Progressive Geographies

Charlotte Lydia Riley and Suzanne Nossel, Is Free Speech Under Threat? – Penguin, October 2024

Two leading thinkers present alternative answers to one of the most difficult and divisive questions of our times: Is free speech under threat?

Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, the leading free expression organisation, argues that alongside the necessary and long-overdue elevation of minority voices in recent years, there has also arisen an uncompromising intolerance – most notably on university campuses and online – that wrongly equates a wide range of offensive speech with violence and seeks to shut it down. This has led to an escalating free speech arms race, from which everyone loses.

Charlotte Lydia Riley, historian of empire and editor of The Free Speech Wars, argues that accusations of cancel culture and defences of free speech are too often disingenuous attempts to fuel a culture war and so inhibit an important realignment in which hateful speech is at last being called out for what it is and the right to free expression is being extended to more people than ever before.

Published in conjunction with Intelligence Squared, the world’s leading curator of debate, this book is part of the THINK AGAIN series: short books that present two expert, contrasting but equally persuasive views in a single volume that can be read from either end.

Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose, Questioning Humanity: Being Human in a Posthuman Age – Edward Elgar, June 2024

This innovative book questions what it means to be human today and in the future. Drawing on the natural, human and life sciences, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose encourage us to reconsider the human condition and the ways in which humans are affected by their animality, technology and the prospect of their annihilation. 

Questioning Humanity builds on and questions established orthodoxies in the social sciences and humanities. Using arguments from the life sciences it introduces readers to debates surrounding posthumanism, human evolution, the uniqueness of the human mind and human consciousness. The book goes further, into novel territory, to examine relations and distinctions between humans and non-human animals, developments in ‘artificial intelligence’ and its limits, the prospect of human extinction by climate change, and the possibilities of alien civilizations. Osborne and Rose argue that despite calls for a new posthuman ethics, we remain all too human, and the social and human sciences should be imbued with a naturalistic humanism if they are to address the real and immediate challenges of local and global inequity and injustice.

Providing an accessible introduction into both the contemporary challenges and future key questions within the social and human sciences, this book will be a vital read for undergraduate and postgraduate students in these areas. Questioning Humanity will also appeal to scholars from social, cultural, anthropological and biological disciplines interested in human distinctiveness.

Alice Mah, Petrochemical Planet: Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation, Duke University Press, September 2023 – print and open access

New Books discussion with Dave O’Brien. Thanks to dmf for these links.

In Petrochemical Planet Alice Mah examines the changing nature of the petrochemical industry as it faces the existential threats of climate change and environmental activism. Drawing on research from high-level industry meetings, petrochemical plant tours, and polluted communities, Mah juxtaposes the petrochemical industry’s destructive corporate worldviews with environmental justice struggles in the United States, China, and Europe. She argues that amid intensifying public pressures, a profound planetary industrial transformation is underway that is challenging the reigning age of plastics and fossil fuels. This challenge comes from what Mah calls multiscalar activism—a form of collective resistance that spans local, regional, national, and planetary sites and scales and addresses the interconnected issues of environmental justice, climate, pollution, health, extraction, land rights, workers’ rights, systemic racism, and toxic colonialism. Reflecting on the obstacles and openings for critical interventions in the petrochemical industry, Mah offers important insights into the possibilities for resistance and for developing alternatives to the reliance on fossil fuels.

The Anti-Security Collective, The Security Abolition Manifesto – Red Quill Books, August 2024

Introduction open access at this link

Security is the monstrous idea that we are alone and locked into competition over scarce resources, that private property is a natural right, that we need to protect our island of private life against the threat of others, and that we must submit to authority to do so.

Security encourages us to believe that the state exists to protect us from an ever-growing list of internal and external threats, from criminals to terrorists, insurgents to drug cartels, from migrants to refugees, and on it goes.

Security demands we look up and submit to the Leviathan, rather than look across in solidarity to our fellow beings on this planet, human and otherwise. Security tells us that we are obstacles to each other’s freedom, rather than the realization of it.

Samuel Fury Childs Daly, Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa after Empire – Duke University Press, October 2024

In Soldier’s Paradise, Samuel Fury Childs Daly tells the story of how Africa’s military dictators tried and failed to transform their societies into martial utopias. Across the continent, independence was followed by a wave of military coups and revolutions. The soldiers who led them had a vision. In Nigeria and other former British colonies, officers governed like they fought battles—to them, politics was war by other means. Civilians were subjected to military-style discipline, which was indistinguishable from tyranny. Soldiers promised law and order, and they saw judges as allies in their mission to make society more like an army. But law was not the disciplinary tool soldiers thought it was. Using legal records, archival documents, and memoirs, Daly shows how law both enabled militarism and worked against it. For Daly, the law is a place to see decolonization’s tensions and ironies—independence did not always mean liberty, and freedom had a militaristic streak. In a moment when militarism is again on the rise in Africa, Daly describes not just where it came from but why it lasted so long.