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.

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Drugs, Race, and the Politics of Modern Slavery Law: When Enemies Become Victims. Insa Lee Koch. Oxford University Press. 2026.

Insa Lee Koch will speak at a panel event at LSE, Who is Britain really saving in the fight against modern slavery? on Wednesday 6 May 2026. Find out more and register.

What does it mean when young people once cast as dangerous criminals – indeed, as enemies of the nation – are suddenly redefined as victims of exploitation, even as “modern slaves”? This question sits at the heart of Drugs, Race, and the Politics of Modern Slavery Law, an open-access book based on long-term ethnography. The book explores how the British state has come to “discover” victims in need of safeguarding in the figure of the exploited drugs runner It suggests why we need to remain critical of the language of slavery and exploitation against the backdrop of Britain’s history of transatlantic slavery and racial empire, and their ongoing afterlives.

Over the past decade, the UK has witnessed a profound transformation in how it understands certain forms of drug dealing, particularly those associated with so-called “county lines” networks. These networks, involving the distribution of drugs from urban centres to smaller towns and rural areas, have become the focus of intense political, legal, and media attention. Crucially, many of those involved at the lowest levels – often racialised and working-class teenage boys, and some of the most under-protected and over-criminalised populations under the government’s ”war on gangs” – are now increasingly framed not simply as offenders, but as victims of “criminal exploitation” and even as “modern slaves” under the Modern Slavery Act 2015.

The rise of “modern slavery” at home

The Modern Slavery Act 2015 marked a turning point in English law. Initially designed with the figure of the trafficked migrant in mind, it provided an unprecedent piece of legislation, one that made the fight against so-called modern slavery a national priority within Britain’s own borders. Crucially, the act offers not only prosecution tools for those accused of modern slavery offences but also a defence for those who have committed certain offences as a consequence of their exploitation. Today, the largest group of “modern slaves” identified through the government’s own mechanisms are British nationals, many of them young people involved in the regional heroin and crack cocaine networks that were labelled “county lines” in 2015.

The identification of modern slaves in the figure of the drugs runner has been widely framed as a progressive shift. But how does this narrative sit with those at its receiving end, and what forms of power does it obscure?

The identification of modern slaves in the figure of the drugs runner has been widely framed as a progressive shift across the political spectrum. Rather than punishing some of the most over-criminalised and racialised groups under the “war on gangs”, the state is now seen to recognise their vulnerability and extend protection. This shift is often celebrated as moral progress – evidence, even, of a post-racial Britain moving beyond its past. But how does this narrative sit with those at its receiving end, and what forms of power does it obscure?

Ethnography as an entry point

My starting point is the families and young men themselves, living in Britain’s urban post-industrial communities shaped by decades of welfare withdrawal, austerity, and structural abandonment. These are multicultural working-class areas, often with deep ties to Britain’s colonial past through histories of migration. It was in my long-term field site – first explored in my earlier work and published open access – that, in 2016, I encountered my first so-called “slave”: a fourteen-year-old boy identified by police as exploited and trafficked.

Others followed, all displaying similar patterns. Intrigued by this shift, and driven by their mothers’ desperate pleas to protect their children, I undertook a multi-sited research project that over five years took me from homes and streets to police stations, law enforcement offices, legal chambers, and Crown Courts – where modern slavery trials are now being heard. Throughout, my primary reference point remains the families and young men themselves, particularly their experiences of being failed by the state’s promises of victimhood and care. This perspective anchors the book’s central critique.

From criminals to slaves

A central argument of the book is that the move from “enemy” to “victim” does not mark a clean break from punitive logics. Rather, it reconfigures and deepens them in the name of safeguarding. This logic of victimhood is far from new. As I argue, the language of safeguarding carries echoes of colonial logics of saviourism, which have long cast racialised populations as in need of saving – for their own good and from their own kind. Today, this logic is revived in relation to Britain’s postcolonial, racialised working-class youth, framed as part of a colour-blind and even-handed tale of protecting the most vulnerable.

