Progressive Geographies

Georg Glaze, Amaël Cattaruzza, Finn Dammann, and Frédérick Douzet eds. The Elgar Companion to the Geopolitics of Digital Sovereignty: Contested Networks, Territories and Self-determination – Edward Elgar, 2026 (print and open access)

This comprehensive Companion explores the rise of digital sovereignty as a guiding principle of digital policy in different regions of the world. It analyses digital transformation within larger geopolitical and geoeconomic processes and provides a historically and geographically context-sensitive overview of research in this field of growing importance.

Expert authors combine approaches from digital geography, with its sensitivity to the socio-technical shaping of socio-spatial relations, and political geography, with its focus on questions of the spatial organisation of the (political) world with research from political sciences, law, computer sciences and economics. With comparative analysis through an international range of case studies, chapters shed light on the concept of digital sovereignty through a multi-stakeholder lens which includes states, private actors and civil society.

Laying the foundations for a political geography of the digital age, this book is an essential reference for researchers and students in political and digital geography, geopolitics, internet studies and digital social science more broadly.

Kojin Karatani, The End of Modern Literature: On Permanent Revolution – eds. Jonathan E. Abel, Yoshiki Tajiri and Hiroki Yoshikuni – Verso, August 2026

A groundbreaking essay on literature’s demise from the award-winning philosopher

What comes after the death of literature? Kojin Karatani, winner of the 2022 Berggruen Prize, examines the corpse, investigates the cause of death, and offers glimpses of an afterlife from various theoretical perspectives. The End of Modern Literature reimagines the significance and concept of literature.

Alongside Karatani’s essential essay comes commentary and responses by Fredric Jameson, Bruce Robbins, Kenneth W. Warren, Gauri Viswanathan, Andrew Gibson, Young-il Cho, Yoshiki Tajiri, Michael K. Bourdaghs, and Jonathan E. Abel, along with an introduction that situates Karatani’s essay in his theoretical oeuvre.

Don Thomas Deere, The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space – Duke University Press, January 2026

I’ve shared news of the book before, there is now a New Books Network discussion with Morteza Hajizadeh – thanks to dmf for the link.

In The Invention of Order, Don Thomas Deere retraces the colonial origins of spatial organization in the Americas and the Caribbean and its lasting impact on modern structures of knowledge, power, race, gender as well as understandings of global modernity. The coloniality of space dispossessed Indigenous, African, and mixed populations as it constructed new systems of control and movement. Deere demonstrates how these developments manifested, among other forms, in urban grid patterns imposed during the development of Spanish colonial cities as well as totalizing trade routes crisscrossing the Atlantic. Drawing on a range of thinkers including Enrique Dussel, Édouard Glissant, and Sylvia Wynter, Deere reveals how movement—who travels, who settles, and who is excluded—becomes an essential component of control under colonial rule. Against the violence of spatial reordering, Deere outlines how novel forms of resistance and insurgency geographies still take hold, particularly in the Caribbean, where landscapes remain excessive, eruptive, and uncaptured by the order of modernity.

Steven Press, Europe’s Little Anarchy: The Rise and Fall of Neutral Moresnet – Cornell University Press, August 2026

Europe’s Little Anarchy uncovers the history of Neutral Moresnet: a once-forgotten space without borders, nationalism, or a recognized government. Between 1815 and 1919, this square mile of land wedged between Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany was home to thousands of people living off the grid, free of taxation and oversight. But they also had no political status, police, legal currency, proper law courts, or government presence in sectors like public health, infrastructure maintenance, or education. Meanwhile, practical control over Neutral Moresnet lay in the hands of the local industry: a for-profit, multinational mining company that, because it owned rights to the land, also held a near monopoly on the supply of high-quality zinc to the rest of the world. 

Steven Press explores how the residents of Neutral Moresnet sought to improve their quality of life, appealing to Germany and Belgium to “harden” regional borders and forcibly occupy their land. Others, he reveals, pushed to found an independent microstate on the example of Monaco. By the start of the twentieth century, the populace also had to reckon with criminal elements looking to take advantage of the legal vacuum to establish a network of brothels and distilleries—sometimes with deadly consequences.

By looking closely at the people and history of Neutral Moresnet, Europe’s Little Anarchychallenges the definition of what a country is, who belongs within it, and what happens when no one is truly in charge. In today’s world of shifting borders and stateless zones, this forgotten experiment feels newly relevant and offers much-needed context for the current political and international landscape.

James Kneale, Temperance Lives: Life Assurance, Drink and Medicine in Britain, 1840-1918 – Bloomsbury, November 2025

This book explains how the rise of temperance life assurance affected ideas surrounding the dangers of drinking and abstinence between 1840 and 1918.

James Kneale examines how temperance life insurance – initially a speculative business venture – evolved into a social experiment that played a crucial role in persuading ordinary people, doctors, and insurance firms that abstaining from alcohol was safer than drinking it. Drawing from archival materials, Kneale analyses contemporary stories from teetotallers and high-street temperance businesses, and investigates the broader impact on ‘temperance towns’ such as Manchester, Exeter, and the settlements of the Pendle area.

By charting the evolution of the first temperance life assurance firm the UK Temperance and General Provident Institution (UKT) from its difficult beginnings, to being the eighth largest British life assurance firm by the 1890s, the author demonstrates to readers how quickly social attitudes surrounding teetotalism changed, and why.

Miriam Posner, Seeing Like a Supply Chain: The Hidden Life of Logistics – Yale University Press, October 2026

A history of the technology of supply-chain management from punch cards to neural nets, and how the ambiguity built into that technology helps companies and exploits workers

Seeing Like a Supply Chain is a compelling investigation into the hidden networks that drive our global economy. Miriam Posner presents a blow-by-blow account of the technology of supply-chain management from punch cards to neural nets, revealing how the system’s built-in ambiguity shields companies from accountability while exploiting workers.

Drawing on more than a decade of research, Posner shows how computation converged with the growth of global trade to allow for a lightning-quick, astoundingly efficient supply chain that lets corporations source products without any notion of where their goods are actually being produced. At a time when multinational firms fear the reputational damage of human rights violations in the making of their products, the supply chain’s shroud of vagueness is a feature, not a bug. Posner shows how this is technically accomplished—and how the strategic disavowal of information extends through every step of that chain.

Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani (eds.), The Biopolitical Animal – Edinburgh University Press, November 2024; paperback May 2026

João Pina-Cabral, Metapersons: Transcendence and Life – Hau, 2026

Print distributed by University of Chicago Press; available open access

Metapersons begins from a simple yet striking observation: across the world, people live in the company of divinities, ancestors, spirits, sacred mountains, or enlivened statues. They pray with intensity, sense the presence of ghosts, and experience forms of coexistence with beings beyond the human. Drawing on fieldwork in Portugal, China, Mozambique, and Brazil, João Pina-Cabral shows how humans continually move beyond their embodied condition through lived relations with such entities.

Revisiting classic anthropological debates—from Durkheim and Mauss on prayer and the sacred to later critiques of religion—this book argues that a “new anthropological synthesis” has emerged in recent decades: one that understands transcendence as a fundamental feature of life itself. In this light, familiar categories such as “superstition” require reconsideration in new terms. Pina-Cabral develops a scalar model of life’s plurality, seeing personhood as the dynamic source of transcendence.

Engaging with contemporary debates across the life sciences, social sciences, and philosophy, Metapersons offers a groundbreaking, person-centered perspective on transcendence, animism, and spirituality. It challenges disciplinary boundaries while providing an innovative framework for rethinking prayer, religion, and the very conditions of human coexistence with the more-than-human world.