Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Jason W. Moore. Verso. 2025.

A decade after its first publication in 2015, Capitalism in the Web of Life still offers one of the most powerful frameworks for rethinking the relation between capitalism, ecology, and history. It conducts a world-historical investigation of how bundles of human and extra-human natures shape subsequent phases of capitalist development.

From Cartesian dualism to a world ecology

One of the main claims in this 305-page book is that we need to abandon the usual division between “Society” and “Nature”, established at the dawn of modernity (especially with the work of René Descartes)thus structuring much of contemporary, mechanistic science. In Part I of the book, Moore writes that seeing Nature as external is a fundamental condition of capital accumulation. Without the objectification of nature (including women and slaves), and its reconceptualisation as a mere stock of work/energy, centuries-long ecocide would be unthinkable. Capitalism does not act on nature as if they were separate worlds that only collide. Capitalism unfolds through nature – the creative, generative, and multi-layered relation of species and environment.” Human organisation becomes not only a producer but also a product of environmental change. This deep ontological rethinking resonated in the work of new critical thinkers, e.g. Jason Hickel or Kohei Saito (whose more accessible writing styles have enabled them to resonate with larger readerships).

This is the basis of Moore’s key concept of “world ecology” as a method to analyse nature’s relationality. This way he offers a post-Cartesian worldview of capitalism as a dialectical unity of capital accumulation, the pursuit of power, and the co-production of nature. “Capitalism is not an economic system; it is not a social system; it is a way of organizing nature” (2).

That shift in perspective is one of the book’s great strengths. Cartesian dualism, Moore writes, is driving our interpretations of historical change into a choice between social reductionism or environmental determinism. Mainstream environmentalism tends to treat nature as a stock of resources, and mainstream social theory still treats capitalism as if it were mainly about markets, classes, industry, or finance. Moore challenges both views, showing that the history of capitalism is inseparable from the remaking of forests, fields, bodies, frontiers, trade routes, energy systems, and global divisions of labour.

Capitalism and Cheap Nature

Moore’s central concept is “Cheap Nature”, which describes capitalism’s long dependence on appropriating undervalued or unpaid work/energy from humans and the rest of nature. Besides appropriation, capitalism has to capitalise (exploit) paid work/energy; but if it is to survive, the first process must unfold faster than the latter.

Capitalists do not like to pay for what they take, which is demonstrated in female unpaid housework, the oil as accumulated geological labour of Earth, and depeasantisation (pushing small-scale farmers into market labour).This preference requires them to drive the real costs of production (beyond paid proletarian work) as low as possible. Cheap Nature is the invention of a civilisation premised on dualism, comprising key inputs such as labour, raw materials, energy, and food (Moore and Patel later expanded this intuition).

To restore the flow of cheap inputs, capitalists, in conjunction with states, seek new configurations of human and extra-human natures. This is inherent to the history of capitalism

In Part II, Moore offers a historical periodisation of capitalism’s emergence, tracing how early capitalism took shape through frontier expansion, agrarian transformation, imperial power, and new forms of appropriating unpaid work/energy from the agricultural revolution of the Low Countries from the early 15th century onwards. This long historical arc gives the book much of its explanatory force. Capitalism is not an ahistorical economic process but a historically evolving configuration of human and extra-human natures.

That means nature is constitutive of capital accumulation. Capitalism’s recurring crises are tied to its dependence on new streams of cheap inputs. Once Cheap Nature becomes dear, problems emerge: the system is struggling to reproduce the conditions that made its own expansion possible. To restore the flow of cheap inputs, capitalists, in conjunction with states, seek new configurations of human and extra-human natures. This is inherent to the history of capitalism: from the enclosure of the commons in England and the enslavement of indigenous peoples in the “New World” (cheap labour), through plantation production in the colonies (cheap food) to the supply of oil from distant continents (cheap raw materials).

World-systems thinking

The book has a strong intellectual architecture. Besides Marx as clearly the central reference point, Moore is drawing on a wider tradition of historical and critical thought including world-systems analysis and the longue durée tradition associated with thinkers such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi and Andre Gunder Frank. From them comes Moore’s insistence that capitalism must be grasped historically, globally, and relationally rather than substantially. Rejecting both conventional Green thought and poststructuralist theory as well as Latourian actor-network thinking, Moore’s work is underpinned with the same question: not how does capitalism act on nature, but how does it manage to put nature to work.

These observations explain why Moore has become one of the most prominent advocates of the term “Capitalocene” against the more dominant “Anthropocene.” His point is not merely semantic. As he writes in Part III of the book, the Anthropocene discourse attributes planetary crisis to humanity in general, while Capitalocene directs attention to capital as the world-ecological relation.

The crisis of falling ecological surplus

This relation brings us closer to the key message of the book: the crisis of capitalism is a crisis of “diminishing ecological surplus”. Ecological surplus is the foundation of the capitalist civilisational regime, and its core is Cheap Nature. It is how capital prevents the mass of capital from rising too fast in relation to the mass of appropriated nature (191).

The ecological surplus – the relative contribution of unpaid work to capital accumulation – can decline for several reasons: due to class struggle; the rise of environmental movements across the world; mechanised, monoculture agriculture with its increasingly toxic inputs; and, perhaps most obviously, the depletion of energy and mineral resources. Although with geographical variations, Moore writes that from 2003 onwards we witness the simultaneous rise in prices of all four inputs – labour, food, energy, and raw materials.

Moore’s concepts are striking and illuminating, but they sometimes operate at a level of abstraction that leaves the reader craving more empirical grounding.

Though brilliant, Capitalism in the Web of Life is intensely theoretical, arguably to a fault. Moore’s concepts are striking and illuminating, but they sometimes operate at a level of abstraction that leaves the reader craving more empirical grounding. But maybe Moore’s ambition is inseparable from his book’s central tension: its power lies in its attempt to build a unified account of capitalistic environment-making through history, but consequently some earlier critiques of Cartesian dualism tend to disappear from his retrospective.

Reconstruction of value is one of the book’s major achievements, especially where it connects Marxist-feminist insights on unpaid reproductive labour with the appropriation of unpaid work and energy from extra-human natures. But the scale of the theoretical claim occasionally comes at the expense of fuller engagement with nearby interlocutors and alternative vocabularies. In a 2025 essay Moore confirmed his commitment to this level of conceptual generalisation, which gives his work coherence and polemical force.

Changing the terms of the debate

“Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself,” said Native American leader and activist Chief Seattle in the mid-19th century, illustrating the arrogance of modern science. In fact, as biologists suggest, we humans live only a few moments of evolutionary time; and we play games in which we and our mechanical toys are the main characters in an infantile fairy tale called the Anthropocene. But our civilisational model is exhausting, as global warming evidences.

