Progressive Geographies

Scott B. Ritner, Revolutionary Pessimism: Simone Weil’s Antifascist Politics – Stanford University Press, November 2026

Scott B. Ritner argues that the antifascist philosopher and mystic Simone Weil’s critical writings about the social crises of the mid-twentieth century, especially fascism, are particularly instructive for today. Now, as then, liberal democratic capitalist states are under threat from authoritarian leaders and fascist movements. Situating Weil and her work in the tradition of pessimistic critical theory, Ritner reveals how Weil’s work can be understood as participating in an ongoing project critique of capitalist and liberal, neoliberal, and fascist modes of domination. This novel interpretation of Weil’s work argues for reading her combined anarchist, Marxian, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and Platonic approaches to political thought holistically alongside her mystical Christianity and Judaism as a singular antifascist project in which pessimism is given political prominence. Taking up Weil’s critiques of the State, the organization of labor, the use and effects of violence, and the ideology of revolution, Ritner mobilizes Weil’s idiosyncratic antifascist politics towards a conceptual framework he calls “revolutionary pessimism”—defined as root-and-branch political action without expectation. As Ritner persuades, the revolutionary pessimism perceivable in Weil’s writing can reorient antifascism from a defensive political posture to an offensive posture of generative permanent revolt.

Chad Wellmon, After the University: Higher Education and the Future of Intellectual Work – Johns Hopkins University Press, June 2026

When the pursuit of knowledge is eclipsed by money and power, what remains of higher learning?

What is a university for? Is it a sanctuary for disciplined study, or has it become something else entirely? In After the University, Chad Wellmon traces the long and often uneasy relationship between higher learning and the institutions that claim to protect it. Moving from the guilds of medieval Paris and the knowledge factories of Enlightenment-era Göttingen to the research empires of Berlin and Berkeley, Wellmon shows how the modern university has repeatedly reshaped itself to serve shifting social and political demands. 

Across centuries, the goods of disciplined study—the joy of reading, the virtues of intellectual rigor, and the possibility of self-formation—have been overshadowed by the pursuit of external rewards such as money, prestige, and power. Part institutional history and part philosophical reflection, After the University examines how today’s institutions defend themselves not in the name of learning but in the language of productivity, innovation, and economic utility. Drawing on his experiences as a scholar, teacher, administrator, and witness to crises such as white supremacist marches and the COVID-19 pandemic, Wellmon illustrates how universities justify themselves through the outputs of graduates, research discoveries, and workforce training while leaving unmentioned the very practices that once defined them. 

Despite this transformation, Wellmon argues that the university’s current state of turmoil exposes a new, enticing possibility: recognizing the practices of disciplined study as goods worth valuing in and of themselves rather than simply as means to other ends. With insight and urgency, After the University asks whether our institutions can still nurture intellectual desire—or whether we must find new homes for the life of the mind.

Rebecca Adler-Nissen and Kristin Anabel Eggeling, The Brussels Bubble: Inside the European Union in the Digital Age – Cambridge University Press, June 2026

What happens when European politics goes digital? Behind the scenes in European Union institutions, a quiet transformation is reshaping the way power works. Based on long-term ethnographic research, this book follows diplomats, civil servants, spokespersons, and interpreters through the corridors, meeting rooms, cafés, and smartphone screens of Brussels’ European Quarter. Against the backdrop of Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia’s war on Ukraine, it reveals how digital technologies have become inseparable from the practice of international politics—reshaping trust, tact, and authority in unexpected ways. Far from a tale of technological revolution, The Brussels Bubble exposes digitalisation as a messy, human negotiation about what diplomacy and Europe itself mean today. Combining vivid narrative with sharp theoretical insight, it offers a rare, inside view of how global governance, technology, and human interaction intertwine at the heart of European power. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

• Drawing on behind-the-scenes access to Brussels during defining crises, this book offers an unparalleled, first-hand view of how EU diplomats navigate technological change and human challenges under intense political and geopolitical pressure
• Reconceptualizes international politics and global governance as practices transformed by crises, connectivity, and digital infrastructures – revealing how trust, authority, and secrecy evolve in a world where the EU emerges as a digitally and politically constituted site of power
• Blends ethnographic observation with storytelling, theory, and reflection – moving fluidly between Brussels meeting rooms to online negotiations and personal encounters, offering an engaging, relatable lens on how digitalization and politics intertwine in contemporary Europe
• This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core

Salvador Santino Regilme ed., Statelessness and Citizenship Revocation in Europe: Rethinking Politics, Law, Security, and Human Rights – De Gruyter Brlll, July 2026

Statelessness often results from discriminatory policies or legal gaps, while citizenship revocation is typically used as a counterterrorism measure. Both processes strip individuals – particularly from minoritized groups – of legal status and access to essential social services, leaving them vulnerable to exclusion, exploitation, and human rights abuses.

