Judging. Ross Cranston. Oxford University Press. 2025.

Open justice and the art of judgecraft 

“Open justice” is a fundamental principle of our justice system. It captures the idea that justice should not only be done but should also be seen to be done. It is a vital element of the rule of law and a safeguard to democracy, and is about far more than simply ensuring the public can access court proceedings (though that is important). Open justice also demands a transparent justice system: the public should know what this system is doing, how it is doing it, and why.

If the UK Government’s controversial proposal to limit jury trials comes to pass, it will be even more important that we understand the influences and pressures on a judge, often either misunderstood or simply out of sight.

At the centre of the social imaginary surrounding the justice system is the judge: a powerful figure who presides over the courtroom with (hopefully) a firm but fair hand. And if the UK Government’s controversial proposal to limit jury trials comes to pass, it will be even more important that we understand the influences and pressures on a judge, which are often either misunderstood or simply out of sight. Court observation and reading judgments only take us so far. To really understand the judge, we need to examine the art of judgecraft.

In Judging, former judge of the Queen’s (now King’s) Bench Division Sir Ross Cranston helps us do just that. He defines judgecraft as, “the art of judging, the successful employment of practical skills associated with good judging […] It is judgecraft which ensures the success of the judge in court, the efficient processing of their caseload, the making of good decisions, and the advancement of their reputation” (195). There is a practical side to judgecraft, but there is also a value-laden side.

The judge’s three values

The first half of the book is dedicated to the consideration of three values – independence, impartiality, and integrity – that are fundamental to a judge’s work. While these values, “may have taken a ‘taken for granted’ quality in particular situations” (195), Cranston’s comparative approach reveals that the enactment of these values is contested territory.

For example, in his discussion of judicial integrity he contrasts the mandatory (for federal judges) codes of the United States with the Guide to Judicial Conduct in England and Wales. What might explain the disparity? Cranston points to the difference in cultural expectations, including the fact that state judges are elected in the United States, but appointed following recommendation of the Judicial Appointments Commission in the United Kingdom. This illustrates how a contingency of different social norms and practices shapes how a judge enacts what should be universal values. As he points out, the political nature of elections means that judges in the US have been shown to “tailor their judgments, especially in criminal sentencing and appeals, to improve their electoral prospects, adopting a harsher approach to criminal defendants” (326).

It is not just social factors, but also the judge that introduces contingency. In his chapter concerning impartiality, Cranston considers the test for apparent bias. When accused of bias and asked to recuse herself (ie step down from hearing a case), a judge must ask herself whether a “fair-minded and informed” observer would consider her to be biased. If yes, she must recuse herself; if not, she will continue to hear the case unless an appellate court overturns the decision. The problem is that this is a legal fiction – there is no such person. Moreover, this fictional character is supposed to not share the viewpoint of the judge but, at the same time, it is the judge who decides on a case-by-case basis “what the fair-minded and informed observer would think about any given situation” (80).

This fallibility of this mechanism was perfectly captured in a case in 2020. In what she thought was the privacy of her chambers, Mrs Justice Judd criticised a mother in family proceedings. Unknowingly, she was still connected (via her laptop) to a remote link through which all the parties could hear her. The judge declined to recuse herself; the Court of Appeal found that she ought to have done (though, if their reference to the decision being “finely balanced” means anything, the Court of Appeal may also have struggled with the question of bias). 

What if the judge being asked to recuse himself doesn’t recognise something that makes him biased against a party or their position?

All this feeds into concerns about unconscious bias. What if the judge being asked to recuse himself doesn’t recognise something that makes him biased against a party or their position? The problem is not unique to judges, but the stakes are higher given their responsibility. Cranston points to research in England which asked lawyers about racial bias from the bench. Respondents reported that “unconscious bias plays a major role in the justice system”. In one example from the Magistrates’ Court, a “black British youth of no previous convictions […] [was] convicted on obscure reasoning’ by ‘two old posh white ladies” (see page 13 of the report).

A jury will also have both conscious and unconscious bias. But it comprises 12 randomly selected people who must defend their judgement to each other. If jury trials are indeed reduced, we will be left with a system wherein one person need only persuade themselves.

