Noah Walker-Crawford‘s The Climate Trial examines a groundbreaking case where a Peruvian farmer sued a German energy company over its contribution to climate harms impacting his livelihood. This…
The Sage Handbook of Decolonial Theory edited by Jairo Funez-Flores et al. resists Eurocentric, institutionalised norms in decolonial theory by establishing a scholarship that takes a ground-up perspe…
Drugs, Race, and the Politics of Modern Slavery Law examines how Britain reclassified racialised young drug runners as victims of “modern slavery”. Introducing the book, its author Insa…
Robert Dorschel‘s The Social Codes of Tech Workers is a sociological study of class identity among mid-level digital labourers. Drawing on interviews with American and German data scientists and…
Children’s Lived Experience of Poverty and Vulnerability in Kenya by Elizabeth Ngutuku is a theoretically and historically grounded ethnography of childhood deprivation in Siaya, Kenya. The book…
How Sanctions Work by Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Vaez explores how Iran has managed to endure decades of economic warfare. Taking a mixed methods…
Capitalism in the Web of Life by Jason W. Moore, recently re-issued for its tenth-anniversary, refigured how we understand capitalism’s relationship to nature, arguing that economic systems, social…
Victor Mallet’s Far-Right France examines the rise of the far right in France through the successful alliance between the National Rally’s Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella. Blending…
Tribal Politics by Sara Hobolt and James Tilley argues that the 2016 Brexit Referendum created (rather than revealed) two opposing political identities in the UK: Leavers and Remainers.…
Nomadic Indigenous Peoples and the Law by Indrani Sigamany analyses how nomadic communities in India navigate land dispossession, gendered injustices and administrative barriers. This excellent book o…
Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy by Rachel O’Neill examines the industry that claims to teach men how to successfully “pick up” women. To mark the book’s new…
John Tolan’s Islam: A New History from Muhammad to the Present offers a sweeping account of Islam’s evolution, highlighting influential figures, sectarian divisions, and global expansion. Though it…
Performing Power by Marcus Morgan develops a comprehensive theory of social performance, showing how it shapes the exercise of (and struggles over) power, in politics and beyond. Analytically…
Maren Larsen‘s Worlding Home is a study of UN peacekeeping camps in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, revealing them as dynamic, porous and embedded in city life. Larsen…
Tulasi Srinivas‘s The Goddess in the Mirror is an ethnography of Bangalore’s beauty salons, teasing out how beauty intertwines with gender, labour, caste and myth in urban India.…
According to Anne Power‘s Beyond Bricks and Mortar, housing means far more than physical shelter. It shapes and is shaped by the social conditions of its inhabitants, and…
John Chalcraft‘s From Subordination to Revolution advances a Gramscian theory of popular mobilisation – how ordinary and marginalised people take collective action against the powers that be. Th…
Amelie Harbisch’s Making Refugees’ Political Agency Visible refigures refugees from passive subjects to political actors within global immigration systems. Grounded in practice theory and ethnographic…
Preventing Violence by Keir Irwin-Rogers, Luke Billingham, Alistair Fraser, Fern Gillon, Susan McVie and Tim Newburn examines the UK’s public‑health approach to reducing violence and challenges to imp…
Ching Kwan Lee’s Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Decolonization Struggle combines history, ethnography and sociological analysis. According to Lucas Tse, the author’s account of political tra…
In this reading list inspired by LSE’s discussion series, Universities in the Age of Polarisation, Kevin Wilson selects six books that explore different aspects of polarisation – f…
Sanjaya Baru’s Secession of the Successful examines 200 years of Indian migration with a focus on the drivers and impacts of the recent exodus of the country’s elite.…
Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke argues that contemporary US elites claim the language of social justice and identify with progressive causes on one hand while reinforcing…
Care Poverty and Unmet Needs edited by Teppo Kroger, Nicola Brimblecombe, Ricardo Rodrigues and Kirstein Rummery, brings together twenty-seven social policy researchers from across the Global North to…