The fight against ‘modern slavery’ intensifies multi-agency data sharing, surveillance, and pre-emptive policing in racialised and working-class communities

My ethnography traces how this ideology of victimhood plays out in practice. Among frontline professionals, the fight against “modern slavery” intensifies multi-agency data sharing, surveillance, and pre-emptive policing in racialised and working-class communities. Professionals become involved in the intimate details of young people’s lives, interpreting friendship, care, and intimacy through criminal categories such as “mate crime”, “cuckooing”, and “exploitation”. At the same time, anti-trafficking frameworks enable the prosecution of drug dealers not just for drug offences, but for human trafficking – as “slave masters” – recasting them as the ultimate “enemy within”.

Glodi Wabelua & the figure of the “slave master”

In spring 2019, I followed what was the first prosecution of its kind in a jury-led trial: the trial of Wabelua, Alford, and Karamera for human trafficking. The prosecution argued that the three young men, aged 21 at the time of offending, had trafficked six children and one vulnerable adult for the purposes of drug distribution. None of the alleged child victims testified. Instead, the case relied heavily on phone data. In April 2019, Glodi Wabelua became the first person convicted by a jury under modern slavery legislation in this context.

Britain’s ‘discovery’ of modern slavery can be viewed as part of a broader process of state-making at a time of profound racial and economic crisis.

But how does this official narrative of justice align with the experiences of those convicted? In the book, I centre Glodi’s own account – one that was largely absent from the trial. Having come to the UK from Congo at the age of five and grown up on a London estate, his story complicates the stark division between victim and perpetrator assumed by the law. When we met in 2023 and began working together, he described a life shaped by the same structural conditions attributed to those labelled “victims”: poverty, exclusion, and drug debt. His account is one where he was only one step removed from the victims – holding the phone line as opposed to running the drugs.

Race, empire & slavery’s afterlives

Glodi’s conviction reveals not only the difficulty of applying anti-trafficking law where the line between victim and offender is often vanishingly thin. It also exposes the fragility of the claim that Britain is now “post-racial” – a claim advanced, for instance, by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities in 2021, in the wake of the global Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the police’s murder of George Floyd in the US. Having reviewed evidence of racial disparity across different domains, the Commission argued that the UK is a model for other “white-majority countries”.

Seen in this context, Britain’s “discovery” of modern slavery can be viewed as part of a broader process of state-making at a time of profound racial and economic crisis. At the very moment the British state identifies slavery as a central problem to be tackled, it does so without reckoning with its own histories of transatlantic slavery or their enduring afterlives in the continued state racism that the young men and their families confront. Instead, slavery has been reconstructed as a contemporary wrong, projecting not only the figure of the “slave” but that of the “slave” master – the very antithesis of liberal freedom and the ultimate enemy within. It is this analytical move – and the politics of imperial denial it entails – that lies at the heart of the book.

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 Social Codes of Tech Workers: Class Identity in Digital Capitalism. Robert Dorschel. MIT Press. 2025.

Will tech workers act on their code? 

Robert Dorschel’s The Social Codes of Tech Workers: Class Identity in Digital Capitalism seeks to fill a curious gap in social-scientific attention to digital labour. While much has been written about the elite entrepreneurs at the top of the tech sector and a fair bit also about the invisible labour and gig workers at its bottom, the great mass of workers in the middle – those who design, deliver and maintain digital products – are under-studied. Dorschel, a digital sociologist at Cambridge, focuses on this group to illuminate their present and potential engagement with class issues. He does so in terms set largely by Foucault and Bourdieu, speaking to how workers’ historical and institutional context, and their corresponding subjective self-image, influence their sense of class. Relying on interviews with American and German data scientists and user experience (UX) designers, in addition to discourse analysis of institutional study program descriptions and of job postings, he uncovers a set of variegated and often contradictory “social codes” in the builders of today’s digital society.

Tech workers’ inactive activism 

To begin with, Dorschel finds broad and genuine inclination toward social critique among this relatively well-favoured segment of society. The book’s first two post-introduction chapters historicise the emergence of such critique and tie it (and its limitations) to what he calls a “hybrid professional selfhood” that prioritises “translating and balancing needs” (66). Tech workers, Dorschel says, long “to be simultaneously middle-class wealthy and morally worthy” (117). He finds strata of varying critical inclinations, from “affirmative” workers allied with technocapitalism to “radical” ones who fiercely criticise it, with most in a “reformist” middle range favourable to greater government regulation (19). Conflicting interests of publics and profits, however, are unsurprisingly glossed over in institutional material that presents tech roles as entrepreneurially cutting-edge and innovative. (No funding sources are identified for the study programs whose promotional materials are analysed, though one suspects at least some of them depend on corporate largesse.)