Capitalism in the Web of Life has become a contemporary classic. Moore’s subsequent reflections show less a revision than a sharpening of this original wager.

In this sense, Capitalism in the Web of Life has become a contemporary classic. Moore’s subsequent reflections show less a revision than a sharpening of this original wager. But what’s demanding is rewarding: Moore offers us a powerful framework for understanding the deep roots of planetary breakdown, as well as for understanding why the future seems even bleaker. His work is (somewhat depressingly) even more relevant now, as it becomes ever clearer that capitalism’s expansion will always involve intolerable violence against the web of life we are part all part of.

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: mustafa bilge satkın / Climate Visuals Countdown via climatevisuals.org.

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Far-Right France: Le Pen, Bardella and the Future of Europe. Victor Mallet. Hurst. 2026.

A far-right French president?

Will France find itself led by a far-right 31-year-old in 2027? Surprisingly, it looks likely, with Jordan Bardella leading in polls on the French Presidential election to take place next year. Even more surprisingly, in a country where most presidents have placed a strong emphasis on classical education and culture, Bardella has no university degree. And to complicate things further, he supports a staunch anti-immigrant policy, despite himself being of Italian and even Algerian descent.

This paradoxical situation matters for both France and Europe. The country is a nuclear power and veto-wielding permanent member of the UN Security Council, and one of the main engines of the European Union. Unlike Italy, Germany, or Spain, France remains a thoroughly centralised country, concentrating enormous power in the hands of the president. More than impacting French people, a Bardella presidency would embolden far-right leaders throughout the world.

The far right’s appeal in rural France

To understand this phenomenon, Victor Mallet, a journalist at The Financial Times and the author of several books, has written a crisp and lucid account of the reasons behind the far right’s success in France. He stresses a neglected factor: the far right’s newly established roots in many local communities. He depicts the slow but relentless momentum of the far-right juggernaut, delving deep into the country’s political history and social fabric. He achieved this by conducting interviews in neglected rural villages, and in rust belts ravaged by the disappearance of traditional manufacturing. His book is both an essay – backed by statistics, informed by social science literature, and extensive endnotes – and a travelogue, one that took him from the comfort of his Paris office to meet far-right leaders and their electorate living outside major metropolitan areas. He crisscrossed France from Etrepangy in Normandy to Beaucaire on the Mediterranean Coast, including Hénin-Beaumont in France’s northern Rust Belt, which Marine Le Pen has represented in Parliament since 2017.

As a French academic, I was surprised by the picture the book reveals because (like many others) I had limited my mental cartography to liberal and cosmopolitan locations. The most vivid pages are testimonies from people living in remote corners of France, where non-existent public transport demanded Mallet make long journeys on foot to reach his interviewees. One teaching assistant from Normandy states: “I voted for Mélenchon [the far-left leader] in 2022 in the first round, and in the second round I voted for Le Pen.” This is a recurring theme in Mallet’s book: the deep divide between pro-globalisation cosmopolitans embodied by President Emmanuel Macron, and the anti-globalisation of the far right and far left. Both “are relatively sympathetic to Russia,” (99) but disagree regarding environmental issues and immigration. Bardella has called the EU Green Deal one of the “biggest degrowth plan of the last 50 years” proposed by “EU ayatollahs” (178), while the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI) has regularly condemned lax environmental policy.

Marketing xenophobia and racism

The rejection of foreigners looms large in all far-right parties, including in France. Mallet nevertheless reminds us that Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) is not openly racist and xenophobic, unlike her father’s Front National. The latter was formed by Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972 with former French members of the Waffen SS, who fought in Hitler’s army during the Second World War, and with former members of the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS, or Secret Army Organisation), a seditious movement opposing Algerian independence that tried to assassinate Charles de Gaulle for his role in Algeria’s independence. Le Pen was the most presentable face of many fringe, far-right movements.

Marine Le Pen’s strategy of what the French call “dédiabolisation” (counter-demonisation) of her father’s radioactive FN has worked: the party is still fiercely hostile to immigration, but it is now seen more as anti-establishment than as racist.

Mallet excels at uncovering paradoxes related to racism: he interviews a leader of a mosque in Hénin-Beaumont, who speaks positively of the current mayor, Steve Briois of the FN. He also reminds us that during the second round of the 2022 presidential election, Le Pen won more than 60 per cent of the vote in the predominantly black regions of Guadeloupe and Martinique in the French Caribbean. It therefore appears that Marine Le Pen’s strategy of what the French call “dédiabolisation” (counter-demonisation) of her father’s radioactive FN has worked: the party is still fiercely hostile to immigration, but it is now seen more as anti-establishment than as racist.

The double act of Le Pen and Bardella

While Marine Le Pen was the natural leader of the French far right, successfully increasing the political importance of her new, seemingly more moderate RN, she is now embroiled in a trial where she is accused of embezzling European Parliament funds, thereby disqualifying her from the next presidential election. While a successful appeal would allow her to run, the next far-right candidate is more likely to be Bardella, a prodigy who won the first campaign he led for the RN at just 23 years of age, during the 2019 European election. While many observers have likened Bardella to porcelain – shiny but brittle – Mallet finds him rather sturdy. He and Le Pen form a seemingly unbreakable political couple.

Both Le Pen and Bardella share a Trump-like understanding of how much ordinary people resent the metropolitan elites

Both share a “Trump-like understanding of how much ordinary people resent the metropolitan elites” (135), even though Le Pen is the Parisian daughter of a millionaire. Bardella comes from a deprived neighbourhood, but “he was privately educated, and his father gave him a Smart car and regular holidays abroad” (108). Both are socially liberal, defending women, gays, and Jews, both for personal reasons and because it helps them to target Muslims. Lively portraits of Le Pen and Bardella – and countless RN voters – are what make the book such a page-turner.

The future of the French far right

The broader analysis of the rise of the far right is more traditional, with an emphasis on the support of conservative billionaires Vincent Bolloré and Pierre-Edouard Sterin, and on its populist discourse contradicting factual evidence regarding the economy, crime, and climate change. In terms of economic policy, it is difficult to gauge whether the RN will lean toward the dirigiste instincts of Le Pen or towards Bardella’s inclination towards the free market. They certainly promote a pro-business agenda, particularly regarding the dismantling of environmental regulations. The French right shamelessly uses popular historical references, often quoting Charles de Gaulle, France’s most popular leader, who was, ironically, a primary target of the far right. De Gaulle fought against the pro-Nazi Vichy regime and granted Algeria independence, and was at odds with the far right on both issues.

Mallet broaches but ultimately leaves open-ended what is perhaps the biggest question: whether a new far-right president would transform France into an authoritarian regime like Hungary’s Orbán or simply give it a more conservative direction, like Italy’s Meloni.

