Progressive Geographies

Ana Maria Albulescu, Third-Party Mediation and Peace Processes in the Post-Soviet Space: Norms, Interests and Power – Routledge, December 2025

This book examines the success of third-party mediation in conflicts in the post-Soviet space.

Third-party mediation is the subject of an extensive literature dealing with the resolution of internal conflicts. This volume examines the conditions that contribute to the success or failure of third-party mediation, and the positions and interests of mediators involved in the resolution of intra-state internationalized conflict. These topics are addressed with regard to the frozen conflicts in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, Donbas and Nagorno-Karabakh. The book contributes timely research to a growing body of literature concerned with the resolution of intractable conflict in the post-Soviet space and deals primarily with the role of external actors in addressing these conflicts. It proposes a novel conceptual framework centred on norms, power and interests to cover the relationships developed between third-party mediators and primary parties in secessionist conflicts during negotiations for peace. The book’s core argument is that multiple competing proposals for settlement and the clashing interests of third parties often contribute to the increase in spoiling, hindering the opportunity to take advantage of the ripe moment for peace.

This book will be of much interest to students of peace and conflict studies, mediation, eastern European and Central Asian politics, and International Relations.

Philip Janzen, An Unformed Map: Geographies of Belonging Between Africa and the Caribbean – Duke University Press, June 2025

New Books discussion with Elisa Prosperetti – thanks to dmf for the link

In An Unformed Map, Philip Janzen traces the intellectual trajectories of Caribbean people who joined the British and French colonial administrations in Africa between 1890 and 1930. Caribbean administrators grew up in colonial societies, saw themselves as British and French, and tended to look down on Africans. Once in Africa, however, they were doubly marginalized—excluded by Europeans and unwelcome among Africans. This marginalization was then reproduced in colonial archives, where their lives appear only in fragments. Drawing on sources beyond the archives of empire, from dictionaries and language exams to a suitcase full of poems, Janzen considers how Caribbean administrators reckoned with the profound effects of assimilation, racism, and dislocation. As they learned African languages, formed relationships with African intellectuals, and engaged with African cultures and histories, they began to rethink their positions in the British and French empires. They also created new geographies of belonging across the Atlantic, foundations from which others imagined new political horizons. Ultimately, Janzen offers a model for reading across sources and writing history in the face of archival fragmentation.

Theresa Delgadillo, Geographies of Relation: Diasporas and Borderlands in the Americas – University of Michigan Press, September 2024

New Books discussion with Shodona Kettle – thanks to dmf for the link

Geographies of Relation offers a new lens for examining diaspora and borderlands texts and performances that considers the inseparability of race, ethnicity, and gender in imagining and enacting social change. Theresa Delgadillo crosses interdisciplinary and canonical borders to investigate the interrelationships of African-descended Latinx and mestizx peoples through an analysis of Latin American, Latinx, and African American literature, film, and performance.
 
Not only does Delgadillo offer a rare extended analysis of Black Latinidades in Chicanx literature and theory, but she also considers over a century’s worth of literary, cinematic, and performative texts to support her argument about the significance of these cultural sites and overlaps. Chapters illuminate the significance of Toña La Negra in the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, reconsider feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s work in revising exclusionary Latin American ideologies of mestizaje, delve into the racial and gender frameworks Sandra Cisneros attempts to rewrite, unpack encounters between African Americans and Black Puerto Ricans in texts by James Baldwin and Marta Moreno Vega, explore the African diaspora in colonial and contemporary Peru through Daniel Alarcón’s literature and the documentary Soy Andina, and revisit the centrality of Black power in ending colonialism in Cuban narratives. Geographies of Relation demonstrates the long histories of networks and exchanges across the Americas as well as the interrelationships among Indigenous, Black, African American, mestizx, Chicanx, and Latinx peoples. It offers a compelling argument that geographies of relation are as significant as national frameworks in structuring cultural formation and change in this hemisphere. 

Magdalena Buchczyk, Martín Fonck, Tomás J. Usón and Tina Palaić eds., Unearthing Collections: Archives, time and ethics – UCL Press, November 2025 (print and open access)

Unearthing Collections invites readers to reconsider the ethics of collections and archives through the lens of temporality. Drawing on case studies that range from community protests over glacial sampling to the ethical dilemmas of housing human remains in museum collections and acquiring ephemeral political art, the authors interrogate the urgent challenges of collecting, displaying and preserving traces.