The third and fourth chapters uncover more multivalence: In lifestyle, tech workers adopt stances of “comfortable exploring” (“sheltered living at the edge of new developments”), “ordinariness” (preference for lowbrow recreation, like board games or running, even at relatively high income level – albeit within preponderantly cosmopolitan settings), and “mindfulness” (specifically about work / life balance) (18). In identifying ordinariness, Dorschel aligns with Bialski, who describes an ethic of “good-enoughness” among software workers that extends to professional practice. On the other hand, the description of such workers as zealously mindful of boundaries between work and home runs counter to some literature (eg Cote and Harris) and to the exhortations of tech leaders like Elon Musk and Sergey Brin.

Hybridity seems eminently believable for a population suspended between technology and society; between vaunted tech wealth and pressing techno-social crisis; between geek joy and digital harms.

Then too, in terms of class formation, Dorschel finds that “while tech workers identify with ideals of social justice and critiques of power structures, there is very little evidence of these commitments being enacted in tangible, impactful ways.” Though goaded by the excesses of tech’s monopolisation, hype, and entanglement with authoritarianism, these workers seem loath to part decisively with their “individualist and deeply incorporated modus operandi” (114). Altogether, Dorschel considers tech workers to “form a contradictory class fraction that is only partially realized” (119).

Justice-seeking and its co-optation 

Even before such realisation can have a chance of being complete, Dorschel finds aspects of it are being coopted. The book’s fifth chapter applies Boltanski and Chiapello’s “spirit of capitalism” construct, which he finds at work in a new way, appropriating this time not a class’s “artistic” critique (taking exception to capitalism’s truncation of subjects’ creativity and self-determination), but tech workers’ moral critique (their identification of tech-mediated injustices and harms). The chapter details numerous smarmy ways –  from Facebook’s 2022 “Data for Good” campaign to “AI alignment” efforts to corporatised hackathons – in which capital has assumed the trappings of justice-seeking and insurgency for the sake of assuaging and conscripting socially-minded workers.

Nevertheless, the book’s final pre-conclusion chapter contemplates the potential of tech workers’ contradictory positionality to advantage them against an unjust system, a system they can “glitch” by crossing ostensible boundaries (as, for example, Amazon software workers have done by showing solidarity with warehouse workers). “Given [their] multiple levels of inscription power” – the literal and direct determination of software’s contents – “tech workers would be a crucial grouping to be won over for class alliances,” Dorschel writes (157).

Contrasting identifications of the tech worker 

Time and again, Dorschel analyses his population of study as simultaneously one thing and another – both capitalist and critical, adventuresome and comfortable, combining (ideally) “the technical virtues of a Steve Wozniak with the communicative virtues of a Steve Jobs” (82). This hybridity seems eminently believable for a population suspended between technology and society; between vaunted tech wealth and pressing techno-social crisis; between geek joy and digital harms. The contradictions run deep, but in a sense, they have for a long time. The “Californian Ideology” described by Barbrook and Cameron in the mid-1990s, which Dorschel characterises as an incarnation of libertarian hyper-capitalism, was in fact itself a mongrel of libertarianism and supposed counter-cultural leftism. To navigate such contradictions, it seems plain tech workers will have to discern – not only individually but together – which parts of the programme they are engaged in are genuine, and which prosocial.

Just as most software workers are developers, most software work is collaboration, and such collaboration remains under-studied

Dorschel’s interviews occurred between 2020 and 2022, just before Chat-GPT debuted and Elon Musk gutted Twitter, setting off a trend of layoffs (many justified by executives in the name of AI). Without reproducing industry hype, the world of software certainly moves apace, and today findings such as “most tech workers feel relatively secure on the labor market” (126) and “Current developments around AI lend tech workers even greater powers to influence societies” (176) may be in need of an update – as Dorschel himself affirms. He also indicates that study of tech workers’ practices might yield more insight on how those practices relate to workers’ subjectivity. (He stipulates that this would require ethnographic methods, but short of these, abundant professional literature and practitioner commentary are available.)