The judge’s practice

Values are all well and good, but the public and parties don’t see them. What they do see is a judge’s management of a case, and in the second half of the book Cranston seeks to explain how a judge goes about this task. Here is where Cranston makes his most profound contribution to understanding the justice system and, thereby, open justice itself. He painstakingly considers how a good judge should, and a bad judge fails to, manage a case. From dealing with litigants-in-person in a way that’s fair to all parties (represented and unrepresented), to the delivery of ex-tempore (oral) judgments, Cranston sets out the concerns a judge needs to keep in mind.

In essence, Cranston explains what it is like to be a judge. This is the hidden side of the justice system – hidden not because of a conspiracy but because judges are often constrained in what they can say, and too busy to say what they are unconstrained from saying. Cranston is not the first judge to try to unveil the work of judging. Lord Bingham considered the position of judge as juror in chapter one of The Business of Judging (2000); Richard A. Posner conceived of the majority of American judges as legal pragmatists; and Her Honour Wendy Joseph KC has written two books about the work of a criminal judge. What makes Cranston’s contribution unique is that he combines the internal with the practical, and he can do so effectively because, being retired, he is unconstrained by the usual limits on a judge’s speech.

Taking a deep dive into the art of judgecraft, Cranston reveals the true face of the judge: a human being like anybody els

Indeed, the constraints on a judge’s speech are stark. Cranston points to two examples: one from the United States, where a judge’s ruling was overturned on appeal in part because he had discussed the case with reporters, and one from South Africa, where Chief Justice Mogoeng “expressed a view taken to be contrary to the government’s official policy on the Israel-Palestine conflict” (136). In England and Wales, judges are not strictly bound by silence, but the guidance is clear that they must keep their silence on a wide range of matters. As a very recent case shows, even the “liking” of a LinkedIn post may be enough to spark allegations of misconduct.

In taking a deep dive into the art of judgecraft, Cranston reveals the true face of the judge: a human being like anybody else. Far from being “enemies of the people”, they are the people. It’s easy to forget this, in part because so much of a judge’s work and internal life is invisible. By placing this in public view, Cranston has opened up the justice system. Whether we like what we see is for us to decide.

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.

Read an interview with Ross Cranston from the January 2026 edition of LSE Research for the World magazine, What makes a good judge – and why it matters now.

Main image: Stained glass Roundel with Justice (ca.1510), artist unknown. Open access courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Cloisters Collection, 1983.

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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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The Emma LaRocque Reader: On Being Human. Elaine Coburn (ed.). University of Toronto Press. 2026.

To justify their political existence, all nations tell origin stories. The founding myths of the world’s most powerful states, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, tell of heroic Europeans discovering lands that were empty but for primitive peoples, the “Indians” or “Aboriginals”.  Colonial oppressors characterised Indigenous peoples as savages who deserved to be wiped out, unworthy of a future, or doomed to disappear, given their primitive “race” or culture unsuited to modernity.

The myth of manifest destiny

Tomorrow was reserved for European peoples, who brought civilisation to a wild land. The oppression and massacre of Indigenous peoples was justified as part of the inevitable “march of progress”, known in America as manifest destiny; “the right”, as the Representative of Massachusetts claimed in 1846, “to spread over this whole continent.” These founding myths uphold capitalist relations, redefine the land as private property to be bought and sold, justify colonial power structures, and overwrite Indigenous peoples’ governance practices. Today, Donald Trump’s efforts to “restore truth and sanity to American history” by removing exhibits from the Smithsonian museums that are critical of white supremacy exemplify the dangers of the authoritarian control of historical narratives.

But myths are not reality. Indigenous peoples did not die out, and they are reclaiming their histories, their voices, their lands. Vine Deloria Jr, Brendan Hokowhitu, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, and Audra Simpson, and many more scholars and intellectuals are speaking back to empire. Among the most striking contemporary contributions to this demythologising literature is the writing of a Cree-Métis intellectual and poet, now gathered together for the first time in The Emma LaRocque Reader: On Being Human. Born in 1950 in Lac La Biche, in northeastern Alberta, Canada, LaRocque grew up Métis in a “Cree oral literature language and worldview” that together made up a “richly woven cultural life” (145). From the vantage point of her own culture and the experience of “colonialism lived” (251), she mobilises her powers as a scholar and poet to challenge foundational myths of the most powerful nations in the world.

