become tribal political identities, however. As Seymour Martin Lipset noted in Political Man: “Inherent in all democratic systems is the constant threat that the group conflicts which are democracy’s lifeblood may solidify to the point where they threaten to disintegrate society.” And we show in this book that while Brexit identities might not have led to the disintegration of society, they have had profound consequences for political behaviour and social cohesion. One such consequence is affective polarisation between the two Brexit camps – an emotional division between groups, marked by strong ingroup loyalty and outgroup hostility.

People interpreted events like changes to mortgage costs or household bills through the lens of their Brexit identity. Most troublingly, these identities shaped perceptions of democratic legitimacy.

We show how this has extended to behaviour: people stereotyped opponents, avoided social contact with the other side and even discriminated against members of their rival tribe. Conflict over Brexit became embedded in social life. Issue-based identities also distorted perceptions of reality. Leavers and Remainers disagreed not only on Brexit’s outcomes but also on who was to blame for economic and political developments. People interpreted events like changes to mortgage costs or household bills through the lens of their Brexit identity. Most troublingly, these identities shaped perceptions of democratic legitimacy. When asked years after the vote whether “the decision to leave was based on a fair democratic process’” a clear majority of Remainers have consistently said that the process was unfair.

Tribal Politics shows that issue-based identities are not merely expressions of opinion, but powerful social forces that reshape how people see the world, each other and democratic life. The Brexit case demonstrates how a single political event can generate lasting divisions within families, workplaces, neighbourhoods and the country at large. It also underscores the need to understand issue-based identities as not a by-product of political conflict, but as a central mechanism through which modern democracies are being reshaped, sometimes in ways that challenge cohesion, tolerance and democratic resilience.

This is an extract from the conclusion to Tribal Politics: How Brexit Divided Britain by Sara B. Hobolt and James Tilley. Copyright Oxford University Press 2026 © reprinted here by permission.

Note: This extract gives the views of the authors 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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How music brings us together

When you’re a successful musician, it isn’t the songs that typically pay the bills. It’s the touring. The art matters. But ticket sales and merchandise are the lifeblood of the industry. That’s why the music business is organised almost entirely around getting listeners to become fans and fans to become concertgoers.

As craven as that may sound, there’s an aspect to all this profit-seeking that’s actually healthy for society. Coming together around a shared interest or emotion has a unique way of binding people, even if only temporarily, to a shared identity. Give them a beat to dance to or a feeling to vibe with, and studies show their brainwaves literally start moving in sync.

Collective chemistry

This is instructive for movement organisers trying to turn citizens into supporters and supporters into genuine advocates. (In fact, there’s so much that movements can learn from the music industry about building fan bases that we wrote a whole book about it.) And it all goes back to a concept observed more than a century ago by French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who coined the term “collective effervescence” to describe the energy produced when people feel connected to something bigger than themselves.

Émile Durkheim coined the term ‘collective effervescence’ to describe the energy produced when people feel connected to something bigger than themselves.

Durkheim was writing about the atmosphere of religious rituals when he described the phenomenon. But it’s observable in all kinds of places: concerts, sporting events, political rallies, street protests. The results aren’t always positive for society; the sense of community can bring people peace or inspire them to take up pitchforks. Whatever the intention or outcome, emotions get heightened, the air turns electric, and both the crowd and its orchestrators can sense it. It’s precisely this feeling that keeps in-person gatherings vital even in our digital age.

While the goal included educating concertgoers on issues in their communities and encouraging on-site activism, the real promise of these efforts is in the opportunity to kickstart activism that continues long after the show is over.

Once the crowd disperses, however, it’s tricky to maintain momentum. In music, here’s where the merch plays a vital role. Yes, there are huge margins on band t-shirts and other concert memorabilia, and that’s the main reason why the music industry is focused on these product sales. But if ongoing support from the participants in a live event is what you’re after, any memento from the occasion, whether you sell it or give it away, holds special value.

