Progressive Geographies

Cristy Clark, Legal Geographies of Water: The Spaces, Places and Narratives of Human-Water Relations – Routledge, June 2025

Discussion on Law at the End of the World podcast – thanks to dmf for the link.

This book deepens our understanding of humanity’s diverse relationships with water and the law, providing a critical assessment of this relationship, and charting the course towards a more sustainable and just water future.

By using legal geography, this book pays particular attention to the place-based inter-relationships between water, people, and law (both formal and informal) and to the ways that law both constitutes and is constituted by the relationship between people and place. Starting in the 1980s, Chapter 2 investigates the early commodification of water through the liberalisation of rural water markets in Chile and the urban water supply and sanitation systems of England and Wales. Chapter 3 then examines the global expansion of neoliberal water governance in the 1990s, starting with donor-driven reforms in the global south and particularly Manila in the Philippines. Chapters 4 and 5 document both the grassroots response to these neoliberal water reforms and the inherent tensions in the attempts of the early 2000s to reconcile the recognition of a human right to water with the ongoing rollout of market mechanisms, both in the domestic context of South Africa and within the United Nations human rights system. Moving forward again, Chapter 6 examines the recent intensification of neoliberal water governance through financialisation and considers its specific impacts in Detroit and Flint, Michigan. Chapter 7 then considers the renewed global emphasis on living waters and Indigenous ontologies of water by examining the new legislative arrangements for the Whanganui River in Aotearoa, New Zealand. The book concludes in Chapter 8 by highlighting the stories of hope that can be found in many of the case studies explored in the book and in emerging examples from around the world.

This book is essential reading for students and scholars interested in water law, security, and justice from across a wide range of disciplines, including environmental studies, law, geography, human rights, and political ecology.

Sophie E. Battell, On the Threshold: Hospitality in Shakespeare’s Drama – Edinburgh University Press, paperback May 2025 and open access

Renews our understanding of Shakespeare through an interdisciplinary focus on hospitality

• Offers innovative literary analysis of canonical plays including The Merchant of Venice, providing a fresh interpretation of the stranger question
• Engages with different theoretical approaches to hospitality in order to read Shakespeare as a dramatist of ethical encounter
• Reconsiders the early modern interest in limits, thresholds, and boundaries, showing the significance to guest and host relationships in the drama
• Assembles a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary methodology by drawing on major thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Anne Dufourmantelle, Gaston Bachelard and Michel Serres

In this critical analysis, Sophie E. Battell examines hospitality in Shakespeare’s plays. By drawing on literary theory, modern philosophy, and anthropology as well as early modern scientific and religious texts, the book advances our understanding of Shakespeare as a dramatist concerned with the ethical questions at stake in encounters between guests and hosts of various kinds.

The close readings and scholarly interventions presented here reconceive the plays in terms of a poetics of hospitality while arguing for an expansive, far-reaching vision of what it means to be open to the world and welcoming of others. Moving from the levels of subjectivity, the body, and the senses to architecture, economics, legal discourse, and the natural environment, On the Threshold not only makes important contributions to Shakespeare studies but forges new connections between Renaissance literary scholarship and contemporary debates on the politics of migrants and refugees.

Charlotte Heath-Kelly and Sadi Shanaah, The Politics of Preventing Violent Extremism: Liberal Democracy, Civil Society, and Countering Radicalization – Oxford University Press, June 2025

The Politics of Preventing Violent Extremism explores how counter-radicalization policies have come to dominate European counterterrorism and security. Using interviews with practitioners across seven European nations, it documents how national security policies have been repurposed to identify individuals deemed ‘vulnerable’ to extremism and radicalization, and to provide targeted preventative interventions from welfare state agencies. Crucially, however, the methods (and limits) of preventing violent extremism (PVE) policies vary between nations. The Politics of Preventing Violent Extremism explores how political culture, the welfare state, and the conception of civil society in each nation shapes the type of counter-radicalization employed. While some European states have designed extensive pre-crime surveillance networks to identify those ‘radicalizing’ others, other states in Europe are bound by constitutional commitments to liberty of thought and speech which restrain them from using any type of pre-crime intervention. Accordingly, while PVE policies have been heralded as a novel solution to the problem of radicalization, they remain rooted in, and limited by, the political and social traditions of European democracies.