In solidarity, under suspicion is the successor volume to Against the grain (2014) and Waiting for the revolution (2017), complementing analysis of the far left in Britain from 1956 until the present. In addition to new scholarship on hitherto under-researched groups and movements, the volume explores recent findings from the Undercover Policing Inquiry and provides historical context for developments in the British left during and after ‘Corbynism’. Chapters consider the far left’s relationship to the state as well as to the Labour Party, and highlights attempts by far-left groups and activists both to intervene internationally and to transform themselves. With a range of different perspectives – activist and academic – In solidarity, under suspicion draws out the distinct ways that different far left groups and movements have responded to problems which remain salient today.
Only an expensive hardback listed at the moment, unfortunately.
Henri Lefebvre : actualités défend l’actualisation de la pensée de Lefebvre (1901-1991) à travers des contributions d’auteurs d’Amérique latine et d’Europe. Ce recueil met en lumière ses concepts clés — production de l’espace, droit à la ville, urbanisation, quotidienneté — et leur pertinence pour l’analyse des dynamiques urbaines et sociales contemporaines. En croisant des perspectives épistémologiques, sociologique, géographique et historique, l’ouvrage illustre la vitalité de son œuvre face à la prédation capitaliste et une urbanisation qui défie les limites planétaires, affirmant ainsi son influence toujours vivante tant pour les sciences humaines que pour les mouvements sociaux.
Le « laboratoire » de Marc Bloch enfin accessible au grand public.
Les deux carnets de Marc Bloch réunis dans cet ouvrage – « Quelques notes de lecture » et « Mea » – constituent une « anthologie personnelle » de notes et de citations. Si leur publication représente en soi un événement, ce sont bien plus que de simples documents historiques que l’on met ici à disposition du public. Ces carnets nous donnent en effet accès au laboratoire du savant, ainsi qu’à l’expérience morale, politique et civique de l’homme, jusqu’à présent inaccessible aux regards indiscrets, car la prose scientifique du grand historien ne concédait rien, ou presque, à la confession, à l’autobiographie, au détail intime. Ils nous font voir un Bloch lecteur passionné, curieux de tout, aux prises avec les débats et les tourments de son époque. En marge de de cette édition, Massimo Mastrogregori, spécialiste mondialement reconnu de l’œuvre de Bloch, replace les carnets dans leur contexte, analyse l’évolution des Annales et la trajectoire de l’historien tout en mettant en évidence l’actualité de son expérience politique et de la question qui n’a cessé de le hanter: celle des usages publics de l’histoire.
War Economy: Gendered Circuits of Violence and Capital examines the war economy from feminist perspectives, bringing fresh thinking in the context of heightened geopolitical tensions.
The book challenges the common understanding of war economy as a state-driven, top-down project necessitated by a conflictual international order. It introduces the concept of gendered circuits of violence — different types of violence across space and time — to conceptually and empirically link crises and wars through flows of capital, bodies, weapons and militarized technologies. The book deals with real-world conflicts, including in Gaza and Russia/Ukraine as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iran, Liberia, and Mexico. With increasing calls for the development of a war economy, especially in Europe, and broad acceptance that the global political economy is rapidly being primed for war, the book’s feminist political economy analysis and alternatives are vital and urgent.
War Economy will appeal to students, scholars and policymakers in the areas of International Political Economy, Politics and International Relations, Gender Studies, Security Studies, and War, Peace, and Conflict Studies.
On 1 December 1925, the Locarno Treaties were signed by Germany, France, Great Britain, Belgium and Italy, with some of the additional treaties also including Poland and Czechoslovakia as signatories. Negotiated in Switzerland in October, the final signing was in London at the Foreign Office. A consequence of the post-World War One settlements of the Peace of Paris, which saw extensive territorial changes, these agreements were intended to fix the boundaries between Germany and neighbouring states.
As Treaty of Mutual Guarantee of 16 October 1925 said, after a preamble which invoked the “the scourge of the war of 1914-1918”:
The High Contracting Parties collectively and severally guarantee, in the manner provided in the following Articles, the maintenance of the territorial status quo resulting from the frontiers between Germany and Belgium and between Germany and France, and the inviolability of the said frontiers as fixed by or in pursuance of the Treaty of Peace signed at Versailles on June 28, 1919, and also the observance of the stipulations of Articles 42 and 43 of the said treaty concerning the demilitarised zone (Article 1).
