Progressive Geographies

Burak Kadercan, Shifting Grounds: The Social Origins of Territorial Conflict – Oxford University Press, October 2023

Territory has always played a key role in the origins, conduct, and consequences of armed conflict. For territories to exist in any meaningful sense, human groups need to think of them in the first place, and then act upon these thoughts: territory is what states and societies make of it. 

In Shifting Grounds, Burak Kadercan draws upon a wide variety of cases, ranging from the Thirty Years War to ISIS, to examine the relationship between “territorial ideas” and armed conflict. He argues that states and societies have adhered to different forms of territoriality across time and space, and territory, as well as territorial control, has meant different things in different time periods and regions. Building on this premise, Kadercan makes two claims. First, how state elites conceive territory within and beyond their domains affects their military objectives as well as methods and strategies for waging war. Second, adherence to different forms of territoriality leads to different modes and patterns of war, and wars themselves may affect how state elites and societies conceive territories. Kadercan then turns to the transformative roles that wars can play in shaping dominant territorial ideas and geopolitical assumptions and how the impact of such wars differs in Western and non-Western regions. 

Ranging broadly across different eras and world regions, Shifting Grounds sheds light on the shifting nature of the relationship between territorial ideas and armed conflict not only in the context of the distant the past, but also in present-day global politics.

Gianna Englert, Democracy Tamed: French Liberalism and the Politics of Suffrage, Oxford University Press, April 2024

Does good democratic government require intelligent, moral, and productive citizens? Can our political institutions educate the kind of citizens we wish or need to have? With recent arguments “against democracy” and fears about the rise of populism, there is growing scepticism about whether liberalism and democracy can continue to survive together. Some even question whether democracy is worth saving. 

In Democracy Tamed, Gianna Englert argues that the dilemmas facing liberal democracy are not unique to our present moment, but have existed since the birth of liberal political thought in nineteenth-century France. Combining political theory and intellectual history, Englert shows how nineteenth-century French liberals championed the idea of “political capacity” as an alternative to democratic political rights and argued that voting rights should be limited to capable citizens who would preserve free, stable institutions against revolutionary passions and democratic demands. Liberals also redefined democracy itself, from its ancient meaning as political rule by the people to something that, counterintuitively, demanded the guidance of a capable few rather than the rule of all.

Understandably, scholarly treatments of political capacity have criticized the idea as exclusionary and potentially dangerous. Englert argues instead that political capacity was a flexible standard that developed alongside a changing society and economy, allowing liberals to embrace democracy without abandoning their first principles. She reveals a forgotten, uncharted path of liberalism in France that remained open to political democracy while aiming to foster citizen capacity. Overall, Democracy Tamed tells the story of how the earliest liberals deployed their notion of the “new democracy” to resist universal suffrage. But it also reveals how later liberals would appropriate their predecessors’ antidemocratic arguments to safeguard liberal democracies as we have come to know them.

Mara van der Lugt, Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering – Princeton University Press, paperback September 2023

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophers engaged in heated debates on the question of how God could have allowed evil and suffering in a creation that is supposedly good. Dark Matters traces how the competing philosophical traditions of optimism and pessimism arose from early modern debates about the problem of evil, and makes a compelling case for the rediscovery of pessimism as a source for compassion, consolation, and perhaps even hope.

Bringing to life one of the most vibrant eras in the history of philosophy, Mara van der Lugt discusses legendary figures such as Leibniz, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, and Schopenhauer. She also introduces readers to less familiar names, such as Bayle, King, La Mettrie, and Maupertuis. Van der Lugt describes not only how the earliest optimists and pessimists were deeply concerned with finding an answer to the question of the value of existence that does justice to the reality of human suffering, but also how they were fundamentally divided over what such an answer should look like.

A breathtaking work of intellectual history by one of today’s leading scholars, Dark Matters reveals how the crucial moral aim of pessimism is to find a way of speaking about suffering that offers consolation and does justice to the fragility of life.

Siobhan Angus, Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography – Duke University Press, March 2024

In Camera Geologica Siobhan Angus tells the history of photography through the minerals upon which the medium depends. Challenging the emphasis on immateriality in discourses on photography, Angus focuses on the inextricable links between image-making and resource extraction, revealing how the mining of bitumen, silver, platinum, iron, uranium, and rare-earth metals is a precondition of photography. Photography, Angus contends, begins underground and, through photographs of mines and mining, frequently returns there. Through a materials-driven analysis of visual culture, she illustrates histories of colonization, labor, and environmental degradation to expose the ways in which photography is enmeshed within and enables global extractive capitalism. Angus places nineteenth-century photography in dialogue with digital photography and its own entangled economies of extraction, demonstrating the importance of understanding photography’s complicity in the economic, geopolitical, and social systems that order the world.

David O’Sullivan, Computing Geographically: Bridging Giscience and Geography – Guilford Press, January 2024

Geographic information science (GISc) and systems (GIS) have grown rapidly in recent decades, increasingly on a separate track from geographic thought. As geography’s “big ideas”—such as space, place, boundaries, scale, process, and relationality—have evolved, what does this mean for their computational representation? This book considers how key concepts have developed in geography and are represented (or not) in GISc, with a view to bridging gaps between the two. David O’Sullivan shows how revisiting the theoretical underpinnings of geography offers insights on enduring GIS challenges—including map projections, the modifiable areal unit problem, scale and map generalization, and the nature of space and place—while also enriching geographic thought. The book uses examples from across geography’s subdisciplines to promote understanding. Chapters are self-contained essays that can easily form the basis of classroom discussions.

Rachael Squire and Anna Jackman, Political Geography: Approaches, Concepts, Futures – Sage, November 2023

This innovative and thought-provoking text will teach you about the diverse and increasingly expansive sub-discipline of geopolitics. Divided into three sections, Political Geography draws on case studies from a diverse range of scales, contexts, and demographics, to introduce you to the key approaches, concepts, and futures of geopolitics. 

You will cover an extensive range of key topics in Political Geography, from feminist geopolitics to non-human worlds, and nationalism to peace and resistance. Throughout this first edition you will apply various theoretical lenses, utilise a wide range of examples both past and present, and draw on cutting edge scholarship to reinvigorate your understanding of important themes such as the state, borders, and territory.

Based on the award-winning course at RHUL, Political Geography includes a variety of sites, spaces, materials, and images alongside ‘In the field’ tips, ideas for practical dissertation research, and tasks to facilitate active follow-on learning. Case studies, key terms, key questions and learning exercises, and annotated readings are included throughout every chapter to aid understanding and help you to engage and reflect on the content.

Designed as a core text for undergraduates and an introductory text for postgraduates with an interest in Political Geography.