Studying collaboration and power

Attention to practice might also reveal interactions between worker subjectivities in software collaboration, which brings data scientists and designers together more rarely than, say, designers and developers, or developers and testers. Developers, who form the largest discipline in software work, were excluded from Dorschel’s sample in part to focus on newer, more emergent roles and in part because UX and data science set up “contrastive sampling” with a higher confidence of generalisation for findings in common. At the same time, just as most software workers are developers, most software work is collaboration, and such collaboration remains under-studied even after this valuable contribution to the sociology of tech work.

There may be some question whether tech workers enjoy as much inscription power as Dorschel suggests, since use of that power contrary to owners’ wishes is highly discoverable in an informated work environment, and punishable by a variety of workplace, civil and criminal measures. That said, a large class skilled in the production of techno-social outcomes at scale is indeed a class to be reckoned with. And considering it is a group whose patent dissatisfaction with current injustices has likely only grown since this book’s publication, it is one whose allyship is – as Dorschel vividly establishes – devoutly to be wished by anyone interested in a just and sustainable technological future.

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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Children’s Lived Experience of Poverty and Vulnerability in Kenya: Going Beyond Multi-dimensionality. Elizabeth Ngutuku. Routledge. 2025.

The crisis of child poverty extends far beyond a simple lack of household income. It is a fundamental violation of human rights and a “denial of choices and opportunities” stunting a child’s physical, mental and social development. Poverty in childhood can have irreversible effects, as even short periods of deprivation can cause irreversible damage to a child’s long-term growth and potential. Child poverty must be understood, therefore, as a multidimensional phenomenon. Traditional poverty measures often focus on a “dollar-a-day” income threshold, but this approach ignores household resource distribution and the importance of non-market-based goods like public infrastructure and protection.

Intervening into this discourse Elizabeth Ngutuku’s Children’s Lived Experience of Poverty and Vulnerability in Kenya: Going Beyond Multidimensionality is a critical ethnographic account of children’s lived experiences in Siaya, Kenya, drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2017. While examining dominant policy and academic narratives related to child vulnerability, the study makes a paradigm shift from abstract categorisations to the everyday realities through which children navigate poverty, loss and institutional constraints. Rather than treating vulnerability as a fixed condition measurable through standardised indicators of “well-being,” the author focuses on how children actively live with, interpret, and respond to precarious circumstances.

Biometrics, bureaucracy and exclusion

A key empirical contribution is the book’s analysis of welfare access mediated through biometric systems. The registration of beneficiaries through mothers creates a structural fragility: when mothers die, children are rendered ineligible due to failed verification processes. This exposes a critical disjuncture between technology-based governance and social realities. The system, ostensibly designed to enhance efficiency and accountability, produces exclusion, revealing how administrative infrastructures can inadvertently accentuate vulnerability.

The book challenges the prevailing “lack of well-being” framework, which reduces children’s conditions to numerical indicators, and provides a more nuanced understanding of how children experience and negotiate day-to-day hardships. Categories such as the orphaned, fostered, sick, or outsider child are shown to be fluid and overlapping, with no neat classification. In contexts heavily affected by HIV/AIDS, where many children find themselves orphaned, the analysis highlights the social-relational dimensions of vulnerability, including social stigma, marginalisation and shifting household roles. At the same time, Ngtuku highlights children’s emergent agency and challenges their portrayal as passive victims.

Historical production of vulnerability

The issue of child vulnerability in Kenya is not merely a contemporary crisis, the book argues; it is rooted in colonial and early postcolonial governance. For instance, during the Mau Mau emergency (1952–1960), policy interventions including detention, villagisation and Operation Anvil disrupted family structures and livelihoods, resulting in long-term deprivation. Framed as protective measures, these functioned as mechanisms of surveillance and control. By situating present-day vulnerability within this political-historical continuum, the author introduces the concept of “vulnerabilization” as part of describing how state power systematically constructs, sustains and manages marginality.

By centring children’s visual storytelling, the author challenges extractive research practices and reorients interpretation towards participants’ perspectives.