(The demilitarised zone here was land “either on the left bank of the Rhine or on the right bank to the west of a line drawn 50 kilometres to the East of the Rhine”, an area often called the Rhineland, to provide a buffer zone between Germany and France.)
Negotiating Table of the Locarno Treaties. France Germany Belgium Ticino Italy Switzerland United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland Locarno, 1925. https://www.loc.gov/item/2021670573/ Benito Mussolini is at the left corner of the main table; British foreign secretary Austin Chamberlain is to his left with the monocle, German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann is one of the people turning toward the camera in the centre; French foreign minister Aristide Briand is opposite him with the drooping moustache.
The “territorial status quo” sounds a worthy aspiration, but at the time this was an important innovation. We have, I think, a somewhat distorted collective memory, thinking that most boundaries are fixed and have been for a long time. But many Western European borders, not to mention those in Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and other parts of the world, are much more recent.
In my 2013 book The Birth of Territory, I traced the emergence of the idea that a political actor would have exclusive power within the territory they claimed. The idea that the King was an Emperor in his kingdom was something which emerged in the late Middle Ages, and was used in jurisdictional disputes between cities, princes, kings, emperors and popes. Over time, this became recoded as the relation between sovereignty and territory. Jean Gottmann described territory as “the spatial extent of sovereignty” (The Significance of Territory, p. 49), a phrase I used as the subtitle of my 2009 book Terror and Territory.
But the idea that the king’s power, or a state’s sovereignty, was exercised within borders which were fixed was largely unknown at this time. Kings believed they could gain more land, states could accumulate more territory. This could be in a range of ways, including marriage alliances, inheritance, purchase, colonisation, conquest, or punishment of a defeated state. The Louisiana Purchase of the early 19th century and the Alaska purchase of 1863 are of course well known. Territorial conquest continued into the twentieth century, and the punitive settlement imposed on the defeated powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire after World War One was part of what the Locarno Treaties were aiming to secure.
The Locarno Pact was important in stressing the fixity of borders, the territorial status quo. Today we think of this as territorial integrity, the idea that as well as a state being sovereign within its borders, those borders are fixed. States are not supposed to seize parts of their neighbours’ territories, nor promote secessionist claims within them. The United Nations Charter is categorical about this: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations” (Article 2, clause 4). Territorial integrity is usually meant in the sense of territorial preservation, but it also means territorial sovereignty – not just that the borders remain fixed, but that a state can exercise its sovereignty within them. But as my historical work tried to show, those two aspects have very different histories, which come together only in the twentieth century. In territorial preservation, the fixity of borders, Locarno has an important place.
The Locarno Pact was also important in the signatories agreeing that states should handle disputes through negotiation and the framework of the League of Nations. The Treaty of Mutual Guarantee stressed that Germany and Belgium, and Germany and France, “will in no case attack or invade each other or resort to war against each other”, except in self-defence, or if authorised by the League (Article 2). Articles 3 to 5 stressed the peaceful means of dispute resolution. Germany was admitted to the League of Nations in 1926 as a consequence. Building on these agreements, the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 said that states would “condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another”. It was initially signed between France, Germany and the United States, with other signatories following. These two pacts and the League of Nations were part of attempts in the 1920s to secure Western Europe from another devastating war.
The Locarno Pact did not last for long. Negotiations to secure Germany’s Eastern borders – the so-called Eastern Locarno – failed. The grievances of the Treaty of Versailles – the part of the Peace of Paris which treated Germany – endured, and many German politicians wanted its terms, including the territorial ones, reversed. The history of Germany’s territorial claims in the 1930s, from the remilitarisation of the Rhineland to the Anschluss with Austria, and the claims on the Sudetenland through to the rest of Czechoslovakia and Poland, is well known. Of course, the territorial claims made did not end there, either.
The Locarno Treaties could therefore be seen, along with the League of Nations, as a failure. In fundamental aspects they were, since Germany’s western borders were not settled by the agreements and were only reimposed by force after World War Two. Germany’s eastern borders went through further changes at the end of that war, and of course it was occupied and then divided until 1990 and reunification. The Kellogg-Briand Pact could be seen as another failure, but it was part of the legal case of the Nuremberg trials and the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal after World War Two ended.