Durkheim put it this way in 1912: “Without symbols, social sentiments could have only a precarious existence. … But if the movements by which these sentiments are expressed are connected with something that endures, the sentiments themselves become more durable.”

Turning energy into action

The team at Planet Reimagined, an organisation co-founded by Adam to unite climate research and action, has been testing this theory for the past two years. They have been inviting local advocacy organisations to set up tables at concerts on both sides of the Atlantic, including AJR and Tyler Childers shows in the US, Tame Impala shows in France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Billie Eilish shows the UK. During select stops on Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft tour, we averaged more than 1,000 fan actions each night, including getting people to sign petitions, write letters to elected officials, and volunteer for upcoming events. Their efforts strengthened campaigns to support public-transit projects in Atlanta, protect the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and delay approvals for a new gas plant in Scotland, among other local initiatives. While the goal included educating concertgoers on issues in their communities and encouraging on-site activism, the real promise of these efforts is in the opportunity to kickstart activism that continues long after the show is over.

These test runs proved that the potential is certainly there. In fan surveys after the Billie Eilish and AJR shows, for example, 82 per cent of people who took part in the on-site efforts said they were interested in learning about more ways to make a difference in their communities. And, according to a Planet Reimagined report due to be published later this year, 80 per cent of organisations that partnered with us during shows by Renee Rap and Tyler Childers reported that fans had stayed engaged with them after the concert. This included through joining mailing lists, following on social media, or continuing to participate in campaigns.

Khali, a 21-year-old from Bristol, registered for a summer organising drive by Green New Deal Rising after encountering the group at The O2 arena during a Billie Eilish show. “I signed up on a whim,” she told Planet Reimagined. “I feel like I was so empowered.” A few months later, she was co-leading GNDR’s mobilising team and helping to coordinate more than 150 volunteers during a fall campaign. “I’ve joined a couple of new climate groups” since then, she said, “small ones in the community, to try and push more greenery out there.”

Driving sustained engagement

How can organisations help drive more of that type of sustained engagement? Here again we look to Durkheim, who wrote that when an emblem of an experience prompts memories of an event that generated collective effervescence, “it is as though the cause which excited them in the first place continued to act.”

Fan-building tactics from the music industry can be adapted by social movements to bring new supporters into the fold

But as we argue in our book, the emblem need not be anywhere near as pricey as a concert T-shirt. Planet Reimagined created postcards with a QR code linking people to voter registration instructions, talking points to use with friends and family on behalf of different causes, and information about local volunteer opportunities. And after each AJR show, fans who provided their email address at the arena received a thank-you note from Adam (the “A” in AJR) and from one of the local partners, who shared more ways for fans to get involved. These are just a few examples of low-cost, high-impact ways to keep people connected to a cause.

There are many other examples of how fan-building tactics from the music industry can be adapted by social movements to bring new supporters into the fold which we explore in Amplify. But perhaps the most valuable are the ones that produce sustained commitment to causes people care about.

Note: This essay 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.

Adam Met will speak at an LSE Festival event at 5.30pm on Thursday 18 June, The artist formerly known as climate change.

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The Climate Trial: Law and Justice on a Melting Planet. Noah Walker-Crawford. Duke University Press. 2026.

Who should take responsibility for climate change?

The material processes of climate change are well understood. Climate models demonstrate how greenhouse gases become trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere, leading to a warming effect on the planet’s surface. This contributes to a wide variety of phenomena including sea level rise, glacial re-treat, and deadly heat waves. Extensive scientific research demonstrates how climate change impacts people’s lives, exacerbating existing vulnerabilities and generating unprecedented dangers. Atmospheric models illustrate the physical dynamics, but they do not say how we should deal with the consequences.

To make arguments about who should take responsibility for climate change, people link scientific representations of global warming to moral conceptions regarding how people, institutions, and environments should engage with one another. One such approach is the legal argument that climate change makes us all neighbours.