The book is framed around the concept of ‘unearthing’, the process of revealing hidden truths, excavating layers of history, and uncovering the unknown. It explores how the pursuit of knowledge often comes at the cost of displacement, exploitation, commodification, and the enduring legacies of imperialism and colonialism.

Alongside critique of the extractive practices that shaped many collections and archives, the book proposes a shift towards ‘re-earthing’, a practice that reconfigures how we understand and engage with knowledge about traces. As a critical approach, re-earthing acknowledges the messy, entangled nature of traces of the past, rejecting attempts to purify or control them in collections and archives, so they may evolve into new forms of knowledge. This innovative perspective challenges scholars, archivists, artists, and collection practitioners to rethink their approach to time and trace, urging them to disrupt dominant chronologies and cultivate new ethical approaches for working with collections and archives.

Beata Dreksler, Jala Makhzoumi eds. Landscape Architecture in the Arab Middle East – Routledge, September 2025

This book explores the challenges facing landscape architecture in the Middle East. It supports the idea that landscape is a multifaceted idea, and examines landscapes architecture as an emerging profession in the region. The book also responds to the limitations of faulty translations of the English ‘landscape’ that, in turn, limit the professional potential in the region.

The authors of the book see landscape as a way of beholding the world that is informed by place and culture. And because landscape is context specific, a landscape framing contextualizes a problem, be it community development, tourism, or nature conservation, to foster place and culture responsive perspectives. The nine chapters are grouped under four broad themes that reflect the multifaceted, ‘expansive’ framing that embraces landscape, natural and cultural heritage, people and livelihoods, and landscape and human rights.

The authors recognize that a landscape framing is not the exclusive domain of landscape architecture, but can be applied by architects, planners, and environmentalists. The ideas advanced and issues discussed will be of interest to researchers, students, and practitioners in landscape architecture, architecture, planning, and urban design, as well as social and environmental scientists.

Samuel A. Moore, Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons – University of Michigan Press, September 2025

New Books discussion with Stephen Pinfield – thanks to dmf for the link

Publishing Beyond the Market argues that the move to open access should focus less on the free accessibility of research outputs and more on who controls the publications and infrastructures for scholarly communication. By deploying theoretical literature on science and technology studies, care ethics, and the commons, the book critically interrogates open access and reimagines a more ethical future for researcher-led publishing. A case study of Plan S—the multifunder European policy for open access publishing—explores its tendency to rehearse all the failures of commercialisation. Through critical engagement with the open access landscape, the book reveals the shortcomings of market-centric and policy-based approaches to open access book and journal publishing, particularly their tendency to reinforce conservatism, commercialism, and private control of publishing.

Going forward, Publishing Beyond the Market explores the importance of collectivity and democratic governance within the transition to open access publishing. It suggests that developing a commons-based, scholar-led publishing landscape through a series of presses that are each managed by working academics could offer a productive counterpoint to marketised systems of open access and subscription publishing. In weaving themselves together in order to “scale small” these publishing initiatives would act as a counter-hegemonic project based on mutual reliance and care. By illustrating how these projects build toward a commons-based publishing future, and how they may complement other approaches to publishing within university presses and libraries, the book culminates in an argument for the infrastructures, policies, and forms of governance needed to nurture such a collective vision.

Hanno Brankamp, Occupied Refuge: Humanitarian Colonization and the Camp in Kenya – Duke University Press, February 2026

Introduction open access at this link

In a world shaped by war, climate disaster, and displacement, refugee camps are imagined as indispensable safe havens for millions of people fleeing crises. In Occupied Refuge, Hanno Brankamp challenges the presumed innocence of refugee humanitarianism as a system of civilian protection that can manage global inequalities and forced migration by peaceful means. He shows that although humanitarian missions aim to protect displaced populations in the global South, they often function as militarized occupations that treat camp inhabitants as new colonized subjects. Through ethnographic research in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp, Brankamp demonstrates how aid operations rely on a combination of infrastructural expansion, militarized policing, ethno-racial subjugation, indirect rule, and economic extraction. By co-managing these camps with international aid agencies, the Kenyan state becomes not only a willing accomplice in planetary humanitarian containment but seeks to pacify its own peripheral territories, securitize unwanted migrants, and impose national rule. Illuminating how refugee camps serve as key sites where carceral protectionism, postcolonial nation-building, and global mobility control intersect, Brankamp calls for abolitionist futures beyond the violent structures of encampment, borders, and citizenship.