With contributions from scholars in political science, international law, and sociology, this unique collection presents case studies of policies that reinforce statelessness; it connects legal doctrines with real-world impacts and critically balances the tensions between security imperatives and human dignity. Statelessness and Citizenship Revocation in Europe calls for policy changes that position citizenship as an essential human right. Offering both rigorous multidisciplinary academic analysis and practical recommendations to address statelessness in contemporary Europe, this book is an essential resource for scholars, policymakers, and advocates.

• Uniquely addresses both citizenship revocation and statelessness within a European context from a multidisciplinary perspective.
• Offers contemporary, real-world case studies with actionable reform recommendations.

Andrew McKenzie-McHarg, The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory – Princeton University Press, June/August 2026

Will be interesting to read this alongside Nicolas Guilhot, Conspiracy: The History of a Political Obsession – Harvard University Press, October 2026.

Truthers, birthers, flat-Earthers, the deep state, crisis actors, chemtrails, the Epstein files, Pizzagate, the Plandemic—it seems as though there’s a conspiracy theory for every situation. But what exactly is a conspiracy theory? And why is the term used to describe beliefs that are so very unlike theories (at least in the scientific sense of the word)? In this erudite and original book, Andrew McKenzie-McHarg answers these questions not by formulating a definition but by tracing a genealogy. He uncovers two crucial strands of contemporary conspiracy theorizing on the threshold of modernity: on the one hand, political analysis as realized by Niccolò Machiavelli in such works as The Prince and, on the other, apocalyptic prophecy as channeled by the charismatic preacher Girolamo Savonarola.

The French Revolution, the antisemitic hoax known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the Nuremberg Trials number among the subsequent episodes that progressively entangled these strands before finally knotting them into the twentieth-century concept of conspiracy theory. Alternative labels were also offered, most strikingly by the historian Richard Hofstadter, whose engagement with American right-wing politics in the 1950s and 1960s inspired his notion of the paranoid style. As McKenzie-McHarg shows, Hofstadter’s coinage, with its psychological bent, contributed to personalizing our understanding of conspiracy theory, thus yielding a specific type of person that, for better or worse, has become all too familiar to us today: the conspiracy theorist.

Proceeding from The Prince through The Protocols to the paranoid style and then beyond to QAnon, The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory sheds new light on a complex and troubling phenomenon.

Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa – new edition, foreword by Angela Davis, Verso, September 2026

An exemplary work of political, economic, and historical analysis, powerfully introduced by Angela Davis

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, Rodney makes the unflinching case that African maldevelopment is not a natural feature of geography, but a direct product of imperial extraction from the continent, a practice that continues up into the present. Meticulously researched, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains an unshakably relevant study of the so-called “great divergence” between Africa and Europe, just as it remains a prescient resource for grasping the the multiplication of global inequality today. 

In this new edition, Angela Davis offers a striking foreword to the book, exploring its lasting contributions to a revolutionary and feminist practice of anti-imperialism.

Anne O. Law, Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants – Oxford University Press, March 2026

I’ve shared news of the book before, now with a New Books network discussion with Lilly Goren

Since the late nineteenth century, the US federal government has enjoyed exclusive authority to decide whether someone has the ability to enter and stay in US territory. But freedom of movement was not guaranteed in the British colonies or early US. By contrast, voluntary migrants were met with strict laws and policies created by colonies and states, which denied free mobility and settlement in their territories to unwanted populations.

Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship presents a story of constitutional development that traces the confluence of the logics of slavery and settler colonialism in early legal rulings and public policy about migration and citizenship. The book examines the division of labor between the national and state governments that endured for over a century, reasons why that arrangement changed in the late nineteenth century, and what the transformation meant for people subject to those regimes of control. Drawing into one study the migration policy histories of groups of people that are usually studied separately, and combining the methodologies of political science, history, and law, Anna O. Law reveals the unmistakable effects of slavery and Native American dispossession in modern US immigration policy.