The myth of terra nullius

The first myth she debunks is that the lands were empty, or at least empty of any meaningful civilisation, before the Europeans arrived. LaRocque gives testament to the many original peoples in the Americas who had their own histories, traditions and attachment to the land. For her part, she grew up with a rich cultural life, in a log cabin built by her resourceful father. In characteristically vivid prose, LaRocque recalls her childhood:

I was born into a world of people whose roots of pride, independence, industriousness and skills go back to the Red River Métis, back to the Cree. I was born into a world of magic, where seeing and hearing ghosts was a routine occurrence, where the angry Pehehsoo (thunder-bird) could be appeased by a four-directional pipe chant, where the spirits danced in the sky on clear nights and where tents shook for people to heal (48).

.With particular intensity from the late 19^th century onwards, colonisers deliberately disrupted the lifeworlds of Indigenous peoples, including LaRocque’s Métis people, through violent repression but also through forced religious instruction, residential and public schooling

Colonising Europeans interrupted self-determining Indigenous civilisations for their own gain. With particular intensity from the late 19^th century onwards, colonisers deliberately disrupted the lifeworlds of Indigenous peoples, including LaRocque’s Métis people, through violent repression but also through forced religious instruction, residential and public schooling (c.1890 to 1996), and adopting Indigenous children into White families. Despite efforts at erasure, Indigenous peoples have persisted, remembering their histories on lands filled with the stories of their ancestors.

The myth of the prehistoric “Indian”

Indigenous peoples are often considered purely historical, consigned to the past. Against this myth, change is part of every living culture, LaRocque emphasises, including Indigenous civilisations. The Métis practiced adaptable economies, rooted in land-based and wage labour, and their participation has been central to the development of contemporary nations like Canada and the United States:

Métis have been the labouring backbone of this country, serving first as portaging and fur packing coureur de bois, defining the buffalo industry with their organization and technologies, then on to building railroad lines and roads, clearing fields for farmers or fighting fire for forestry (98).

Today, LaRocque emphasises that artists, writers, poets and political and social commentators are revitalising and renewing Indigenous lifeways and knowledges.

Despite tendencies to imagine Indigenous peoples as consigned to a “primitive past” (131), their cultures have been fluid and changing. If forced change is oppression, some change is chosen. “Like the rest of humanity” LaRocque writes, Indigenous peoples are “facing and adapting to change” (xxxi, italics in original), participating in a world in movement.

The myth of the “Vanishing Race”

As LaRocque documents, Indigenous peoples, including Cree-speaking Métis like her own family, were deemed incapable of “civilisation,” hence doomed to vanish as too savage for the present or future. This myth was popularised by the 19^th and early 20^th century photographer Edward Curtis, who stripped his Indigenous subjects of any sign of modernity and then labelled them, “The Vanishing Race”. Too primitive and too pure to survive the wicked world, they were destined to disappear in the face of the “progress” brought by European colonisers. This myth lives on in contemporary re-tellings, from The Last of the Mohicans to coffee-house artbooks, like Jimmy Nelson’s infamous Before They Pass Away. In reality, “the Métis were systematically coerced from their land” (8) by civil servants, priests, police, surveyors and settlers. European settler success, never total, was a contingent fact of struggle, rather than a result of the necessary march of history. Today, LaRocque emphasises that artists, writers, poets and political and social commentators are revitalising and renewing Indigenous lifeways and knowledges (269).

The myth of the savage

Colonial oppressors created dehumanising stereotypes about Indigenous peoples to justify their oppression, which linger today. One frames them as ignoble savages, “grunting and bloodthirsty” (32), hence deserving of elimination by a more civilised European colonial culture. Recalling the first cowboy and Indian movie she watched, LaRocque writes:

I was riveted, revolted, and terrified. I was perhaps eight years old. I do not remember the name of the movie; I only remember “the Indians”: grotesque, wild-eyed, lurking creatures with painted bodies and hideous faces, tomahawks on hand, howling and whooping, crouching like animals across the screen, preying on beautiful white people on their way west to bring law and order (122).