Mallet broaches but ultimately leaves open-ended what is perhaps the biggest question: whether a new far-right president would transform France into an authoritarian regime like Hungary’s Orbán – a plausible outcome considering France’s institutional system with a “near-monarchical president” (102) – or simply give it a more conservative direction, like Italy’s Meloni. The book sketches out several scenarios, including a possible financial crisis, but presents none as a forerunner. Europe is rarely mentioned; the wider world even less so. Given the weight of Orbán and Meloni in Trump’s Washington, it would be surprising if a Bardella victory in 2027 did not resonate on the other shore of the Atlantic.

Of course, this 264-page book is not comprehensive, but its shortness and liveliness are also its major appeal. While the endnotes span over 40 pages, some important books are missing, such as Luc Rouban’s recent La vraie Victoire du RN, which dissects the latest presidential election. The book also includes at least one minor inaccuracy, on page 117, which states that Bardella dropped out of his geography studies at Sciences Po; he was actually enrolled at Sorbonne Université. A valuable complement to Mallet’s down-to-earth and personal approach is Patrick Lehingue and Bernard Pudal’s newer, more academic study, Du FN au RN. Les raisons d’un succès, and sheds light on long-term social, economic, institutional, and cultural dynamics that explain the rise of the far right in France.

Overall, this book is a depressing read for liberals. It tells the tale of how two improbable leaders – a woman in an arch-conservative party, and a young nationalist with a foreign-sounding name – managed to stoke and exploit the grievances of peripheral voters. The presidential election in 2027 will reveal how far they can push their success.

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.

The Britain that Brexit built

Not long after the 2016 Brexit Referendum, we were at a family gathering where I learned that a couple of my relatives had voted Leave. I didn’t tell my wife until we got home. Why? Because I knew she’d have been upset, maybe even angry. Ten years later, I’m pretty certain from one or two things they’ve said now and then that those relatives are no longer entirely convinced that they or the country made the right choice. As for my wife, I really don’t need to ask. If anything, she’s even more sure than she was back then that Brexit was a stupid idea foisted on a country by opportunistic, morally dubious politicians who took cynical advantage of peoples’ often wilful ignorance and tapped into their prejudices.

Leave and Remain as identities

Hobolt and Tilly’s largely quantitative but always approachably-written book makes it clear that an awful lot of Brits have, like my wife, stuck to their guns rather than, like my relatives, reconsidered their position. By exploiting a wide range of surveys (including panel and tracker surveys from YouGov which they tailored themselves, as well as others taken off the peg from polls conducted for, among other outfits, the British Election Study and the Centre for Social Investigation) the authors show definitively that the majority of people who voted in 2016 and are still around, have retained their Leave and Remain identities. Moreover, they make it clear that, in the ensuing years, the divide “went well beyond a disagreement over EU membership and became a lens through which people interpreted the economy, democracy, and each other’s character.”

Just as importantly, they claim (and amply demonstrate) that the 2016 referendum did not merely unleash forces that had lain dormant in the British electorate for decades, as many – including Sobolewska and Ford and Clarke et al – have suggested. Rather, the referendum and the arguments that followed it actually engendered those identities and the ingroup attachment and outgroup hostility that, sadly, accompany them. Indeed, that is part of their wider claim (again one that is supported both by the research of other scholars and by the empirical evidence upon which they draw) that issues can give rise to identities that encompass a whole host of attitudes and values – if, that is, certain conditions are met.

And in Brexit they most certainly were. Brits were always more lukewarm about the EU than many of their European counterparts, but before 2016 they really weren’t (in marked contrast to the Conservative Party, for example) particularly exercised about it. The referendum and its immediate aftermath changed all that, transforming this “indifferent scepticism” into a diluted version of the affective polarisation in the United States that Lilly Mason, among others, has written about so powerfully and presciently.

That was because the vote involved a conflict which was “clear, salient and binary, intensifying group boundaries” (which they label issue contestation). It saw people engaged in “behaviours like voting [and, later on, offline and online activism] that reinforce[d] their identity and commitment to a group” (issue expression). And Brexit was one of those issues that “cuts across traditional party lines, allowing new identities to emerge outside the existing partisan structure” (issue alignment). Yes, there was some correlation between attitudes toward the EU and the way people voted in the referendum; but, Hobolt and Tilley stress, “it was the act of voting that created Brexit identities. Remainers and Leavers were both children of the referendum”.

The referendum’s legacies

This is not all they show. Indeed, the book is full of insights that help explain the party and electoral politics of the last ten years. It is now increasingly common, for example, for political scientists to argue that, underlying the evident fragmentation of the country’s party system, there are essentially two competing blocs comprised, on the one hand, of the self-styled progressive parties (the Greens, Labour and the Lib Dems) and, on the other, their right wing opponents (the Conservatives and Reform UK). Hobolt and Tilley show that, given how long-lasting and encompassing the identities triggered by Brexit have proved to be, this underlying logic has a lot to do with the sorting that took place in the aftermath of the referendum – particularly as it became clearer to voters after 2017 which side of the divide different parties were on.

Social media, incidentally, doesn’t appear to have had anywhere near as much influence on reinforcing those identities as some of us might have assumed. The “echo chambers” that really matter, Hobolt and Tilley show, are our real-life friends and family, not folk we follow on our platforms of choice. Where we live doesn’t count for much either, although personality traits do. And so strong is our very human desire to belong that, rather than adjust our views to fit the facts (for example, on the economy), we bend reality so that it accords with what we presume is our side’s take.

They also show that Remainers are significantly more likely to have retained their issue-based identity than Leavers. This they convincingly explain by pointing to the very fact of losing being more emotionally painful, Additionally, they remind us that the genius of the Leave campaign, which was to keep things as vague as possible about what would come next, also meant that by no means all the winners were satisfied with the “messy reality” of Brexit.

Accordingly, the book also throws up a counterfactual that may well haunt many readers: what might have happened had Remain won? This is something the authors, understandably, only touch on briefly. By their logic, the referendum would presumably still have given birth to the identities they talk about. But – given the fact that, had it gone the other way, it would not have triggered feverish debate about when and how to effect the UK’s withdrawal – whether it would have seen those identities harden quite as implacably as they did, who knows? Personally, I suspect not. Then again, after reading this excellent book, I’m more aware than ever that any guess on that score will, inevitably, be the product of my own Brexit bias.

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

Law and historical injustice

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

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

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

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

Is all land god’s land? 

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

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

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

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

Nomadic women and struggles for self-determination

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy. Rachel O’Neill. Translated into simplified Chinese by Wei Huarong. Yuelu Publishing House. 2026. (Originally published in English by Polity Books in 2018.)

The malleability of the “pickup artist”

In January this year, my book Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy (Polity 2018) was released in Chinese translation. The book is an ethnographic study of the “seduction industry”, which purports to teach men the skills needed to be “good with women”. Working with an incredibly dedicated team in the months leading up to its release, I learned a great deal about the relevance of the topic in China, and had cause to reflect on the book’s arguments more generally several years on from its original publication.

