Progressive Geographies

Christopher S. Browning, Nation Branding and International Politics – McGill-Queen’s University Press, October 2023

Nation branding is regarded as essential for competitiveness among countries, but the idea of branding nations is often derided as lacking seriousness. While nation branding has been on the radar of scholars of marketing, communication, and media studies, as well as political geography for decades, it has only made a small dent into the international relations field.

In Nation Branding and International Politics Christopher Browning argues that international relations should take nation branding seriously. Nation branding not only involves the issues of culture, identity, and status – which are of principal concern to IR – but it is also a different and potentially fruitful way of reconceptualizing statehood. Mobilizing work on ontological security, anxiety, status, and distinction, and grounding the analysis in a broader historical context, Browning finds that nation branding is politically significant, though not necessarily for the reasons its advocates claim. Specifically, the book raises important questions about nation branding’s influence on the constitution of national identity, the reframing of citizenship, and the topography of contemporary geopolitics.

Nation Branding and International Politics considers how status, prestige, and reputation are constructed and maintained in international society, and how, perhaps, this construction and maintenance may be changing – just as the practice of nation branding is changing.

Susan Slyomovics (ed.), Ordering Imperial Worlds: From Late Medieval Spain to the Modern Middle East, Edinburgh University Press, November 2023

Studies cross-cultural exchanges across the Mediterranean using new interdisciplinary methodologies

• An edited volume that provides architectural, literary, historical and visual analyses
• A strong focus on interpreting archives
• A work of comparative cultural studies
• Each chapter opens an original and critical perspective, the book coalescing into a wealth of new ways of thinking about the history of the Islamic world
• Represents new developments in theories of empire
• Discusses cases from medieval Spain, Ottoman Empire, colonial North Africa, and France and Algeria based on primary sources

This volume of original essays invites 10 preeminent scholars to think through a rich corpus on cities, empires, images and archaeological sites produced by the distinguished architectural historian Zeynep Çelik. Awarded the prestigious 2019 Giorgio Della Vida medal for excellence in Islamic studies by the University of California, the occasion allowed researchers from various universities, countries and disciplines to reflect on her rich body of work. Inspired by Çelik’s works, chapters travel between Muslim and Christian Spain, the Ottoman Empire and France, Europe and its overseas empire in North Africa, and more.

Angelo Del Boca, As Cruel as Anyone Else: Italians, Colonies and Empire – trans. Richard Braude, Seagull, July 2024

Reveals a dark chapter in the Italian government’s colonial history that has been largely hidden from view.
 
Between the end of the nineteenth century and over the first half of the twentieth, Italy invaded and occupied the Horn of Africa, Libya, and several other territories. Yet recognition of this history of colonial destruction, racist violence, and genocidal aerial and chemical warfare—carried out not only during the Fascist dictatorship but also under preceding liberal governments—has been consistently repressed beneath the myth that the Italians never truly practiced colonialism.
 
The late journalist, historian, novelist, campaigner, and former Resistance fighter Angelo Del Boca dismantles this myth. He expertly narrates episodes of state violence committed by Italians both abroad—from Ethiopia to Slovenia, from China to Libya—and “at home” during the civil war following Unification in the 1860s or when the anti-Fascist Resistance faced off against the Republic of Salò after 1943. Attentive to the losses and pain suffered by all sides in war, Del Boca deftly demonstrates how such violence was not only a tool of domination but has also been central to creating and shaping an Italian “people.”
 
Drawing on a lifetime of interviews as a special correspondent, decades of work in private and state archives, and his own experiences during the Second World War, Del Boca’s popular and influential work has contributed to overturning views of Italian history. Presenting many historical episodes in English for the first time, As Cruel as Anyone Else provides a key to reading contemporary Italy, its place in international politics, and the disturbing permanence of the far-right within mainstream Italian politics.

John Robertson (ed.), Time, History and Political Thought – Cambridge University Press, June 2023

Between the cliché that ‘a week is a long time in politics’ and the aspiration of many political philosophers to give their ideas universal, timeless validity lies a gulf which the history of political thought is uniquely qualified to bridge. For that history shows that no conception of politics has dispensed altogether with time, and many have explicitly sought legitimacy in association with forms of history. Ranging from Justinian’s law codes to rival Protestant and Catholic visions of political community after the Fall, from Hobbes and Spinoza to the Scottish Enlightenment, and from Kant and Savigny to the legacy of German Historicism and the Algerian Revolution, this volume explores multiple ways in which different conceptions of time and history have been used to understand politics since late antiquity. Bringing together leading contemporary historians of political thought, Time, History, and Political Thought demonstrates just how much both time and history have enriched the political imagination.

Thomas Vesting, State Theory and the Law: An Introduction – Edward Elgar, 2022, paperback 2023

There has been renewed and growing interest in exploring the significant role played by law in the centralization of power and sovereignty – right from the earliest point. This timely book serves as an introduction into state theory, providing an overview of the conceptual history and the interdisciplinary tradition of the continental European general theory of the state.

Chapters present a theory of the state grounded in cultural analysis and show liberal democracy to be the paradigm of today’s western nation-state. The analysis includes the emergence of legal forms and institutions that are linked either to the constitutional state (the securing of civil liberties and fundamental rights), the welfare state (social and welfare law), or the network-state (regulation of complex digital technologies). Thomas Vesting focuses on illustrating the fundamental features of these evolutionary stages – the three layers constituting the modern state – and reveals their cultural and social preconditions.

This book will be an ideal read for students, postgraduates, and other academic audiences with interests in state theory, jurisprudence, legal theory, political theory, and legal philosophy.

Richard Saull, Capital, Race and Space, two volumes – Brill, 2023; paperbacks with Haymarket in summer 2024

– Capital, Race and Space, Volume I: The Far Right from Bonapartism to Fascism

In this first volume of Capital, Race and Space, Richard Saull offers an international historical sociology of the European far-right from its origins in the 1848 revolutions to fascism. Providing a distinct and original explanation of the evolution and mutations of the far-right Saull emphasizes its international causal dimensions through the prism of uneven and combined development. 

Focusing on the twin (political and economic) transformations that dominated the second half of the nineteenth century the book discusses the connections between class, race, and geography in the evolution of far-right movements and how the crises in the development of a liberal world order were central to the advance of the far-right ultimately helping to produce fascism.

– Capital, Race and Space, Volume II: The Far Right from ‘Post-Fascism’ to Trumpism

In this second volume of Capital, Race and Space, Richard Saull offers an international historical sociology of the Western far-right from the end of World War II to its contemporary manifestations in Trumpism and Brexit. Focusing on its international causal dimensions, Saull draws on the theory of uneven and combined development to provide a distinct and original explanation of the evolution and mutations of the ‘post-fascist’ far-right. 

Despite the transformed geopolitical context of capitalist development after 1945 – with decolonization and the end inter-imperial rivalry – the far-right continued to be intimately connected to the consolidation of the anti-communist liberal order. Thereafter, the far-right also formed an important, if contradictory, element within the neoliberal historical bloc that emerged in the 1980s and has been the main ideo-political beneficiary of the 2007-8 neoliberal crisis.