LaRocque urges us to relate to each other as more than the “sum of our colonial parts” (xxiv); this is key to challenging oppression.

Alternatively, “Indians” are figured as noble savages, wise, kind and close to nature. LaRocque laments that the noble savage trope, for instance, the ecologically attuned Indigenous person, acts as a “prop for the conscience of a morally lethargic corporate world” (133). The noble savage is a normative ideal, not a fully realised person. Rejecting these fictions, LaRocque reminds us that Indigenous peoples are, simply, human: “People who can laugh, cry, hate and love” (xxxi). The response to demands for the “authentic Indian” (130), whether in the ignoble or noble variant, must be an insistence on Indigenous humanity. This requires the direct, honest appraisal of “the good, the bad and the ugly” (xxxvi).

Beyond myths to the human

In her scholarship and poetry spanning a half a century, LaRocque has appealed to our “will for justice” (133) to writings remind us of the imperative to dismantle dangerous, obfuscating political mythologies, and that recognising each other’s humanity:

I am ethically committed to the vocation of humanization, that is, both to the ending of injustice and oppression, whether social or intellectual, and at the same time, to the reconstruction of Indigenous humanity. And ultimately, all humanity (227).

LaRocque urges us to relate to each other as more than the “sum of our colonial parts” (xxiv); this is key to challenging oppression. We can begin by telling the truth about the lands that we are on and the original peoples who have lived here, not as ciphers representing good or evil, but as human beings filled with hopes and dreams, foibles and failures, strengths and weakness. In an era where truth is a casualty of national mythmaking this is a special challenge; but only then can we begin to build right relations for a future together.

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

How the internet fostered subcultures

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

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

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

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

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

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

When capitalist interests took over

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

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

Mainstream or alternative media?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Main image: Tomas Martinez on Unsplash.

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I always have mixed feelings when I make the journey from London to my second hometown of Gainesville, FL. But for a native Floridian, you never really leave the Sunshine State; it’s just too sticky. When I do go back, it’s exciting to see what’s new and what will (hopefully) stay the same in a city that carefully balances nature, culture, and college students.

Gainesville sits in North Florida, caught between the Deep South and the rest of the state, and that in-between feeling shows up in the raw, rebellious arts scene circling the University of Florida.

The wildlife is buzzing: lizards scrambling at your feet, woodpeckers hopping from tree to tree, and, of course, alligators. The culture seeps in slower, but its roots run as deep as the mossy live oak trees. Gainesville sits in North Florida, caught between the Deep South and the rest of the state, and that in-between feeling shows up in the raw, rebellious arts scene circling the University of Florida.

Just south of town, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896–1953) wrote about rural Florida without softening it, focusing on work and survival in a landscape that pushes back. That refusal to romanticize the state continues with contemporary authors like Lauren Groff, who describes Florida as “an Eden of dangerous things.” The music carries the same attitude, from culturally disruptive legends like Bo Diddley to the punk of Against Me!, where art emerges from discomfort and defiance, and residents keep DIY-ing when systems and structures fail them.

Happily, a place where DIY culture and political resistance intersect is ripe for good reading material!

The Lynx Books

The Lynx Books opened after I left town, so naturally I was suspicious of it – it offered me not a shred of nostalgia. But, what a delight. Opened in 2024 by Lauren Groff and her husband, The Lynx bills itself as a general-interest bookstore with a focus on books currently challenged or banned in Florida, alongside work by BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and Florida writers.

I visit independent bookshops often and read a lot of contemporary fiction, but I’m easily bored by seeing the same handful of titles everywhere I go, so it’s refreshing to walk into a small-city shop and find shelves full of books I’ve never heard of. As a tourist in my own hometown, I’m immediately pulled toward the Florida authors section, where I find everything from university press publications and natural history guides to oral histories of local scenes, poetry – both new and republished classics. There’s also plenty of books by emerging writers, many of whom have signed their own books. A full run of Groff’s own work is there too, naturally.