One of the first and most interesting things I learned is that the term “PUA” – shorthand for “pickup artist”, a man skilled in seduction techniques – is commonly used in China, deployed to describe varied practices of emotional manipulation and even abuse. So commonplace is the phrase that its usage is largely divorced from any more concrete relationship to the “seduction community”, the actual community-industry hybrid from which it originates.  

The seduction community is not a “subculture” – something separate from and in some sense “under” the rest of society. Instead, it must be understood as a logical outgrowth of the “twin rationalities” of neoliberalism and postfeminism.

For me, this is a fascinating discovery, not only because it signals an important development in sexual politics in the region, but also because it exemplifies one of the book’s core arguments – namely, that the seduction community is not a deviation or departure, but instead an extension and acceleration. By this I mean that the seduction community is not a “subculture” – something separate from and in some sense “under” the rest of society. Instead, it must be understood as a logical outgrowth of the “twin rationalities” of neoliberalism and postfeminism.

The first of these posits that one’s problems in life are individual and must ultimately be resolved through individual effort. The second maintains that women today are empowered and indeed advantaged over men. Within the context of the seduction community, these logics combine to produce an understanding that heterosexual men can and should approach their intimate lives as something to be worked on, invested in, “optimised” and so forth. In doing so, they are licensed to deploy tactics that undermine women in a variety of ways, to “level the playing field”.

Neoliberal masculinity

This manner of thinking is in no way unique to avowed pickup artists. Instead, it “fits” with much wider beliefs about how people generally should be (active, entrepreneurial, ambitious) as well as how men specifically should be (assured, assertive, dominant, “masculine”).

The spread of “PUA” in China as a popular idiom demonstrates this point further. Many, even most, people there use it without particular reference to the seduction community, precisely because it’s a useful shorthand to describe socially prominent or expected ways of being a man. To the extent that the seduction community is a novel cultural entity, this is because it codifies practices of emotional manipulation, often in highly elaborate and technical ways, and creates a market to sell these techniques to apparently ever-growing numbers of men.

This latter point was another key learning for me. In the Anglosphere, there can be no doubt as to the pernicious influence of the “manosphere” on large numbers of young men, as demonstrated by the incredible popularity of figures such as Andrew Tate and dramatised via programmes such as Adolescence.

Despite an apparent crackdown by authorities in China following a high-profile suicide case some years ago, PUA content remains rife across popular social media platforms in the region. As LSE alum Kedi Zhou describes in an interview that prefaces the Chinese edition: “seduction techniques that once circulated only within niche forums are now front and centre on algorithm-driven platforms, often packaged as “confidence coaching”, “lifestyle content”, or “masculine strength and discipline””. Kedi highlights the prevalence of videos in which men secretly film themselves approaching women, an issue that is very live in UK also.  All this raises the question of what can and should be done about the general mainstreaming of PUA in China and elsewhere.

When I wrote the book, I made clear that targeting individuals – as happened, for example, with the international media event that surrounded American PUA Julien Blanc – offers limited grounds for change and can in fact generate further visibility for PUA content. Thus, while individual men need to be held responsible for their actions, as a tactic for feminist organisers this has serious drawbacks.

How tech enables PUA culture

A more beneficial approach may be to target specific practices associated with but not limited to PUA, such as covert filming. A staple of the PUA genre, content of this kind ranges from men filming their initial interactions with women in public spaces through to filming sexual scenarios in private settings. Moreover, the tactic is becoming ever harder for victims to spot, owing to the use of products such as Meta’s AI glasses.

Platforms actively promote seduction-related content to young men, serving this up as part of a masculinised media diet, whether or not male users demonstrate any particular interest in the subject.

Campaigns that target these practices have great potential. We have seen glimpses of this with mobilisations in South Korea under the slogan “my life is not your porn”, which feminist activists elsewhere can take inspiration from. A great deal more could also be done to regulate the technologies that facilitate covert filming, not least given that feminist campaigners have long raised concerns about their propensity to enable gendered abuse.

Crucially, we also need to turn our attention to platforms. YouTube, TikTok, Douyin, Rednote and others all host seduction-related content. Moreover, research demonstrates that many of these platforms actively promote such content to young men, serving this up as part of a masculinised media diet, whether or not male users demonstrate any particular interest in the subject. In this way and in many others, privately controlled and profit orientated social media exerts a distorting and frequently malignant force in the realm of intimate life, taking over more and more of the “space of our world”. Sexual politics cannot be held apart from such struggles, and indeed should be central to them.

A final question Kedi posed to me in our interview is what my hopes are for the book in its Chinese translation. As a teacher at LSE working with students from all over the world, including on a course dedicated to feminist media and cultural studies, I am very aware of how urgently many want to explore questions of intimacy and relationality amid renewed interest in feminist separatism as well as wider discourses of heteropessimism.

Against and beyond seduction

The book’s concluding chapter is called “Against Seduction”. It is a treatise against the seduction community, to be sure, but also and even more so against the vision of heterosexuality it makes available, one that is hugely effortful for men and at the same time full of animosity and antagonism towards women. This is, in my view, an impoverished vision, and one for which there is no necessary or in-built rationale, whether psychological or biological.

Manipulating women, manoeuvring them, striving for dominance – none of this actually offers men fulfilment at a human level.

It is also borne of the recognition that PUA does not serve men, not really. Manipulating women, manoeuvring them, striving for dominance – none of this actually offers men fulfilment at a human level. Indeed, attempting to realise a sense of masculine selfhood in this way can be deeply alienating, as was made clear to me by the deep loneliness, isolation and perpetual discontent many of my research participants recounted.  

We need to open up wider conversations between women and men about how they want to relate to one another, how they want to interact and engage, what relationships should feel like, if they are to escape the current “tragedy of heterosexuality”. My hope is that the Chinese translation of Seduction might enter into and become part of these conversations in small way. I am so grateful for the opportunity.

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.

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Islam: A New History from Muhammad to The Present. John Tolan. Princeton University Press. 2025.

Islam’s beginnings and evolution 

What are the roots of Islam, and how has it been interpreted and practiced in different ways across time and place since its inception? Islam: A New History from Muhammad to the Present by John Tolan, surveys a wide range of defining historical episodes and movements from the time of the Prophet Muhammad in the 6^th century through to today. Tolan’s historicising approach focuses not only on events, but highlights the diverse contributions of caliphs, travellers, Sufi saints, merchants, and Islamic reformers in shaping Islamic societies across regions and eras.  