Similarly, the Locarno Treaties did help to get this idea of the fixity of borders onto the international agenda, after some 19th century colonial developments, discussed by Kerry Goettlich in “Territorial Integrity as an Etiquette of Thieves”. The aspirations were behind some of thinking of the framing of the United Nations Charter. Since the founding of the United Nations, the attempt of the international community has been, again and again, to preserve existing boundaries. Decolonisation in Africa broadly took place with the independent states keeping the boundaries of their colonial era, either the boundaries between colonising powers, or divisions within European empires. The Cairo declaration of the Organisation of African Unity in 1964 recognised both that “border problems constitute a grave and permanent factor of dissention”, and that “the borders of African States, on the day of their independence, constitute a tangible reality”. The signatories therefore “pledge themselves to respect the borders existing on their achievement of national independence”. This was a process which had earlier been followed in South America, sometimes discussed through the legal notion of uti possidetis, that what you have you will continue to possess.There are exceptions of course, though they tend to be from the early post-war years – the imposition of a settlement in British Mandate Palestine, leading to the declaration of the State of Israel, and the partition of India. But with the post-1989 changes in Central and Eastern Europe, states either kept their earlier borders, broke along lines of federal division, or fought wars where these issues were significant.
Some of the enduring territorial issues follow from this broad principle – the republics of the Soviet Union became states, with the borders they had at the time, but regions within a Soviet republic did not. Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia became states, Chechnya and Dagestan did not. This led in some instances to populations being outside the state with which they perhaps felt most affinity. Areas with strong external support, such as Transnistria in Moldova, could survive as de facto states, even without recognition.
Especially in the post-Cold War era, the right of states to exercise sovereignty without restriction came under scrutiny, especially in the idea of humanitarian intervention or later the responsibility to protect. This was later expanded in the ‘war on terror’ into an idea that was sometimes known as ‘contingent sovereignty’. On this argument, made especially by neo-conservatives of the George W. Bush administration, sovereignty was not absolute, at least for some states, but was conditional. If a state violated certain norms – its treatment of civilian populations, pursuit of weapons of mass destruction or harbouring terrorists – then other states could, the claim went, intervene within its borders. When I discussed this, especially in Terror and Territory, I suggested that one part of the idea of territorial integrity – the exclusive power of a state within its borders – was being increasingly challenged. Yet at the same time, often quite a lot of effort was made to prevent a state’s territory from fracturing along ethnic or other lines. Somalia is still the recognised state, though there is no government which exercises authority over all of its territory, and there are areas within it such as Somaliland which are more viable, yet not recognised, states. Once Saddam Hussein had been overthrown, a key part of the enduring occupation of Iraq was to prevent territorial fragmentation from happening. Kosovo was an example of where an intervention to prevent Serbia from acting towards its population in a part of a territory created a problem the existing system was ill-prepared to resolve. Eventually Kosovo became a recognised state by just over half of United Nations states. But I argued that breaking one part of the post-World War Two settlement risked its entire basis.
A territorial free-for-all would inevitably create the kind of instability in the international system that existing frameworks are designed precisely to avoid. But pulling at one thread in the international framework risks unravelling the whole (Terror and Territory, p. 174).
It feels like some of this is behind what is happening at the moment. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was widely condemned, but its 2008 invasion of Georgia, and establishment of unrecognised states in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, did not receive nearly as much attention. Nor did the seizure of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and the promotion of secessionist groups in the Donbas. I briefly wrote about Georgia in Terror and Territory, and said a little on this site in 2014 about the invasion of Crimea and territorial integrity. Gerard Toal has explored these issues in much more detail in his 2017 book Near Abroad: Putin, the West, and the Contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus, and more recently in the 2024 article “The Territorial Taboo”.