Neighbourliness as a moral framework

Neighbours are actors with mutual moral obligations, often arising out of physical or conceptual proximity. The term neighbourliness and the adjective neighbourly refer to ideas about how neighbours should rightfully treat one another. Neighbourliness is a familiar moral framework that resonates with people around the world. I distinguish between normative and analytical conceptions of neighbourliness: In a normative sense, appeals to neighbourly relations posit that people should act in a certain way toward one another.

Those are the claims I study in this book. I begin with neighbourliness in examining the moral dynamics of climate change from an anthropological perspective. The analytic of neighbourliness is a tool for studying moral relations across local and global scales. Here I study how moral relationships are constructed between humans, corporations, and other actors. This approach highlights a fundamental ambiguity at the heart of legal climate justice claims: They appeal simultaneously to individual and collective moral responsibility.

Luciano Lliuya’s lawyers expanded the legal conception of neighbourliness to encompass relations across the planet: as climate change has connected RWE and Lliuya, it has made them neighbours.

Saúl Luciano Lliuya’s case against RWE

A small-scale Quechua-speaking farmer in Peru, Saúl Luciano Lliuya took a lawsuit against German energy giant RWE over its contribution to climate change impacts in the Andes. The case drew on legal norms that people usually invoke to seek relief from neighbours for damage or potential harm to their property. In their arguments, Luciano Lliuya’s lawyers expanded the legal conception of neighbourliness to encompass relations across the planet: as climate change has connected RWE and Luciano Lliuya, it has made them neighbours.

Law codifies who counts as a neighbour and what constitutes good neighbourly behaviour. Strictly speaking, Luciano Lliuya’s claim concerned the relationship between two legal persons. It individualised climate change by framing it as a dispute between one human and one company. Yet, for Luciano Lliuya and his supporters, the lawsuit was also an attempt to set a precedent that would govern relations between all polluting corporations and all people affected by climate change.

This premise allows them to argue that fossil fuel companies, which have caused harm to others through their contribution to climate change, should take responsibility and provide redress to those harmed because they have acted as bad neighbours.

Beyond the legal framework, the lawsuit provided a platform for its proponents to make broader normative arguments about who should take responsibility for climate change. This issue concerns social relations among countless people who face the devastating impacts of climate change, numerous corporations, and governments that continue to promote a fossil fuel-based economic model, as well as the Earth itself. The normative appeal to neighbourliness addresses the question of how we should live together on our planet. This approach links an everyday understanding of neighbourliness, as relations between people who live close to one another, to the legal definition – legal persons shouldn’t interfere with each other’s property – and expands the concept to a global level.

Luciano Lliuya and his NGO backers broaden the moral basis of neighbourliness beyond property rights, arguing that neighbours should act in a positive way toward each other and should not cause each other harm. They make the universalising moral claim that climate change makes us all neighbours – all humans and corporations. This premise allows them to argue that fossil fuel companies, which have caused harm to others through their contribution to climate change, should take responsibility and provide redress to those harmed because they have acted as bad neighbours.

Towards a global neighbourhood

The normative conception of neighbourliness deployed in and around the lawsuit against RWE involves a fundamental ambiguity: It individualises climate change by framing it in terms of relations between specific actors, and it universalises those relations by claiming that we should all be good neighbours. It involves claims not only about how individuals should inter-act with each other but also about how social relations should be governed more broadly – in the global neighbourhood. The appeal to neighbourliness simultaneously individualises and collectivises the issue of climate change. This ambiguity lends the concept strength: The idea of neighbourly relations is easily understandable to anyone who has lived in a community, and it allows people to draw the imaginative link from the individual to the collective scale.

I examine how social relations are redefined in response to climate change, and how climate change reshapes moral relations across local and global scales.

