Progressive Geographies

Kiri Olivia Santner, The Borders of Responsibility: Migration Control in the Mediterranean Sea – Duke University Press, May 2026

While migrants face many dangers in attempting to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean Sea—from drowning to dying of dehydration—they also confront an elaborate legal system that is designed to return them to their countries of origin. In The Borders of Responsibility, Kiri Olivia Santer outlines the architecture of these legal systems and how they help Europe evade legal responsibility for rescuing migrants. Focusing on legal agreements between Italy and Libya that have resulted in the systematic interception of migrants, Santer shows how Europe’s liberal identity is belied by legal agreements that let migrants die at sea or that send them back to dangerous, exploitative situations in post-Gaddafi Libya or their home countries. Law, she argues, is the tool that enables states to affect control beyond territory, whilst disappearing their responsibility for violence across border assemblages. Through ethnographic fieldwork with migrants, lawyers, policy makers, and humanitarian workers, Santer shows how the law is too often used as an instrument of violence against migrants, who fall outside of conventional structures of legal rights.

Introduction available to read open access now.

Brian Drohan and Margot Tudor eds. Military Humanitarianism: Aid Operations and Armed Forces – Cornell University Press, July 2026

While interconnections between humanitarian actors and military operations are a pervasive feature of contemporary conflicts around the globe today, Military Humanitarianism challenges the idea that these interactions are a recent phenomenon. Instead, this volume offers an alternative interpretation to the traditional framing of military actors as a homogenous group and humanitarian actors as impartial intermediaries between armed groups and aid recipients. 

In tracing a longer lineage beyond the post–Cold War period and twenty-first century, Military Humanitarianism uncovers a deeper history of entanglement between “humanitarian” and “military” actors—supposedly distinct categories that have long been mutually constitutive. By examining the malleability of these concepts and bringing different contexts into conversation, both editors and contributors reveal the tensions, ambiguities, and paradoxes of defining “humanitarian” action in practice, particularly in contrast to military operations. As a result, Military Humanitarianism provides timely insight into the understanding and politics of humanitarian operations, on and beyond the battlefield. It asks not just what it means to “help” but who gets to—and why.

Contributors: Cedric Cotter, Maria Cullen, Lewis Defrates, Bronwen Everill, Matilda Greig, Baher Ibrahim, Julia F. Irwin, Norman Joshua, Jonathan McCollum, Justine Meberg, Michelle Moyd, Daniel Palmieri, Elisabeth Piller, Lou Pingeot, Pietro Stefanini, and Jiayi Tao.

Sarah C. Dunstan and Ian Stewart eds. Race in the Modern World: An intellectual History – Cambridge University Press, August 2026

Few ideas have had a more powerful effect on the modern world than that of race, yet few ideas are less understood. Bringing together contributions from leading international scholars, this volume traces the crystallisation of this concept in western intellectual discourse in the eighteenth century, its rapid rise to prominence as a governing concept across the world from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, and its legacy from the Cold War and era of decolonisation to the present. Through multiple case studies, the chapters provide new angles on more familiar contexts, such as Enlightenment Europe, while introducing related themes in areas including India and New Zealand. Race in the Modern World offers a comparative understanding of the multiplicity of ways that race has been conceptualised, how these ideas changed over time, and how the world of ideas shapes the world in which we live.

Reading suggestions from Stanford University Press.

Jacques Rancière, Distant Freedom: Essay on Chekhov – trans. Steven Corcoran, Polity, February 2026

Chekhov’s fiction offers a subtle yet powerful message: another life is possible. Something can always happen to our lives – a possibility that breaks the monotony of servitude and points to a different, more liberated existence. This is the way to approach all these brief tales of lost lives, nights filled with tears and joy, landscapes, or love, against the cynicism of those who believe that time is destined to replicate the same. In these glimmers, new forms of life arise – noble and sensible shapes that we occasionally perceive and may strive to unfold if we have the courage to do so.

Jacques Rancière, using Chekhov’s stories as a lens, sees literature not as a source of knowledge but as a catalyst for reshaping the fabric of being. He illuminates the profound capability of literature: positioning us within the landscape of freedom, transparent about the distance it holds from the reality of servitude, yet unwavering in the standards it sets, inviting us to strive towards them.

First conference of the British Daseinanalysis Institute, 29 June 2026, Corpus Christi, Oxford

registration: office@daseinanalysis.uk

Marcus Rediker, Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea – Verso, March 2026

Conspiracy, mutiny, and liberation across the Atlantic from the award-winning author of The Slave Ship

Freedom Ship is a gripping history of the enslaved African Americans who stowed away on vessels that carried them to liberty. Up to 100,000 fugitives successfully fled the horrors of bondage in the American South. Many moved northwards through a network of secret routes and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. Thousands of others, most of them completely unknown, escaped by sea. Their dramatic accounts of whispered conspiracy and billowing sails make Freedom Ship essential and en­thralling reading.

From the docks of Savannah and Charleston to Boston Harbor and beyond, Freedom Ship traces the seekers who turned their sights to the sea. Stowaways regularly arrived in Britain aboard cotton ships bound for Liverpool. Moses Roper, one of the most determined runaways in American history, travelled 350 miles through slave coun­try before boarding the Napoleon and sailing for England. He became the first self-emancipated bondsman to lecture in the cause of abolition in Britain. Legendary abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman both saw the shipping lanes as paths to freedom.

Marcus Rediker displays a prodigious command of ar­chival research to embark on a thrilling journey along the Atlantic seaboard, following those who risked everything in a maritime pursuit of freedom.

Kélina Gotman, What is a Thoughtful Life? – Manchester University Press, June 2026

In fresh readings of Theodor W. Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, Barbara Cassin, Michel Foucault, Werner Hamacher, Martin Heidegger, and many more, Gotman rearticulates the foundations of broadly western philosophical thinking to carve out a shadowy space of recalcitrant thought ‘in dark times’. At once indebted to the legacy of critique and enmeshed in affective and performative approaches to language, anti-theatricality, critical race theory and gender studies, she weaves a poetic mesh of intimate fragments, reflections on what it means to think and to write, as she puts it, after spectacle. Almost but not quite a straight work of philosophy, distinctly literary and performative in its anti-genre, this book twists and turns, swerves and cuts, to show the work of thinking as an intimate act – a theatre of angles and openings, adjacencies and reverberations.

Timothy Mitchell, The Alibi of Capital: How We Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow – Verso, March 2026

Stealing the future and concealing the theft – capitalism’s method, as examined by the author of the acclaimed Carbon Democracy

Today, extraordinary wealth seems to arrive from nowhere. The trick of conjuring this unearned wealth is, in fact, the key to understanding capital­ism’s origins and a clue to why the catastrophe of climate collapse is upon us: value is created by consuming the future.

The Alibi of Capital explains how this came about through the imperial expansion of the West, en­cumbering today’s generations with repayments on earlier extractions. Timothy Mitchell identifies the forms of capitalisation, credit, and coercion that turn prospective assets into present income. Rejecting the common idea that claims on the future create only financial or fictitious capital, he traces the terraforming projects – the destruction of rivers, the colonising of territory, the expan­sion of infrastructure, and the burning of carbon – through which the future has been squandered. Terms such as finance, technology, the economy, and growth function as alibis that conceal this devastating form of extraction.