When the new US administration came to power at the beginning of 2025, claims made about Greenland or Panama were widely ridiculed. But I wondered at the time if they were part of a wider challenge to the idea of territorial integrity. If a settlement is imposed on Ukraine which requires it to cede some of its territory, then the borders of a state will have been redrawn by force.* The Syrian civil war and the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria led neighbouring states to claim territory there, often described as some kind of buffer zone, even if what is notionally being protected is already illegally seized territory. Israel seems ever more determined to make unilateral declarations of annexation, some explicitly designed to make a viable Palestinian state impossible – despite or potentially because of the belated recognition of such a state by many world powers in recent months. China’s attitude to Taiwan, which it describes as a breakaway province, is another example; in contrast, the government in Taipei claims to be the legitimate government of the whole of China.
The post-World War Two settlement was far from ideal, of course, and the list of grievances and failures of the United Nations is long. But the aspirations behind it remain ones which are worth defending, and the territorial integrity principle was better than alternatives. This does not mean that there were not invasions of countries, seizure of territory and enduring boundary disputes after 1945. But claims to territory were generally not recognised by the international community, or at least not unanimously – consider the cases of Northern Cyprus, Western Sahara, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the Golan, and other cases. What the Locarno Treaties were designed to prevent was another war on the European continent. Their aspiration was carried forward on a global scale into the United Nations Charter. Equally, territorial disputes between two members of the European Union are limited – until the United Kingdom left the EU, the status of Gibraltar was a rare exception.
Territorial disputes continue today, of course, but Locarno was trying to prevent them, or at least to find a framework through which they could be resolved. We might return to the ideal behind Locarno, and the relation between territorial preservation and territorial sovereignty as territorial integrity, as we navigate our own troubled times.
* Quite apart from its political problems, one peculiarity of the 28-point US-Russia plan for Ukraine was point 21: “Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk will be recognised as de facto Russian, including by the United States”. One of the usual ways of determining legal status is recognition, so the idea that something might be recognised as de facto, rather than redrawn de jure is in tension. But either way, it would be a limitation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity. If it loses some of its territory, then its territorial integrity has clearly been breached, with borders redrawn by force. If parts of its legal territory continue to be controlled by Russia, then Ukraine will be unable to exercise sovereignty within its entire territory, again a limitation of its territorial integrity.
Update: I should have also indicated Reece Jones’s recent critical discussion, “Political Geography II: The End of Territorial Integrity”, Progress in Human Geography, 2025, online first
Stuart Elden, Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Abdelhamid El Ouali, Territorial Integrity in a Globalizing World: International Law and States’ Quest for Survival, Berlin: Springer, 2012.
Kerry Goettlich, “Territorial Integrity as an Etiquette of Thieves: Non-conquest in Nineteenth-Century Imperialism”, International Organization 2025, doi:10.1017/S0020818325101124
Jean Gottmann, The Significance of Territory, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973.
David Storey, Territories: The Claiming of Space, London: Routledge, third edition, 2024.
Gerard Toal, Near Abroad: Putin, the West and the Contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Gerard Toal, “The Territorial Taboo: Explaining the Public Aversion to Negotiations in the Ukraine War Support Coalition”, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 42 (7), 1108-27.
Jonathan Wright, “Locarno: A Democratic Peace?”, Review of International Studies 36 (2), 2010, 391-411.
Mark W. Zacher, “The Territorial Integrity Norm: International Boundaries and the Use of Force”, International Organization 55, 2001, 215-30.
Maja Zehfuss and Nick Vaughan-Williams, “From Security-Space to Time-Race: Reimagining Borders and Migration in Global Politics”, International Political Sociology 18 (3), 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olae019
This is the 48th post of a weekly series, where I post short essays with some indications of further reading and sources, but which are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare ideas, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few, usually shorter, pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week.
The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic ordering here.
The remarkable story of an overlooked map archive that reveals how maps have helped inspire some of the greatest scientific discoveries, but also led to terrible atrocities.
At the heart of University College London, nestled in the centre of Bloomsbury, lies a long-forgotten map library packed with thousands of maps and atlases. After Professor James Cheshire stumbled upon it, he spent three years sifting through hundreds of dusty drawers to see what was there. He was stunned to uncover some of the most significant maps and atlases from the last two centuries – many of which had not seen the light of day for decades.