The aim of this book is not to make a moral argument. Rather, I examine how social relations are redefined in response to climate change, and how climate change reshapes moral relations across local and global scales. I use the concept of neighbourliness to address these questions from an anthropological perspective. I do not argue that climate change makes us all neighbours; I explore how a neighbourliness perspective allows for a simultaneous appeal to individual and collective responsibility. I briefly outline anthropological discussions of climate change, highlighting how the neighbourliness analytic offers a new perspective.

This is an extract from the introduction to The Climate Trial: Law and Justice on a Melting Planet by Noah Walker-Crawford. Copyright Duke University Press 2026 © reprinted here by permission.

Noah Walker-Crawford will speak about the book at a hybrid LSE event on Monday 18 May at 6.30pm, The climate trial: law and justice on a melting planet. Book now.

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

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The Sage Handbook of Decolonial Theory. Jairo I. Funez-Flores, Ana Carolina Diaz Beltran, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sandeep Bakshi, Agustin Lao-Montes and Flavia Rios (editors). Sage. 2025.

Decolonisation and deflection

“Decolonisation” has entrenched itself firmly on the psyche of academics and practitioners since Tuck and Yang’s seminal 2012 article, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor”. In the article, they argue that the “language of decolonization has been superficially adopted into education and other social sciences, supplanting prior ways of talking about social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches which decentre settler perspectives”. But Tuck and Yang’s call for re-centring decolonisation into its original context of resistance against violent oppression remains unheeded in the context of Eurocentric discourse on colonialism and its remnants across the world. As I have also argued, decolonisation stems from actual acts of violent resistance, or in the words of Frantz Fanon, “evokes for us the searing bullets and bloodstained knives which emanate from it.” There is a danger that the word can be used to deflect. Safe in academia, it can abstract the violent colonisation and oppression that continues today in the form of illegal wars, ethnic cleansing and lack of Indigenous reconciliation.

This handbook consciously attempts to de-link decolonial theory from its origins in the Frankfurt School and other conventional academic perspectives.

The Sage Handbook of Decolonial Theory, edited by Jairo I. Funez-Flores, Ana Carolina Diaz Beltran, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sandeep Bakshi, Agustin Lao-Montes and Flavia Rios, is an attempt to contradict this deflection. Its approach to this is to disrupt “conventional understandings of “society” by showing how entangled structures of power cannot be sufficiently examined by ignoring the global linkages established by racial capitalism, colonialism and heteropatriarchy.” It does so using a multidisciplinary – or, moving beyond academia, a multi-sectoral – approach to addressing issues of oppression, occupation, racism and capitalism. It simultaneously examines contemporary events that illustrate these issues and challenges existing decolonial theoretical frameworks.

A bottom-up perspective

Previous literature on decolonial theory has usually adopted the frameworks and methodologies of the Eurocentric (and often defended) Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, or other conventional academic perspectives. This handbook consciously attempts to de-link decolonial theory from these origins. It instead imagines new ways of situating decoloniality to address struggles of resistance against violence and oppression. In essence, it establishes a new form of scholarship that looks at decolonial practice from a bottom-up perspective of the subjugated subaltern rather than a top-down perspective of the Eurocentric oppressor.

This enormous volume – comprising 42 chapters written by scholars, practitioners and social activists from or of the Global South – brings into focus various geographies where colonialism, illegal occupation, racial capitalism, genocide, Indigenous practices among other social injustices, has been rife. Palestine, the Indigenous Peoples of the Abya Yala (North America), decolonial feminists, queer Muslims (yes, Muslims!) are just some of the subjects the Handbook spotlights. In so doing, it departs from Eurocentric knowledge, as the editors call on new ways to interpret the praxis between decolonial theory and decolonial practice. The co-editors and contributors themselves all bring a rich background of lived experience in decolonial struggles – Indigenous activism, Black antiracism, feminist activism, journalism, abolitionism, and Palestinian liberation, and of course, academia.

