The Evolution of Repressive Law in Putin’s Russia takes a socio-legal perspective to trace the development of this regime of legalized repression, by looking at both the laws on the books and the law in action. Each chapter is a case study of a single repressive law regime, containing the context and a short legal history followed by analysis of its implementation. The authors cover terrorism, extremism, treason and espionage laws. They also trace restrictions on freedom of assembly, traditional and online media, and speech in multiple contexts, including the COVID era and the 2022 war in Ukraine. Importantly, this book takes a ground-up perspective, centering the voices of those who have engaged with these laws in practice. The contributors have been on the front lines of documenting and resisting the evolution of Russia’s repressive legal system that we document in this book and, as such, have also been caught in its crosshairs.

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The chapters showcase different strategies employed to claim the right to ‘stay put’ in local neighbourhoods, not only by mobilizing people and community but also through memory, art, law, documentaries and a caravan. Each local example is presented through the lens of a specific strategy of struggle, analyzing what has worked and what has not worked. This structure allows readers to focus on the local evolution of the strategy, allowing other activists to adopt, in full or part, the specific strategy in their local context. The examples allow readers to compare the implications, strengths, contradictions and shortcomings of each of the strategies illustrated, and to consider how strategies emerge from local context and global dynamics.

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Highlighting the ways in which micro-scale improvements, organised movements, local, national and transnational policies interacted, the book traces the complex history of these spaces. Shantytowns and Modernity in Cold War Buenos Aires deploys an innovative methodology integrating archival research, oral history, mapping, and visual analysis to tell the story of how the villas came into existence both as a conceptual entity and a specific urban typology where people lived and had to defend.

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Vitality in Lebanon explores how the simultaneous experience of radical uncertainty and return to old certainties has produced new forms of agency for addressing emergent challenges through political activism, research, and local community action. The collection brings together a transdisciplinary group of experts, including economists, policymakers, academics from various disciplines (anthropology, politics, and philosophy among others) and a member of parliament, to analyse Lebanon’s ongoing crises and discuss the practices and projects that have emerged in response. The book argues that, in a context where uncertainty has become an integral part of governance, solutions for today’s most pressing challenges are driven by diverse actors with different expertise, resources, and networks aiming to improve quality of life and catalyse new hopes for the future.

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Afterlives of Urban Cosmopolitanism charts the history of these communities in Muslim Asia and explores their migratory trajectories. Rather than emphasising the declining significance of non-Muslims to the region, however, this unique book illuminates how even in the context of diaspora many communities have continued to maintain relations with their countries of origin and with Muslims from them living in the diaspora. The book is informed by in-depth fieldwork conducted in Muslim Asia and amongst the region’s diasporas in contexts as diverse as Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent, Aleppo, Kabul, and London, New York and Vienna.

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The volume highlights three cross-cutting methodological challenges: ensuring data quality, establishing causality and enhancing reproducibility/replicability. It discusses how these challenges are best addressed in order to strengthen the robustness and practical relevance of empirical evidence. Additionally, the book enables readers to diversify their methods toolbox to combine approaches in mixed methods research that facilitates innovative and impactful insights. Considering quantitative, qualitative and computational techniques, nine commonly used methods for studying online extremism and terrorism are presented in accessible, practical guides. The latter demonstrate what each design or data collection strategy offers to the field and how they can be implemented, drawing on concrete examples from the literature.

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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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Introducing the concept of ‘translocal kinning’, Zhenwei Wang reconceptualises family not as a static unit anchored in co-residence, but as an ongoing, care-centred process forged through movement, mediation and negotiation. The book shows how efforts to ‘do family’ across space both reproduce and reconfigure hierarchies of gender, generation and class. Women remain central caregivers, yet their agency is shaped by intergenerational support and classed resources; grandparents emerge as key brokers of emotional and practical care; and digital technologies reshape what presence, supervision and responsibility mean at a distance.

By foregrounding care as a multidirectional flow rather than a one-way obligation, this book challenges dominant narratives of family breakdown under migration. It offers a timely and original contribution to scholarship on kinship, migration and social reproduction, while providing a grounded critique of how private family struggles are entangled with China’s marketisation reform.

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Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research with Amsterdam’s Parent and Child Teams, Remaking Welfare in the Netherlands examines how this intimate welfare state is imagined and enacted by frontline professionals. The book attends to the fantasies, ethical commitments and everyday dilemmas that animate these reforms, including the negotiation of race within ostensibly universalist frameworks of care.

The book argues that this emerging formation has a psychic life of its own: animated by aspirations toward a friendly, caring and accessible state, yet haunted by enduring fears of bureaucratic intrusion and state violence. Bringing ethnographic insight into conversation with debates on welfare and social policy, the book offers a fresh perspective on contemporary transformations of governance in the Netherlands and on the political futures now being forged across Europe.

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Though the book recognises that comics have long had a troubled relationship with racialised identities, it demonstrates that comics can also be a powerful tool for antiracist discourses and practices. It delves into the complex nature of racialised inequalities and comics production. It contributes to growing calls for multiracial perspectives, in this case featuring Black, Indigenous, mestizo and Asian-descent artists who use comics to express a shared opposition to racism. The book’s multidisciplinary approach creates a set of networked pathways that cut across disciplines, nations and lines of thought, and, in a gesture towards the hybrid nature of both comics and Latin American philosophies, across visual and written forms.

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