From the spiritual legacy of Rabia al-Adawiyya, the 8th-century Muslim saint, to contemporary interpretations of Islam, the tradition has continually transformed, adapted, and evolved since its inception. During the life of the Prophet Muhammad, Islam remained unified under his direct guidance and the presence of his companions. However, the significant doctrinal and political developments emerged following his death in 632 CE. The first caliph was chosen by Abu Bakr al-Siddiq (632-634) and unifying the Arabian Peninsula and combating early waves of apostasy. The question of succession – specifically who would lead the Ummah (believers of Islam) – marked a decisive moment in Islamic history and led to the emergence of sectarianism such as Sunni and Shi’a. 

Tolan reveals how early political rivalries were transformed into lasting sectarian cleavages within the Islamic tradition.

Tolan draws attention to Nana Asmau, Uthman ibn Fodio’s daughter, a distinguished scholar, poet, Sufi, and reformer, who exercised significant intellectual and political influence during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In the modern period, figures such as African American Imam Amina Wadud – who converted from Christianity to Islam – have continued this tradition of reinterpretation. In her work Qur’an and Woman (1999), Wadud argues that each generation of Muslims must retain the freedom to reread and reinterpret the Quran, underscoring Islam’s dynamic and evolving engagement with history, and society. Further, Tolan highlights how Muslim scholars, organisations, and leaders have politically mobilised Muslim communities across the world and their contribution of proliferations of Islam especially in the Middle East, the USA and Europe. He discusses figures from an Egyptian author Gamal al-Banna to the brother of Hassan al-Banna and from Malcolm X to Mahmud Muhammad Taha and Bilali Muhammad.  

The Quran and sectarianism

Tolan  episodic historical approach zones in on key events in Islam, particularly those surrounding the compilation of the Quran and the struggle for political authority after the Prophet Muhammad’s death. The Quran was first full text compiled in written form during the caliph of Uthman ibn Affan, a process that later became a source of sectarian controversy. Certain Shi’a scholars such as Ibn Abil Hadid and Yasir al-Habib have argued that portions of the original revelation were concealed, alleging that Ali ibn Abi Talib as the rightful successor were omitted, and that some Quranic materials were destroyed during the standardisation of the text. 

Tolan further situates these theological disputes within the larger political conflicts between emerging Sunni authorities and Shi’a factions during the Umayyad period, followed by the Abbasid era, when competing claims to the caliphate continued to shape Islamic governance. He demonstrates how the institution of the caliphate became a source of deep and enduring division within Islam. For instance, Tolan discusses accusations directed at Ali in relation to the assassination of Caliph Umar, including claims that Ali protected and facilitated the escape of the assassin, Piruz Nahavandi – a Persian captive taken during the Battle of Al-Qadisiyya (25). Through these episodes, Tolan reveals how early political rivalries were transformed into lasting sectarian cleavages within the Islamic tradition. 

Islam’s spread and divisions 

Initially, Islam expanded its dominance from Damascus (634 CE) to Antioch (637 CE) and Jerusalem (638 CE). By the time of Caliph Umar’s death in 644 CE, the Islamic empire spanned from Libya to Afghanistan and from Azerbaijan to Yemen. Later, Tolan briefly discusses the rise of Islam most continents of the world through battles, merchants, and Sufi’s spirituality. Tolan notes that how the first Fitna or civil war stated in the 7^th century in Islam which gave to rise new sectarian divisions such as Sunnis, Shi’a, and Kharijites. These sects started to practice Islam in their own ways. For instance, Shi’a believed that Ali was first Caliph of Umma and Sunnis believed Abu-Bakr, and some Muslim rulers imposed a Jizya (tax) on Christians, Jews, Jains, Buddhists and Hindus. 

Movements including Deobandi, Wahhabi, Ahmadiyya and Faraizi emerged that created identity-based segregation and emphasised strict adherence to the Quran and Hadith, rejecting some traditional practices among Muslims

Tolan highlights the significance of Ibn Battuta’s Rihla (1959) in understanding the global spread and lived diversity of Islam. Battuta’s travels from Mecca to Mali, India, Mauritius, and China – illustrate how Islam adapted cultures across regions. Serving as a qadi (a Muslim judge) in India under Muhammad bin Tughlaq and later as an envoy to China, Battuta offers detailed observations on governance, economy, and international relations. His vivid, experiential narrative enriches Islamic history, particularly through contributions such as his writing of hadith (corpus of sayings or traditions of the Prophet Muhammad) in Arabic at the request of Muhammad ben Aydin, Sultan of Birki (Birkin) (125). 

Colonial influence and modern Islam 

In the chapter “Colonization and Its Discontents, 1798-1918,” Tolan traces the history of European colonisation in Muslim societies from the late 18th to the early 20th century. He examines how India came under the control of European powers such as the East India Company, the Portuguese, and the Dutch, who established colonial regimes across different regions. Tolan highlights how the Dutch East India Company (DEIC) employed Muslims to codify Islamic law in matters of inheritance, marriage, and divorce, at Masulipatnam (Andhra Pradesh), Malabar Coast (Kerala) Gujarat, and some part of Bengal, while the British East India Company similarly institutionalised Islamic (Sharia) law for Muslims in Bengal, Madras, Bombay presidencies and later all over India as part of its colonial governance strategy (168).  

Movements including Deobandi, Wahhabi, Ahmadiyya and Faraizi emerged that created identity-based segregation and emphasised strict adherence to the Quran and Hadith, rejecting some traditional practices among Muslims. For instance, the Deobandi Movement founded in 1866, went against modern western education and promoted traditional studies (Quran, Hadith, Fiqh). Contrastingly, Sir Syed Ahmad founded Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in 1875, to modernise education with Islamic values. Later, these movements spread not only across the Indian subcontinent but also to the Middle East, South Asia and Europe.   

Overall, Tolan’s book is a comprehensive account of key Islamic events and historical developments; however, some of his arguments are insufficiently substantiated. For instance, the claim that Shi’a Muslims believed that Ayesha (wife of Muhammad) concealed Quranic verses proving Ali’s rightful succession is presented with limited evidentiary support. The book also overlooks the significant role of Sufi traditions in the spread of Islam in the Indian subcontinent, particularly the contributions of key figures. Nonetheless, Tolan’s work offers a broad historical perspective on Islam’s evolution, transformation, and the emergence of diverse sects across regions. The book focuses primarily on political events in Islamic history and their role in the making and unmaking of Islam. In so doing, it makes a meaningful contribution for Islamic scholars, academicians and individuals to understand the evolution of Islam from Muhammad to present.

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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Performing Power. Marcus Morgan. Polity. 2025.

Marcus Morgan’s book Performing Power (2025) makes an important contribution to understanding the symbolic and affective dimensions of political life. Performance and the related concept of performativity have long served as a productive metaphor in social theory, from Austin’s philosophy of language and Goffman’s sociology to what is arguably today the most widely recognised articulation in the work of Judith Butler.