True to Gainesville fashion, The Lynx pairs literature with action: it also operates a nonprofit, The Lynx Watch, Inc., which collects donated banned books and distributes them to local educational organisations serving young people.

Book Gallery West

Book Gallery West (opened in 1983) is an unassuming local essential, tucked into a shopping centre alongside a post office, grocery store, and pet shop. It’s not flashy from the outside, but it’s nearly impossible to walk past the outdoor bargain shelf without stopping in, if only to see what unexpected paperback has been left out in the Florida heat.

What sets Book Gallery West apart is its thoughtful, varied collection. The shelves are organised by theme and category, but within each section new and old titles sit comfortably side by side, encouraging browsing and rewarding a deeper dive with the occasional recent release at a bargain price.

For locals, there’s also the option to sell books back to the shop for store credit, which keeps the inventory circulating. It’s less about chasing trends (although their  new political nonfiction section was on point) and more about sustaining a long-term community staple, making Book Gallery West feel less like a bookstore you visit occasionally and more like one you pop into on the way to buy more orange juice.

Friends of the Library Booksale

In Gainesville, the semi-annual Friends of the Library Book Sale might as well be a citywide holiday. If you’re planning a visit, it’s well worth timing your trip around one of these five-day sales (and bringing an empty suitcase).

The sale began modestly in October 1954, held in a temporary location and raising just $80 for what is now the Alachua County Library District. In 1989, Friends of the Library, together with the Junior League of Gainesville, purchased its first permanent (and still current) home, where the sale now features more than 500,000 items per event. It has grown into one of the largest book sales of its kind in the southeastern United States, complete with a giant map at the entrance to help you navigate the stacks as you get your first hit of that unmistakable used-book smell.

The only thing better than the sheer range of materials – everything from rare maps to joke books – is the pricing. Books run from 25 cents to 4 dollars during the first three days, drop to half-price on day four, and on the final day, everything left is a glorious ten cents. True fans know that attending on the last day is non-negotiable: I left the sale laden with treasures I had to redistribute before moving abroad. It was worth the effort to support a sale that not only encourages reading and makes for a fun day out but also supports the important work of local libraries!

Note: This bookshop guide gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main image credit: Sean Pavone on Shutterstock.

Do you know a place with great bookshops? As part of a regular feature on LSE Review of Books, we’re asking academics and students to recommend their favourite bookshops in a particular city or town to share with our book-loving community of readers the world over.

Bookshops could be academic, alternative, multilingual, hobby-based, secret or underground institutions, second-hand outlets or connected to a university. We’d like to cover all world regions too and are particularly keen to feature cities outside of Europe and North America.

If something comes to mind, we’re looking for a brief introduction about the city, a selection of three or four bookshops with around 150 words per bookshop, detailing why each one is a must-see. Our editorial team can then find suitable photos and links to accompany the piece, though you’re welcome to supply these too.

Email us if you’d like to contribute: lsereviewofbooks@lse.ac.uk

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Benjamin Selwyn will speak about the book at an event hosted by LSE Department of International Development on Wednesday 18 March 2026 find details and register to attend.

Capitalist Value Chains: Labour Exploitation, Nature Destruction, Geopolitics. Benjamin Selwyn and Christin Bernhold. Oxford University Press. 2025.

Capitalist value chains

From the onset of globalisation (around the late 1970s to the early 1980s), global production has increasingly been organised across borders. Large transnational corporations (TNCs) have emerged organising transnational production in what is frequently referred to as Global Value Chains (GVCs). A new book by Benjamin Selwyn and Christin Bernhold critiques the existing literature on GVCs, arguing that they don’t deliver on their promise of prosperity for workers and the planet.