The analysis of the Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) framework provides an important critique of global development discourse. Following the HIV/AIDS narratives, the OVC category mobilised international attention and funding but also narrowed the definition of vulnerability. The emphasis on crisis narratives shifted the responsibility from the State to communities, promoting localised care models, while diluting State accountability. Despite significant policy activity, implementation remains uneven with many vulnerable children falling outside the framework’s scope. The critique underscores the limitations of donor-driven approaches that prioritise visibility and measurability over contextual responsiveness.

Participatory research and household vulnerabilities

Methodologically, the book offers a compelling insight into participatory research through photo narratives. By centring children’s visual storytelling, the author challenges extractive research practices and reorients interpretation towards participants’ perspectives. The discussion of “prosthetic visuality” (storytelling through photographs) is particularly insightful, illustrating how visual methods extend understanding beyond verbal accounts. This approach enriches not only empirical insights but also foregrounds children’s agency, their aspirations and interpretive authority. The ethnography also provides detailed accounts of how vulnerability is lived and managed at the household level. Issues such as food insecurity, unstable income and caregiving strain are embedded within informal and precarious economic arrangements. One narrative of Pius and his mother illustrates the intergenerational transmission of insecurity, as both are drawn into increasingly unstable forms of labour. The shift from petty trade to subsistence exchange reflects the fragility of local economies and the constant negotiation required for survival.

The book also addresses sensitive dimensions of vulnerability, including the risk of sexual abuse. Practices such as separate sleeping arrangements for prepubescent children at households with the presence of sexually active adults reveal how risk is managed within constrained environments. These insights highlight the intersection of material deprivation and concerns of safety and bodily integrity.

Socialisation into scarcity

A striking contribution is the analysis of how caregivers normalise and communicate scarcity. Children are often made aware of household limitations as part of a broader moral pedagogy that emphasises resilience, responsibility and survival. While this transparency may foster adaptive capacities, it raises critical questions over the emotional and developmental consequences of an early exposure to deprivation. The ethnography effectively shows how structural poverty is internalised and reproduced through everyday practices of care.

“Free” primary education does not eliminate barriers, as hidden costs – described by children as “small things here and there” – continue to exclude the poorest.

Another significant theoretical intervention is how the book conceptualises schooling as an “assemblage”, drawing on Deleuzo-Guattarian thought. Here, assemblage refers to a dynamic and non-linear configuration of heterogeneous elements – such as education policy, material conditions, institutional practices, and children’s own agency – whose contingent interactions collectively shape schooling experiences. Moving beyond linear explanations of educational access and performance, this alternative framework emphasises the interplay between these factors as mutually constitutive rather than discrete. The analysis reveals how “free” primary education does not eliminate barriers, as hidden costs – described by children as “small things here and there” – continue to exclude the poorest.

Ethnographic details illustrate how uniforms, informal levies, and disciplinary practices, such as sending children home during exams, reproduce exclusion within ostensibly inclusive systems. The discussion on children’s labour further complicates notions of agency, showing how schooling is shaped by children’s engagement in work – whether through the opportunity costs of attending school, irregular attendance due to income-generating activities, or the ways children negotiate between educational participation and household survival needs. Attention to gender adds further depth. Girls’ schooling is mediated not only by institutional factors such as the availability of female teachers or separate toilets, but also by intra-household dynamics, including birth order and caregiving responsibilities, which structure their access to and continuity in education beyond static categorizations.

Rethinking agency in institutional contexts

The book offers a sophisticated reconceptualisation of children’s agency within support programs. Rejecting binary distinctions between compliance and resistance, it presents agency as relational and emergent within unequal institutional settings. Acts of disobedience are interpreted not as failures, but as analytically productive moments, that reveal structural contradictions within NGO interventions. This perspective shifts the evaluative focus from individual behaviour to systemic design, opening new avenues for rethinking program effectiveness and responsiveness.