A rich and analytically rigorous framework for understanding how power is structured, exercised and contested in contemporary societies.

Despite its long-standing presence in theory, its wide use, and its diverse operationalisations, Morgan offers the most systematic and ambitious attempt to develop a theory of social performance to date. In so doing, he draws on cultural sociology, a distinctive sociological approach developed by Jeffrey Alexander and his collaborators, characterised by a sustained effort to place meaning at the centre of analysis. At the same time, he shows how material structures and power relations shape the emergence, enactment, reception and interpretation of performance. The book offers a nuanced theory of social performance, foregrounding the enabling and constraining force of cultural structures while integrating the material conditions that shape its production and consumption. The result is a rich and analytically rigorous framework for understanding how power is structured, exercised and contested in contemporary societies.

Theories of power and performance 

The book is divided into three parts, addressing conceptual clarification, the analysis of performative structures, and the development of a new theoretical model. The first part offers a critical engagement with theories of power and performance, the two foundational concepts of the study, and explores their points of intersection. Chapter one sets out the importance of performance in the production, transmission, and legitimation of power from the outset, beginning with a systematic overview of major conceptualisations of power in sociological and, more broadly, social theory. Chapter two turns to the concept of performance itself, where Morgan distinguishes between artistic and social performance, while also tracing the connections between what is conventionally recognised as performance and what may be understood as such. In contrast to everyday understanding of performance as something artificial and deceptive, this book shifts the focus toward a broader understanding of social performance as a way of expressing meaning in order to achieve something.

Cultural structures of performance 

For Morgan, performance is the concept that makes it possible to avoid privileging either structure or agency, and instead to approach social reality in a synthetic manner. The second part of the book (Chapters three and four) is devoted to examining the cultural structures on which performance is grounded and to analysing their character. Morgan conceptualises performance on the basis of Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology, which employs the theatrical metaphor to theorise human agency in everyday interaction, as well as cultural sociology. He highlights the cultural structures that constitute performance, such as binary codes, narratives, genres, character types, and casting. The author then turns to rhetoric as a means of producing persuasive speech and performance and to its capacity to mobilise audiences, as well as to ritual – not simply as a stabilising mechanism of social integration, but as a dynamic force capable of generating social transformation.

The third part develops Morgan’s new theoretical model of performative success (Chapters five, six, and seven). Drawing heavily on Alexander’s cultural sociology, he begins with the model of social performance articulated within this approach. For Alexander, social performance entails the mobilisation of a background system of collective representations, actors capable of bringing these codes and scripts alive, specific spatial and temporal settings, particular audiences who interpret the meanings of the performance, and relations of power. Success is emergent rather than guaranteed: it depends on the effective fusion of performance’s elements to secure audience identification, emotional engagement and orientation toward action.

The value of resonance

In the following chapters Morgan builds a framework for modelling social performance on Alexander’s framework while revising it in significant ways. He retains the Strong program’s commitment to treating culture as relatively autonomous and to viewing performative acts as mobilisations of existing cultural structures. However, he offers a different conceptualisation of power. Distinguishing between its various dimensions, he maps the power relations that shape the context in which performance emerges and unfolds, as well as the forms of power generated through performance.

Morgan argues that performative success hinges on resonance: the capacity of skilful actors to mobilise shared cultural structures, recombine them in innovative ways, and frame perceived problems as offering solutions or a resolution of emotional tensions

In doing so, he moves beyond treating power as merely one element among others and develops a more complex account of performative success. Rather than locating success in the fusion of elements, as in Alexander’s approach, Morgan argues that it hinges on resonance: the capacity of skilful actors to mobilise shared cultural structures, recombine them in innovative ways, and frame perceived problems as offering solutions or a resolution of emotional tensions. This shift from fusion to resonance is one of the book’s most original theoretical interventions.

Performance strategies and the materiality of power 

One question that remains open concerns the extent to which actors are strategically oriented. The book distances itself from conceptions of culture as a repertoire of symbolic resources from which actors strategically select elements for action. Instead, performative structures are presented as deeply internalised, shaping dispositions and perceptions, particularly when they draw on seemingly universal cultural forms such as binary oppositions. At the same time, those involved in the production of performance clearly do make choices, selecting narratives and symbolic resources in ways that increase the likelihood of conveying a desired message and orienting audiences toward particular ways of thinking or acting. A tension thus emerges between viewing social performance actors as either strategically oriented or guided by largely tacit, semi-reflexive engagements with deeply embedded cultural structures.

Overall, Morgan advances a theory of social performance while deepening our understanding of power relations, both as a structuring context and as an outcome of performance. By “context”, he refers not only to forms of domination embedded in language and culture, but also to questions of access to the material means that render performances persuasive and shape audiences’ interpretive capacities. In this way, he avoids a criticism often directed at cultural sociology: that it overlooks material asymmetries, preexisting power relations, and remains overly idealist. At the same time, his strong emphasis on cultural structures allows him to account for why certain performances prove successful even when enacted by actors who occupy structurally subordinate positions within a given society.

Morgan offers a productive analytical tool for examining the complexity of symbolic action and public struggles over power.

The book’s analytical framework constitutes its most significant contribution, offering a productive lens for research across diverse political contexts – from contemporary right-wing populist mobilisations and progressive social movements to historical cases, as Morgan’s analysis of the Black Consciousness Movement illustrates. By reworking an apparently Marxist vocabulary, forces, means and labour of production and consumption, here referring to the symbolic domain, Morgan offers a productive analytical tool for examining the complexity of symbolic action and public struggles over power. The book will be of primary interest to sociologists, but its conceptual innovation extends its relevance well beyond the discipline.

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

Peacekeeping camps as active processes

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

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

An interdisciplinary lens on peacekeeping 

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

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

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

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

Dilemmas of peace operations 

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

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

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

Peacekeeping camps’ place in the world 

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

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

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

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The Goddess in the Mirror: An Anthropology of Beauty. Tulasi Srinivas. Duke University Press. 2025.

What does beauty and the many forms of labour, consumption and culture that surround it, look like in contemporary Bangalore (Bengaluru)? Tulasi Srinivas’s The Goddess in the Mirror is an ethnographic study of contemporary Indian beauty parlours in the capital city of the state of Karnataka, India. The beauty parlours located in every corner of contemporary urban India may initially seem like unlikely sites for political anthropology. But Srinivas’s detailed account of the moral, political and emotional worlds that sustain the beauty parlour begs to differ. Through vivid descriptions of bodies, relations, and myths, Srinivas adroitly demonstrates how the pursuit of beauty is deeply intertwined with gender, religion, and power in urban India. 