The exploitation of human labour and expropriation of nature are both regarded as essential for capitalist accumulation

Selwyn and Bernhold’s key contribution is that they locate their analysis of transnational production within what Karl Marx referred to as the “hidden abode of production”. Thus, instead of GVCs, they coin the term “Capitalist Value Chains” (CVCs), defined as “historically specific configurations of [international] capitalist class relations that contribute to heightened exploitation of labour and appropriation of nature by capital” (6). Their analysis is based on a detailed understanding of Marxist political economy and the way exploitation is increased through a combination of absolute and relative surplus extraction within CVCs (24). “Under capitalism,” they write, “economic growth is driven forward by capital’s insatiable and never-ending demand for profit rather than for human or environmental need” (230). By this logic, the exploitation of human labour and expropriation of nature are both regarded as essential for capitalist accumulation.

Exploiting workers and the environment

Selwyn and Bernhold’s second major contribution is their focus on the plight of workers. In an impressive range of empirical examples throughout the volume, they demonstrate how working people are losing out in CVCs. Key here is their notion of immiserating growth regimes, where corporations profit because “workers do not earn sufficient wages in a normal working day to sustain their and their family’s social reproduction costs” (134). Rather than enabling development, CVCs cause widespread poverty, the authors maintain. Importantly, they go beyond the World Bank’s international poverty line and in line with the Asia Floor Wage to focus on a living wage, which also includes, for example, access to health services and education in addition to a minimum wage (135).

Third, Selwyn and Bernhold excel at highlighting the causal dynamics underpinning relentless environmental destruction due to the expansion of capitalism through CVCs: “CVC hyper-specialization entails an increase in production, transportation, and energy use – accelerating climate breakdown and mass environmental ruin” (206). Savings due to new technologies will only increase investment and accumulation due to capitalist competition, resulting in yet further environmental destruction, they argue. By revealing this process, Selwyn and Bernhold successfully debunk the myth that an expansion of CVCs would help to address the ecological crisis (218).

Capitalism’s ever-larger crises

As impressive conceptually and empirically this volume is, it does have some arguable shortcomings. First, CVCs have driven the transnationalisation of production, which in turn has underpinned the emergence of transnational capital as leading class fraction at the global level. And yet, the authors portray TNCs such as Apple or Microsoft simply as US capital, being increasingly challenged by Chinese CVCs, i.e. Chinese capital. Thus, the authors risk falling into a state-centric trap in their analysis of transnational capital, conflating particular class fractions with specific states. Yes, states such as the US, Japan and China have facilitated the transnationalisation of ‘their’ large corporations (89, 111). The strategic considerations of these TNCs have, however, outgrown their initial home country setting.

Second, the authors overlook the structuring conditions of the capitalist social relations of production, especially the way capitalism is prone to crises. Together, their rather state-centric approach to CVCs, as well as their choice to disregard capitalism’s tendency towards crisis have significant implications for their understanding of geopolitics. Capital is presented as all-powerful and almost completely dominant at the very moment when increasing geo-political conflicts tear at its very structure. The Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Israeli-US attack on Iran and the numerous tariff wars incited by the US are all signs of a global capitalism steeped in crisis. The book was completed in 2024, but some of these developments were already apparent then.  

A heightened level of state intervention underpins the current, volatile global geo-political environment, characterised by trade wars and military conflicts.

William Robinson’s analysis of global capitalism’s crisis provides an explanatory corrective here. Robinson illustrates well how, against the background of a declining rate of profit, global capitalism has become engulfed in a crisis of overaccumulation. As companies increasingly struggle to find profitable investment opportunities for their record profits, he points out that “since 1980, uninvested corporate cash holdings have ballooned to 10 per cent of GDP in the United States, 22 per cent in Western Europe, 34 per cent in South Korea, and 47 per cent in Japan”.

Increasing state intervention

As it is the role of states as nodal points in the global political economy to ensure the continuation of capitalist accumulation, more and more governments around the world are intervening into the economy not only trying to ensure the fortunes of “their” particular capitalist class fractions, as Selwyn and Bernhold may argue, but even more importantly to attract investment by transnational capital. In other words, when analysing the internal relations between global capitalism and international geopolitics, we have to focus on the way and the degree to which the interests of transnational capital have become internalised within various state forms. Even the US has to work hard to ensure capital investment and to date it is doubtful to what extent it will be successful at securing some reshoring of manufacturing by corporations such as Apple. Ultimately, it is this heightened level of state intervention which underpins the current, volatile global geo-political environment, characterised by trade wars and military conflicts.