Ngutuku’s ethnographic enquiry uncovers critical non-material dimensions like relational poverty, defined by shame, stigma, and the corrosive impact of parental stress on family relationships, which standard quantitative indicators frequently overlook

The book illustrates why understanding child poverty from an ethnographic perspective is an essential corrective to adult-centric, household-based measures which often obscure children’s unique, socially situated knowledge. Embracing a “child standpoint” facilitates “epistemic inclusivity,” acknowledging children as legitimate authorities on their own experiences of deprivation. Ngutuku’s ethnographic enquiry uncovers critical non-material dimensions like “relational poverty“, defined by shame, stigma, and the corrosive impact of parental stress on family relationships, which standard quantitative indicators frequently overlook. Prioritising children’s voices is revealed as vital for shifting policy towards holistic, child-centred responses that address the visceral, multi-dimensional reality of poverty.

Ngutuku’s book provides a substantial contribution to poverty studies, African studies and childhood studies. It convincingly argues that child poverty cannot be addressed through standardised policy “blueprints.” Instead, it calls for a citizenship-based approach, that recognises children as active claim-makers embedded within complex social, historical, and institutional contexts. By conceptualising poverty as an entanglement of material, discursive and relational dimensions, the book provides a nuanced and ethically grounded framework for understanding childhood in the Global South.

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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How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare. Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Vaez. Stanford University Press. 2024.

The ongoing war between the United States, Israel, and Iran has brought several critical questions to the fore: What lies at the root of the grievances that triggered a protest movement in Iran earlier this year, exploited by the US and Israel? How widespread are the sentiments of resentment towards the regime among the Iranian population? How did Iranian society not collapse, and what prevented the sanctions from incapacitating the Iranian economy, thereby preserving Tehran’s ability to resist today?

How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare effectively answers these questions from different angles. It is written by Narges Bajoghli – an anthropologist with expertise in media, power, and military dynamics, Vali Nasr – a political scientist, specialising in international relations, Middle Eastern politics, and Islamic political movements, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani – an economist with interests in demographic and energy economics, with a focus on Iran and the Middle East, and Ali Vaez – a policy analyst that helped bridge gaps during Iran-P5+1 nuclear negotiations. What sets this book apart from other approaches is its balanced take on the subject, enabling readers to form their own opinions. Their multifaceted methodological approach, combining inputs from dozens of leading scholars, discourse analysis, interviews with Iranians, and quantitative analysis based on surveys and official economic data, lends further credence to their work.

Sanctions against Iran predate the expansion of Tehran’s nuclear program, initially imposed after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the hostage crisis the same year. Over the decades, the sanctions regime became increasingly comprehensive.

Sanctions against Iran predate the expansion of Tehran’s nuclear program, initially imposed after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the hostage crisis the same year. Over the decades, the sanctions regime became increasingly comprehensive: “no country in the world has been the target of this array of sanctions to the extent experienced by Iran over the past four decades (56).” Beyond the explicit restrictions on Iranian banks, oil revenues, and access to the global financial system also lies an unspoken component of the sanctions regime. The vagueness of the sanctions regulations, particularly in their language, coupled with Iran’s portrayal as a ‘pariah’ state, leads to their overinterpretation, effectively deterring the Western scientific, literary, and academic communities from interacting with their counterparts in Iran.

Impacts of sanctions on the public

On the impact of sanctions on the economy, the book offers compelling evidence.  Beginning in 2018, sanctions became increasingly harsh; between 2018 and 2021, healthcare costs in Iran rose by 125 per cent, and food prices increased by a staggering 186 per cent. The resultant hardships inevitably generated frustration among the public and, among some, resentment towards the regime. However, the expression of this resentment was not widespread enough to trigger regime change, one of the sanctions’ key goals. In fact, authors hold that sanctions weakened the middle class and strengthened the regime by increasing the population’s dependency on the state.

To highlight societal resilience, the authors include first-hand accounts of Iranians living through sanctions. Some respondents highlighted coping strategies that included detachment from the capitalist struggle for money and material desires, and finding refuge in nature, music, and art. For instance, Kaveh, an architect in his late thirties recounted, “I quit my job. I began to play music again. I hike and cook and document it all on my Instagram. I’ve found so many others my age who are doing the same thing… We’ve literally downsized our lives to two backpacks. We’ve given up the race of being ‘successful’ and instead have decided to connect with nature and music and art and each other” (26-27).

Businesses formed economic links with non-Western partners and learning from how sanctioned nations, such as Cuba, developed their domestic industries despite external embargoes.