Beauty parlours have emerged as crucial sites for understanding contemporary urban life as spaces where gender, labour, consumption, and cultural transformation meet, yet few ethnographies have captured their complexity. Srinivas thus makes an original and worthwhile intervention with this work. Her scholarly background in anthropology of religion and ethics permeates the work. Each chapter explores a theme corresponding to an aspect of the goddess and a facet of beauty culture, providing the book with a conceptual symmetry. Srinivas’s analysis of beauty is deeply feminist, while also expanding feminist discourse by including perspectives beyond the heteronormative frame. This book challenges both Western feminist discourses on beauty, which are mostly centred on cisgender heterosexual women’s experiences and South Asian feminist scholarship on embodiment and public space. Both of those traditions have tended to overlook queer and transgender experiences in discussions of beauty, labour, and aspiration.  

Ethnographic approaches and urban context 

The book is immersive, seamlessly blending theory and case studies and a multi-sited ethnographic approach of participant observation and in-depth interviews at beauty parlours around Bangalore. Encompassing upscale boutiques to modest neighbourhood salons, the client base of these beauty parlours is wide, serving women from different classes and castes from middle-class housewives to working-class migrants and queer communities. This enables Srinivas to capture the heterogeneity of the beauty industry. 

The work situates intimate salon interactions within the broader context of Bangalore’s post-1990s urban transformation, during which the beauty services sector exploded

Crucially, the work situates these intimate salon interactions within the broader context of Bangalore’s post-1990s urban transformation, during which it emerged as a global tech hub. During the same period, the beauty services sector exploded, and by the end of the 1990s, the “personal care” market was booming. In this neoliberal urban milieu and capitalist expansion, when beauty work became a new labour niche, Srinivas’s ethnography stays attentive to everyday life and interpersonal relationships in the salon. She documents the intimate ties between beauticians and their clients, and how the salon becomes a microcosm of Bangalore’s social contrasts and connections.  

Her fieldwork combines traditional observation with a knack for narrative. For example, Srinivas describes sitting with beauticians as they styled hair or threaded eyebrows, and interweaves these descriptions with stories of film stars, Hindu goddesses, and personal hopes. She acknowledges the unstable power dynamics between the researcher and subjects in the salon setting, as well as the challenge of representing intimate, embodied experiences without exploiting them. Srinivas’s reflexivity about her own positionality as a researcher and as an Indian-American anthropologist returning to Bangalore strengthens the ethnography. She occasionally appears in the narrative, which humanises the account, renders her presence and learning process transparent. 

Beauty as a social, moral and political project

A central contribution of this book is its reconceptualisation of beauty as a richly layered social project. Srinivas notes that the concept of beauty has long been a central ethical category in South Asian cosmology. She illuminates how the abundance of beauty signifies auspiciousness, moral virtue and order, while ugliness in myth signals evil, chaos, or the asura (demonic) realm. This cultural association of beauty with goodness means that women’s appearances are never politically neutral.  

Clients and beauticians often reference Hindu myths in their daily salon conversations. These stories serve as models for women to interpret their lives and desires.

Srinivas argues that women in Bangalore’s salons practice ethical self-fashioning. As they seek smoother skin or more radiant faces, they also shape their “ethical subjectivities” through storytelling and ritual practice. For example, clients and beauticians often reference Hindu myths in their daily salon conversations. These stories serve as models for women to interpret their lives and desires. Beauty is a political resource, a way for women to navigate recognition as an intersubjective acknowledgement of one’s social standing and worth, as well as respectability and opportunities within the prevalent power dynamics.  

Rather than romanticise beauty, Srinivas outlines its complexity. It is not entirely empowering or oppressive, but a constantly evolving arena of negotiation. This perspective counters the Western feminist discourse that attempts to place beauty within binaries; they either view beauty solely as a patriarchal trap or they see it as a form of liberation. Within this context, Srinivas portrays beauty as part of everyday politics involving ethics and feelings. 

Myth, narrative and embodiment 

Salons of Bangalore are revealed as storied spaces where women often recount Hindu epics and legends alongside Bollywood plots and personal anecdotes, through which they process their realities. A beautician might compare a client’s predicament with a scene from the Mahabharata, or a group of clients collectively riff on the beauty contests of celestial apsaras. Such storytelling, Srinivas argues, functions much like Scheherazade’s One Thousand and One Nights (an endless story technique that is ultimately survivalist)She suggests that Bangalorean women sustain hope and community through shared mythic references. This perspective resonates with current anthropological interest in affect and futurity in neoliberal societies, as Srinivas aligns with scholars like Arjun Appadurai and Lauren Berlant who view narrative and imagination as essential tools for managing uncertain futures. 

Srinivas does not side with scholars (such as Talal Asad and Johannes Fabian) who argue that myth is “passé” in contemporary anthropology, a mere reflection of something else. In fact, in her fieldwork, she observes how myth provides a vocabulary of embodiment and emotion that bridges the personal and the cosmic. Srinivas’s writing excels in conveying the sensory and affective dimensions of this process. 

Caste and labour politics of beauty 

Srinivas also illuminates macro-political issues through grounded, everyday encounters, analysing the caste and class dynamics underlying India’s beauty culture. She delves into the politics of skin colour and caste to argue how fair skin – coded as savarna (upper-caste) and upper-class – remains a premium beauty ideal in India. Srinivas powerfully juxtaposes the myth of Draupadi with Mahasweta Devi’s subaltern story of Dopdi. Through this retelling, she exposes how social violence against darker-skinned women persists in contemporary India, albeit in new guises. She shows how caste inequalities are both reinforced and contested in everyday beauty work. 

A book that will resonate with scholars of gender and labour, urban anthropology, South Asian studies, and anyone interested in how everyday practices become sites of political struggle

Labour and economic exploitation form another critical thread of her work, as Bangalore’s beauty workers are often young women from the northeastern states or from marginalised caste backgrounds. Srinivas analytically links personal narratives of loneliness of migration and vulnerability to abuse, and a constant negotiation of belonging to wider political-economic structures. She argues that beauty labour is political labour in the sense of who gets to occupy urban spaces, whose bodies are considered desirable or polluting and how global capitalist forces intersect with ancient inequities of caste.  

One potential limitation of the work stems from its analytical breadth. Srinivas sets out to combine mythology, economics, sensory ethnography, and political critique all in one volume, resulting in certain topics being touched upon but not followed explored in depth. Similarly, the detours into Sanskrit aesthetics and epic myths might overwhelm readers unfamiliar with these references and can occasionally lead to an idealised interpretation of its role. 

That said, this is a valuable and nuanced book that will resonate with scholars of gender and labour, urban anthropology, South Asian studies, and anyone interested in how everyday practices become sites of political struggle. In terms of disciplinary impact, The Goddess in the Mirror may well become a touchstone for integrating aesthetic and affective dimensions into analyses of power.

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: Sumit Saraswat on Shutterstock.