A must-read for everyone interested in how the latest phase of capitalism is pushing humanity and the planet towards the brink.

The authors’ argument that “China has evolved from the workshop of CVCs, via technological innovation, to become a challenger to increasing numbers of US high-tech CVC firms” (112) is also debatable. By contrast, Sam King argues that it is especially the “grip over the high-end of the labour process” – in particular over microchips – that the United States is now wielding against China in the “trade war,’” which indicates China’s continuing subordinate position. Moreover, capitalism’s internal contradictions and related crisis tendency have affected China too, reflected in ballooning banking assets looking for profitable investment opportunities, out of control household and corporate debt levels and “a slowdown in growth rates; and social polarization.” China’s Belt and Road initiative is also a vehicle of creating profitable investment opportunities to counter its own crisis of overaccumulation. Ultimately, only the future can tell whether China will be able to catch up or not.

These criticisms should not, however, be read as dismissing the huge contributions of this book for illuminating the ways CVCs work to the detriment of workers and the environment. The book is a must-read for everyone interested in how the latest phase of capitalism is pushing humanity and the planet towards the brink.

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: Rasto SK on Shutterstock.

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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.

Main image: leungchopan on Shutterstock.

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The post Travelling concepts – notes on “PUA” culture in China first appeared on LSE Review of Books.

The Women’s Library is the oldest and largest library in Britain devoted to the history of women’s campaigning and activism. It was officially opened in 1926 as the Library of the London Society for Women’s Service and was renamed the Fawcett Library in 1957 in memory of Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and The Women’s Library in 2002. It moved to LSE in 2013 and has remained there since.

Throughout its history, encompassing different names and locations, the Library has remained faithful to its original aims: to preserve a history of the struggle for women’s suffrage and to provide access to materials that can be used by contemporary women’s rights campaigners. It contains an array of personal and organisational archives, books, journals, pamphlets, zines, audio-visual, objects, textiles and visual materials relating to campaigning and activism from the late 19th century onwards.

It is striking how much the development of the library depended upon the long-term work of determined women

To mark its 100^th anniversary, a new exhibition at LSE explores its collections from the viewpoint of researchers and their current engagement with the materials, and celebrates the figures who created, maintained and expanded the Library in its early years. It is striking how much the development of the library depended upon the long-term work of determined women: the first official librarian was Lahore-born Vera Douie who managed the Library for over 40 years.

You can listen online to an oral history of her memories about the library produced in 1975 as part of a suffrage history interviews project. Below is a reading list of books to accompany the exhibition, shedding light on the powerful history of the Library and the women behind it.

Enterprising Women: The Garretts and their circle. Elizabeth Crawford. Francis Boutle Publishers. 2002.

Elizabeth Crawford’s Enterprising Women sheds light on the networks of women who fought for the vote and, after winning it, continued to work after with campaigning organisations such as those preserved in the Library. The book focuses on the women of the Garrett family, providing a fascinating account of how members including Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Emily Davies made pioneering achievements for women in such diverse fields as education, medicine and interior design.

Turning the Tide: The life of Lady Rhondda. Angela V. John. Parthian. 2013.

The exhibition celebrates some of the many campaigning organisations who contributed to improving the lives of women. These include the work of the Six Point Group founded by Lady Rhondda in 1921 to press for changes in the law of the United Kingdom in six areas: improving legislation on child assault;  legal rights for widowed mothers; legal rights for unmarried mothers; equal rights of guardianship for married parents; equal pay for teachers and equal opportunities for men and women in the civil service.

Angela V. John’s fascinating biography of Lady Rhondda, Turning the Tide, reveals that she was the director of over 30 companies and the first woman president of the Institute of Directors in the 1920s. She also founded Time and Tide magazine, an influential, all-female produced publication which played a key role in covering politics and the arts in the interwar period.

Housewives and Citizens: Domesticity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1928-64. Caitriona Beaumont. Manchester University Press. 2013.