The book’s themes place decolonial thought and theory across three streams of thought and practice: the Palestinian struggle for liberation; Indigenous knowledge and resistance in North America (Abya Yala); and queer sexualities and liberation.

It does this by structuring its contributions by 46 contributors around five key themes; key debates in decolonial history; geopolitics and geographies, transdisciplinarity, feminisms, genders and sexuality and racial capitalism. The book’s themes place decolonial thought and theory across three streams of thought and practice: the Palestinian struggle for liberation; Indigenous knowledge and resistance in North America (Abya Yala); and queer sexualities and liberation. Black liberation and diasporic identity have the possibility of forming a fourth stream, while cutting across the first three. Each of these sections forms a sizable work in its own right.

A selective framework on decoloniality

These cases and contexts explored in the chapters raise some questions: what about other geographies of decolonial resistance? For instance, a chapter on Hindu Nationalism and Indigeneity introduces a lesser-known influence on decolonial thought, but what of the Dalit resistance (one of the contributors is Dalit and Queer), or the recent ethnic violence in the north-east Indian state of Manipur, that effortlessly fall under the decolonial struggles the book details? Similarly, a chapter on Decolonial Islamophobia Studies argues for the need for anti-Muslim racism or Islamophobia to be understood and studied from a decolonial lens, incorporating solidarity with others affected by power and coloniality. But is it also worthwhile to try to understand the growing hyper-religious sentiment within many Muslim nations that could lead to repressive societal changes such as denying women’s, trans and queer rights among Muslims? The latter issue of queer representation and positionality is raised exceptionally well in chapters on caste and South Asian Queer diaspora and Islam and Queer life, respectively.

Likewise, while the volume includes individual contributions on decolonial perceptions of slavery, climate, fascism and economic disempowerment, it could have been worthwhile to develop a framework of how decoloniality can use these as legitimate forms of liberation from the oppressive structures they represent. For instance, how can decolonial thinking draw on the history of transatlantic slavery to dismantle the structures of modern slavery now implicated in climate disasters, corporate power and rising authoritarianism? Is this even possible?  

Inviting further work on decoloniality

None of these observations supposes that the contributions in this volume should or can be exhaustive. Instead, the wide range of issues it covers are only a part of what must be a wider debate on decolonial thought. Beyond this volume, we must find other ways, subjects and lenses through which to examine the impacts of different forms of resistance. And rather than examine them in isolation from each other, we should explore how one connects to another. While the book reflects many of these practices of resistance in India, Jamaica, Mexico, and Ghana, it also creates room for future scholarly exploration of how decolonial theory feeds into praxis across various geographies, religions and cultures.

Arguably the book’s most important contribution is how forcefully and unapologetically it resists both the Eurocentric delegitimisation of whole communities and the limitations of decolonial theory as a paradigm.

But the editors also rightly recognise that “departing from the Eurocentric knowledge production does not suggest that the Global South has a privileged epistemic viewpoint”. They contend that “Questioning power is not a result of one’s geopolitical location of sociocultural identity, but of one’s praxis, understood here as collective action informed by thought and reflection”. While it is not possible to comment on each chapter of this expansive handbook, arguably the book’s most important contribution is how forcefully and unapologetically it resists both the Eurocentric delegitimisation of whole communities (the Indigenous peoples of the Abya Yala, Palestine or now, Iran) and the limitations of decolonial theory as a paradigm. Emphasising this dehumanisation and the struggles against it, the book is dedicated to the Palestinian Resistance, before and after the events of October 7^th 2023. In its framework and the contributions of individual chapters,

The Sage Handbook of Decolonial Theory is an urgent, important contribution to scholarship and other types of work that illuminates and drives struggle against oppression in old and new forms. It will be an excellent resource for understanding historical and contemporary struggles of liberation and resistance. It will appeal to scholars, practitioners, activists and anyone interested in furthering those struggles and participating in the real, and often challenging work, of decolonisation.

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: Carolina Jaramillo on Shutterstock.

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