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Beyond Bricks and Mortar: Building Homes, Communities, and Neighbourhoods. Anne Power. Policy Press. 2025. 

How housing reflects social life

“Near to that part of the Thames on which the church at Rotherhithe abuts, where the buildings on the banks are dirtiest and the vessels on the river blackest with the dust of colliers and the smoke of close-built low-roofed houses, there exists the filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are hidden in London, wholly unknown, even by name, to the great mass of its inhabitants.” – Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

This passage from Oliver Twist draws readers into the cramped interiors and precarious lives of the urban poor, making housing conditions inseparable from social injustice. It is fitting, then, that Dickens’s world serves as a touchstone for Anne Power, Professor Emerita of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. As its title signals, Beyond Bricks and Mortar: Building Homes, Communities, and Neighbourhoods shifts attention from buildings to the social life they sustain – or fail to sustain. For Power, housing is not simply infrastructure, but a complex combination of stability, dignity, and belonging. She argues that the wider role of housing involves valuing and protecting the lowest-income communities. Dickens’s London offers an early literary record of what happens when the ground beneath those communities collapses. 

The way housing is designed, developed, and managed is central to creating and sustaining communities. Housing policy, in short, shapes collective life.  

The book’s authority rests on experience as much as analysis, drawing on decades of work in housing systems, urban regeneration, and low-income neighbourhoods. This includes her leadership of LSE Housing and Communities and direct involvement in improvement initiatives including the 1966 “End Slums” campaign with Martin Luther King and the Urban Task Force (1998). Power is extraordinarily well placed to write on housing, and in this book, she expertly combines policy expertise with practical knowledge. The resulting book offers a precise mixed-methods design with apt case studies and persuasive policy arguments, and speaks to students, scholars, and practitioners alike. 

The book advances an expansive understanding of shelter as a constant across human history, from “prehistoric cave dwellings to rudimentary huts, portable tent homes, stone cottages, tenements, and terraces, to semi-detached houses and high-rise blocks” (3). This long view allows her to treat housing as a social process rather than a static object, one that includes informal and precarious dwellings alongside formal stock. This dynamic view of shelter is echoed by fellow LSE professor Claire Mercer’s The Suburban Frontier (2024), which details suburban growth and squatting in Dar es Salaam, and Carolyn Whitzman’s Home Truths (2024) that explores Canada’s housing crisis. Power’s central claim gives the book its force: “the way housing is designed, developed, and managed is central to creating and sustaining communities” (vi). Housing policy, in short, shapes collective life.  

Housing as key to social reform 

In the first section, Power identifies the influence of Robert Owen (1771-1858), founder of utopian socialism and among the first to connect fair, accessible housing to the creation of “a productive and cooperative society that took care of basic needs while protecting and advancing people’s wellbeing” (11). This framing is apt, as Owen emphasised mutual respect between workers and supervisors that extended to renters and social landlords. Likewise, social reformer Octavia Hill (1838-1912), co-founder of the National Trust (1895), demonstrated how attentive management, affordable rents, and decent conditions could improve everyday life. Her hands on approach to property management proved “if you treat tenants with respect and fairness, you could establish a two-way trust that would keep your properties in good condition and your tenants happy” (15). Together, Owen and Hill establish the foundations for a collective and sustainable approach to housing managment. 

Where the first section establishes these reform principles, the second turns to 20^th-century overcrowding and demolition. Power details the 1974 financial crisis that nearly bankrupted the UK and the austerity measures that followed. Citing examples like the Charteris Road community and Finsbury Park in North Islington, she links economic retrenchment to intensifying social problems, clearance schemes, and state-led rehousing. Immigrants and newcomers were frequently excluded from these plans and pushed into cramped, deteriorating private rentals, exacerbating existing inequalities. Legislative responses – the Race Relations Act (1968) and the Homeless Persons Act (1977) – sought to define “priority need” and address discrimination, but policy often lagged behind lived conditions. 

Place-based investment, shortcomings in housing provision 

Section three, “Targeting the Poorest Areas,” shifts to the 1997 election of the New Labour government and its stated commitment to “equality of opportunity” (95). Tony Blair’s platform – “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, “education, education, education,” and the insistence that “no-one should be disadvantaged by where they live” – folded housing into broader neighbourhood renewal strategies. Despite Blair’s success offering low-income families supplemental support through tax credits, the Housing Benefit did not have the same effect. Power notes, “to prevent the risk of arrears…Housing Benefit was paid directly to landlords” (96). As such, the connection between landlord and tenant diminished, creating a “system that lacked mechanisms for picking up problems or generating responsibility” (96). By revealing the shortcomings of impersonal property management, Power emphasises the need to protect low-income communities from further decline. 

Power successfully illustrates that housing policy is never merely technical – it determines whether communities hold together or come apart.

The fourth and final section, “Changing the Basis of Welfare,” brings the argument into the 2000s and 2010s. Returning to the principles articulated by Hill and Owen, Power argues that long-term stability depends on community-based management grounded in fair rents, decent housing conditions, and trust between tenants and landlords. Writing through the 2008 financial crisis and the premiership of Gordon Brown – credited widely for stabilising the global financial system – Power notes both meaningful reductions in child and pensioner poverty and persistent shortcomings in affordable housing provision. Even so, she concludes that the thirteen years of New Labour government produced tangible, ground-level gains for low-income communities. 

A framework for reading marginalised neighbourhoods 

Ultimately, in Beyond Bricks and Mortar, Power asks readers to see housing as more than a physical or economic commodity; it is the social foundation on which dignity, stability, and belonging rest. Advocating a community-based approach to social housing, she grounds policy in respect, stewardship, and everyday care. Each case study tests this principle in practice, showing not only what fails but what works. Power successfully illustrates that housing policy is never merely technical – it determines whether communities hold together or come apart.

For scholars like me – currently writing a doctoral dissertation on the literatures of Canadian suburbs – this argument can apply in other contexts. Power’s attention to tenant-led networks, local organising, and the daily practices that sustain belonging offers a concrete framework for reading marginalised neighbourhoods. Her model travels well as a set of principles, though its reliance on the institutional strength of Britain’s social-housing sector may be harder to reproduce in more fragmented, market-led contexts. 

I see both the promise and the limits of that transfer in the neighbourhood of Jane-Finch in Toronto, where newcomers are attracted by affordable rents and transit access and where community groups, cultural events, and religious gatherings operate as infrastructures of care. Residents share information, resources, and rituals, building systems of support that counter the area’s persistent stigma as a crime-ridden periphery. Power’s work is a crucial contribution to the work of capturing such textured social life that goes far beyond the physical shelter and policies that try to contain it. 

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

Anne Power will speak about the book at a public LSE event on Tuesday 3 March, The care economy and social housing. Find details and register to attend.

Main image: I Wei Huang on Shutterstock.

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