The authors also show that, while the socioeconomic impacts were challenging, they did not become entirely dismal for most Iranians. Unemployment remained contained, as nearly half of all Iranian workers were self-employed, the country’s labour laws discouraged employers from laying off workers, and a large informal economy accommodated the unemployed. Meanwhile, the government’s decision to allow the currency to depreciate, along with the associated rise in the cost of imported goods, enabled domestic businesses to capture a larger market share and grow. Besides government cash transfers, mutual aid networks, run mostly by women, and formal impacts were charities helped the population in dealing with everyday hardships.

How sanctions drove innovation and complicated diplomacy

As with society, so did the economy adapt in meaningful ways, as sanctions forced Iran to innovate. In 2010, the then Iranian Supreme Leader, the martyred Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, formulated the notion of a “resistance economy’” (eghtesad-e moqavemat), calling on economists, scholars, and businessmen to propose and pursue policies to diversify markets and revenue sources. By providing testimonies from Iranian businesspeople, the authors show that businesses actively rallied behind these calls, forming economic links with non-Western partners and learning from how sanctioned nations, such as Cuba, developed their domestic industries despite external embargoes. More importantly, sanctions encouraged Tehran, alongside international actors such as China and Russia, to explore alternatives to the dollar-based cross-border payment system. These adaptations could not fully offset the impact of sanctions, given their scope and magnitude, but they kept Iran from collapsing under pressure.

But while the authors mention the role of “workarounds” in alleviating sanctions-related pressures, at times, readers are left seeking deeper explanations in some cases. For instance, What role did the Iranian shadow fleet of tankers play, and to what extent did it help mitigate the impact of sanctions on oil revenues? What role did barter trade play? Beyond this, an analysis of the role Iran’s high literacy rate, and the employment opportunities this affords, played in helping the country endure sanctions could have enriched the discussion.

The authors contend that sanctions complicated diplomacy, as they were easier to impose than to remove. Congress and domestic politics strongly supported Iranian sanctions, making it difficult for US leaders to lift them even when negotiations required it. However, neither could the sanctions trigger a regime change, nor did they lead Iran to abandon its nuclear program. Instead, while sanctions may have been effective in the short run in bringing Iran to the negotiating table, culminating in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), in the long run, they led Iran to accelerate its nuclear program and pursue a more assertive regional policy.

A partial view of Iran’s nuclear program

One shortcoming of the book is that while the authors treat the acceleration of the Iranian nuclear program as a reactive response to the hardline approach by the West, they do not probe the veracity of dubious claims made about it. It is unknown which direction the Iranian nuclear program will take after the current war ends. At the time of the book’s writing, sufficient evidence suggested that assumptions surrounding the program may have been grossly exaggerated, even if Iran was expanding its uranium enrichment program. For instance, multiple Western intelligence assessments concluded that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, while an International Atomic Energy Agency report found no conclusive evidence linking Iran’s undeclared nuclear activities, even prior to 2003, to a weapons program. (The report was published during the tenure of Mohamed ElBaradei, who was widely regarded for his impartiality.)

By incorporating local testimonies and vivid descriptions of Iranian streets and social spaces into the research, the book allows readers to picture everyday life in Iran under sanctions,

While the discussion briefly acknowledges Washington’s lack of sustained commitment to diplomacy in compelling Tehran to accelerate its nuclear program, it places an outsized emphasis on the role of sanctions, without adequately exploring other factors. For instance, in 2021, former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani linked Iran’s decision to produce 60 per cent enriched uranium to a suspected Israeli attack on a nuclear site. The limited consideration of other factors results in a somewhat reductionist conclusion.

These limitations aside, the book is a comprehensive and insightful account of Iran’s survival and resilience under sanctions. By incorporating local testimonies and vivid descriptions of Iranian streets and social spaces into the research, the book allows readers to picture everyday life in Iran under sanctions, where hope and vibrancy still existed – characteristics that remain evident even amidst the new war. Despite being a compilation of contributions from four authors, the book maintains coherence and consistency in style throughout. It is a worthwhile read for current and future policymakers, effectively demonstrating why maximum pressure strategies fail to achieve their intended results.

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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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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