Many of the campaigning organisations archived in the Women’s Library were small grassroots groups run by dedicated volunteers, often from their own homes. Caitriona Beaumont’s Housewives and Citizens is an excellent insight for anyone interested in these groups. It focuses on six organisations in the period 1928-64: the Mothers’ Union, the Catholic Women’s League, the National Council of Women, the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (whose records are held by LSE) and the National Union of Townswomen’s Guild.

Many of these published journals which included calendars of events and articles on campaigns, which are rich sources of information on women’s local, regional and national activism. The LSE Digital Library has recently added the Townswoman, a journal published by the Townswomen’s Guild.

A Bookshop of One’s Own: How a Group of Women Set Out to Change the World. Jane Cholmeley. Mudlark. 2024.

Feminist book publishing is a key theme in the exhibition, (including the work of the Sheba Press which became a pioneering publisher of Black women. A Bookshop of One’s Own is a riveting account of the women who set up and ran the famous Silver Moon bookshop on Charing Cross Road, written by one of its co-founders, Jane Cholmeley. The bookshop championed women’s and feminist writing, like that of Sheba. Watch a YouTube video of or read a Q&A with the author from 2024 detailing the trials and tribulations and the grit and optimism required to open a bookshop in 1980s London despite a lack of business experience and funding!).

For more recent accounts of journal publishing by feminists. I would also recommend the Liberating Histories website which provides detailed timelines, research bibliographies and teachers notes of iconic and recent feminist magazines ranging from Spare Rib to Red Rag.

Chrystal Macmillan, 1872-1937: Campaigner for Equality, Justice and Peace. Helen Kay and Rose Pipes. Edinburgh University Press. 2024.

The exhibition also emphasises the long history of feminist internationalism, as many organisations engaged in international campaigning and forged alliances with their peers overseas. This historical biography by Helen Kay and Rose Pipes celebrates the achievements of Chrystal Macmillan, a remarkable woman who was one of the founders of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She was also an organiser of the 1915 International Women’s Congress at The Hague, which urged political leaders to use mediation to stop World War One.

Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel. Rachel Holmes. Bloomsbury. 2020.

Did you know that suffrage campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst was also politically involved in Ethiopia? In 1935 she campaigned against the Italian invasion of the country and in the 1950s moved there permanently, working ceaselessly to improve social conditions and writing a detailed history of the country as well as founding a newspaper.

This was one of the great surprises I discovered from a recent biography of Pankhurst by Rachel Holmes which offers a highly readable insight into the achievements of her long, impactful life, including those that have been less examined. Watch a video of the author speaking about the book at LSE library.

Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles. Imaobong Umoren. University of California Press. 2018.

An LSE author who has also emphasised the long history and importance of transnational feminist connections is Imaobong Umoren, based in the Department of International History. Her book, Race Women Internationalists, which won the 2019 Women’s History Network Book Prize, focuses on the lives of American Eslanda Robeson, Martinican Paulette Nardal, and Jamaican Una Marson, exploring how they created and used global networks to campaign against colonialism, fascism, sexism, and racism.in the 20^th Century.

I hope these recommendations have inspired you to explore the exhibition and Women’s Library itself. During March, look out for links I will be posting on Instagram of other recommended resources available via LSE Library, including databases of articles and primary resources. LSE staff and students can book one-to-one advice sessions for further help researching women’s history resources.

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

Main image: National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies procession with Frances Balfour, Millicent Fawcett, Emily Davies and Sophie Bryant, 13 June 1908. Credit: The Women’s Library collection by LSE Library on Flickr.

The LSE exhibition The Women’s Library at 100: celebrating a century of collections, curated by Patricia Owens, Kelly Bosomworth, Grace Heaton, Lyndsey Jenkins, Claire Cunnington, Caroline Derry, Nazmia Jamal, Angèle David-Guillou, and Gillian Murphy, runs from 2 March to 30 September 2026.

A launch event for the exhibition will take place next Thursday 12 March from 5 to 8 pm at LSE – find details and register.

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The post The Women’s Library at 100 – seven recommended reads for a new LSE exhibition first appeared on LSE Review of Books.