Drawing on extensive archival research and expert interviews, the book traces two interconnected processes. It reconstructs how human rights were rooted under late socialism through home-grown practices of documentation, translation and dissent. It then examines how these practices were reconfigured after 1989 through uneven professionalisation of national ‘human rights complexes’. The book’s unique contribution lies in its comparative, socio-legal approach. By placing Hungary, Poland, Romania, Ukraine and Russia side by side, it reveals diverse trajectories of human rights professionalisation, resilience and failure. In doing so, it offers a new relational and bottom-up perspective on human rights as a lived social practice shaped by history, professional networks and human experience.

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This textbook is ideal for students with no background knowledge of STS or as an introduction for more advanced researchers in other fields that study war and security, including politics and international relations, history, geography, sociology and anthropology.

Designed to support both independent and classroom learning, each carefully structured chapter begins by listing its key features and concepts so that readers understand the coverage at a glance. Chapters end with discussion questions to encourage critical thinking and suggested further readings. Online resources offer additional support in the form of learning activities and answer prompts for the discussion questions.

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Drawing on scholarship across sociology, anthropology, political science, and cultural and legal history, the volume examines how narratives of masculine restoration, revolutionary spirit and cultural belonging drive and reinvent political formations across Turkey, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, India and China. Refusing positivist and Eurocentric templates, the contributors co-theorise from within their own contexts, attending to the specific temporalities through which Islamic movements claim the past, inhabit the present and project futures.

The result is a volume whose theoretical force comes from the very geographies it studies: a contribution, not a conclusion, to the decolonial rethinking of political imagination and its entanglement with nationalism, masculine desire and the unfinished business of revolution.

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Grounded in the critical and theoretical tradition of political ecology, the book calls for a practical politics that rebels against the dominance of nature, resists fascist populism and reconnects with human tradition. Robert Biel argues that two forms of ‘remembering’ are needed, first that we embrace humanity’s past connection with socio-ecological change through deep time, and second that we assimilate still-valuable socialist traditions such as dignity and creativity of work. From this basis, he proposes a novel synthesis between complex systems research, Indigenous one-ness with nature, the ‘good Anthropocene’, and Marxist perspectives on nature. This unlocks a broad interrogation of the COVID experience by drawing on notions of biopolitics and queer theory, while also re-framing theories of imperialism to critique the central role of racism. Written in an engaging style, the book builds a compelling case for a new practical and actionable politics based on reclaiming what we have lost.

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To develop a multidisciplinary understanding of the rise and functioning of right-wing populism in Central and Eastern Europe, The Anatomy of Right-wing Populism examines the two original concepts of neo-traditionalism (to capture the construction of the pure people in opposition to the corrupt elites and the threatening others) and neo-feudalism (to capture an economic strategy whereby a relatively small elite controls the apex of political power and a sizable portion of the country’s economy). This book argues that the causes and consequences of populism cannot be fully understood without a multidisciplinary analysis, drawing on the theories and approaches of politics, history, economics, sociology and anthropology. Grounded in empirical research, this volume provides theoretical insights into how populism became such a powerful political force and formulates policy recommendations on how to resist illiberalism, thereby appealing not only to academics but also to activists and policy makers.

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Anna Shadrina situates older Russian women’s experiences within the post-Soviet redefinition of the nation, analysing their portrayal in popular media and biographical narratives of women aged 60 and over in Russia and the UK. It addresses class and racial disparities, noting how some women outsource family duties to less qualified women, and emphasises age as a significant but overlooked axis of social inequality. From a feminist perspective, the book explores citizenship as both a status and a practice of inclusion and exclusion. By focusing on older women’s rights to participate in private and public spheres, it discusses the new social inequalities that emerged after the USSR’s collapse. Despite prioritising others’ interests, older Russian women actively engage in economic citizenship, though their struggles for recognition are often excluded from formal economy and politics.

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Young people could not protest in essays, speeches or fiction, but the referents of live jokes are hard to prove. KVN became a forum for Aesopian free speech. Soviet pedagogues promoted the game as a wholesome, intellectual youth activity, leading to a preponderance of ordinary schoolchildren gaining at least some experience writing jokes. Even after the fall of the USSR, millions of young people across the former Soviet bloc continued playing KVN in schools, universities and semi-pro leagues. Drawing on fieldwork in Russia and Ukraine between 2015 and 2019, Garey compares KVN traditions in two post-Soviet nation states at war. A series of interconnected, cross-border stories spanning 60 years illustrates how laughter and oppression entwined in the long cultural context of the war in Ukraine.

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This book details how the inclusion of these five sources across temporal, spatial, cultural, linguistic, and species contexts leads to the discovery of democratic practices and institutions hitherto unknown or unfamiliar to the conventional ‘Western’ perception. It promises to generate a new class of democratic theorist – the ‘Fourth Theorist’, who theorizes from thousands of multimedial democracy concepts – and it has the potential for generating better-founded, less arbitrary, more inclusive democratic theories. In doing so, the book considers the philosophical, institutional, educational, and methodological difficulties of the scientific understandings and undertakings it proposes. The book is a choral work of many collaborating authors. Their ambition is to offer a touchstone text for government and public officials, citizens, residents and visitors, researchers, practitioners, and philanthropists (big and small) participating in what is a vibrant global discussion on how to study and practice democracy equitably.

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The Faces of Authoritarianism and Strategies of Dissent in Contemporary Brazil examines repression and dissent: efforts to dismantle democratic foundations alongside forms of contestation and resistance to authoritarianism. The chapters offer valuable theoretical and ethnographic insights, from interdisciplinary perspectives, into the complex realities that Brazilians experienced in the four years of Bolsonaro’s presidency. The book is organised around four sections, each addressing a core area where democracy, as meaning and practice, was contested, attacked and defended. This is shown not only between Bolsonaro’s government and those who resisted it from within and outside the state, but also between state and non-state actors and between public and private sectors, allowing for a broad view of the country’s polarised political landscape and the impact such struggles have had on civil society.

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Anti-Atlas plays with the politics of the conventional atlas, with its assumptions about knowledge and power, its hierarchies of value, and its simplifications. It presents a collection of essays written by an eclectic mix of authors from Europe, both east and west, the UK and North America. These entries analyse a necessarily incomplete selection of topics, but they all engage with the question of how an approach to area can be ‘critical’ – and each entry demonstrates different aspects of criticality. The editors develop a manifesto for such criticality, calling attention to positions that are heterodox, area-informed or vernacular, ‘undisciplined’, and collaborative. Through a variety of genres, including the scholarly article, the travel guide, autobiographical reflections and data visualisations, Anti-Atlas provides readers with a diverse series of intellectual resources, asking them to think critically about the ways in which we construct the world by dividing it into pieces.

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