In The Library of Lost Maps we discover atlases for the masses that expanded nineteenth-century horizons and maps that were wielded by those in power to wage war and negotiate peace; charts that trace the icy peaks of the Himalayas and the deepest depths of the ocean; and pioneering maps produced to settle borders in central Europe or the wealth of those in inner-city London. Maps have played a vital role in shaping our scientific knowledge of the world, showing the impact of climate change and inspiring the theory of plate tectonics. They have also guided politicians, encouraging both beneficial reforms and horrific conquests, the consequences of which we continue to live with today.
Brimming with astonishing discoveries, The Library of Lost Maps reveals why cartography really matters and how map-making has helped transform our understanding of the world around us.
Hugo Drochon, Elites and Democracy – Princeton University Press, January/March 2026
Thanks to John Raimo for the link
A central paradox of democracies is that they are always ruled by elites. What can democracy mean in this context? Today, it is often said that a populist revolt against elites is driving democratic politics throughout the West. But in Elites and Democracy, Hugo Drochon argues that democracy is more accurately and usefully understood as a perpetual struggle among competing elites—between rising elites and ruling elites. Real political change comes from the interaction between social movements and elite political institutions such as parties. But, although true democracy—the rule of the people—may never be achieved, striving towards it can bring about worthwhile democratic results.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels put forward “elite” theories of democracy and gave us terms such as the “ruling class” and “elites” itself. Drawing on their work and tracing the history of democratic thought through figures such as Joseph Schumpeter, Robert Dahl, C. Wright Mills, and Raymond Aron, Elites and Democracy reveals that this fundamentally elitist basis of democracy—democracy understood as competition between elites—was there all along. The challenge is to think it anew.
Moving away from procedural or principled conceptions of democracy, Elites and Democracydevelops a dynamic theory of democracy, one grounded in movement. With current politics defined by a populist backlash against elites, dynamic democracy offers the tools we urgently need to understand our contemporary predicament and to act upon it.
Offers an original analysis of the pivotal relationship between Althusser and Spinoza
Reappraises in a thematic and chronological way the interactions of both philosophies
Presents the reader with a new perspective on Spinoza as a materialist philosopher and on materialism itself
Comprehensively sets out Althusser’s contribution to the contemporary philosophical debate on materialism, aleatory materialism and transindividuality
Juan Domingo Sánchez Estop argues that Spinoza’s influence fundamentally shaped Althusser’s philosophical project, providing key concepts and methods that Althusser used to radically rethink Marxism. The book traces five key ‘detours and returns’ between Althusser and Spinoza, showing how Spinoza’s anti-humanism, theory of reading, immanent causality, politics of the conjuncture, and rejection of determinism were mobilised at critical junctures in Althusser’s development. In the process, Estop uncovers a new ‘Althusserian Spinoza’, a thinker of practice and politics whose revolutionary potential remains to be explored.
Bringing together published works, correspondences, and unpublished writings, this groundbreaking study sheds new light on Althusser’s theoretical trajectory and reveals the hidden Spinozist foundations of one of the 20th century’s most important Marxist thinkers.
Explores the intricate theme of constituent power, a pivotal yet often elusive concept in political philosophy
Provides detailed examinations of La Boétie, Bodin, Lipsius, Campanella, Suárez, and Hobbes, offering nuanced insights into their unique contributions to the theory of constituent power
Places each philosopher’s ideas within the broader socio-political and intellectual contexts of the 16th and 17th centuries, enhancing understanding of how their thoughts on constituent power responded to and shaped their environments
Lays a comprehensive historical and philosophical groundwork that equips readers to bridge early modern theories of constituent power with contemporary political and constitutional debates
Revisits the works of well-studied philosophers to offer new perspectives and critical insights that challenge established interpretations and highlight underexplored aspects of their political thought
This book offers an in-depth examination of constituent power through the writings of six major philosophers from the 16th and 17th centuries, highlighting how their ideas have shaped the foundation and transformation of political philosophy.
Filippo Del Lucchese delves into how La Boétie, Bodin, Lipsius, Campanella, Suárez and Hobbes conceptualized and influenced the evolution of this fundamental political idea. By examining their writings, he illuminates the diverse interpretations and the profound impact these thinkers had on the formation of political authority and constitutional frameworks. He also bridges this historical analysis with contemporary debates on democracy, sovereignty and the enduring tension between political foundation and institutional stability in modern legal and political theory.
