With research covering Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean and the Balkans, the Independent Social Research Foundation’s (ISRF) latest book launches showcased a commitment to supporting heterodox thinkers from around the world.

Beginning in autumn 2023 and continuing into 2024, the ISRF hosted a series of events of international scope, featuring Fellows and associates whose groundbreaking work focuses on Colombia, Bosnia, Jamaica and Vietnam.

This global perspective was deepened by research reflecting on the collapse of European colonialism, and disability and political representation.

These diverse works are connected by the commitment to “close, respectful and detailed engagement with the way people in communities have positioned themselves in relation to the state,” flagged by ISRF Academic Editor Lars Cornelissen during the season’s first launch.

Here’s a bite-sized summary of the six launches.

Development in Spirit

This event launched Seb Rumsby’s Development in Spirit, which looks at how in the 1980s and 1990s, the Hmong people in Vietnam began converting to Christianity due to the influence of evangelical radio broadcasts.

This mass conversion came at a time when these communities had been locked out of the benefits of Vietnam's economic transformation, brought about by state-led market reforms. 

This “unplanned development” put the Hmong on “a trajectory both of formal integration into the economy and resistance to state authority and religious persecution”. 

Dancehall In/Securities

Sound was also at the heart of the second event, though in this case it wasn’t evangelical radio broadcasts but rather the dancehall culture that originated in Jamaica before spreading around the world. 

The launch of Dancehall In/Securities edited by Patricia Noxolo, 'H' Patten and Sonjah Stanley Niaan, amplified how music provides an opportunity to experience bodily and intellectual power.

Indeed, Dancehall showcases Jamaica triumph as a global cultural powerhouse in music, dance, literature and art in opposition to the legacy of slavery and colonialism.

Struggles for the Human

Human rights and the legacy of colonialism are central concerns for Lara Montesinos Coleman whose book, Struggles for the Human, looks at the impact of state- and corporate-sponsored violence on grassroots organisations in Colombia.

After years of research in Colombia, Coleman has an unparalleled understanding of how the country’s “economic opening” in the 1990s led to thousands of activists and trade unionists being tortured, murdered and disappeared.

For Coleman, this violence is a legacy of colonialism which divided the population into a minority which enjoys full legal recognition and protection from a majority that doesn’t. 

Beekeeping in the End Times

The brutality of the Yugoslav Wars casts a shadow over Larisa Jašarević’s book, Beekeeping in the End Times, in which the humble honeybee unexpectedly emerges as a source of inextinguishable hope.

Since the 1990s, travelling beekeepers, who are mostly Bosnian Muslims, have helped reinhabit the conflict’s devastated frontlines. Recently, however, their livelihoods have been increasingly threatened by climate change.  

Jašarević also works as a beekeeper in Bosnia and Herzegovina and, by interpreting this practice through the lens of Islamic eschatology, provides lessons on how to live in the face of ecological disaster.

The End of Empires and a World Remade 

The existential threat of climate change necessitates global action but, as historian Martin Thomas observes, contemporary capitalism continues to complicate the very idea of radical international change.

In his new book, The End of Empires and a World Remade, Thomas collects evidence from throughout the 20th century to show how the promise of decolonisation was undermined by the dominance of free market economic thinking.

A world of empires and colonies has now been replaced by one of sovereign nations. But Thomas explains how the problems which threaten the future of the planet cannot be solved at this national level.

Disability and Political Representation

Much of the work featured during this season of book launches reflects the ISRF’s ongoing support for research which promotes the importance of social rights – an idea exemplified by Disability and Political Representation.

This new book by Elizabeth Evans and Stefanie Reher looks at the ways in which disabled people continue to be locked out of participating in the political process, both as voters and as elected representatives.

Using survey data from 25 European countries, Evans and Reher also show how government policies too often fail to represent disabled people’s beliefs and needs.

What next for the ISRF?

At the latter event, ISRF Director of Research Christopher Newfield highlighted how disability justice is “part of a common front of struggles for the elimination of exclusionary politics that are damaging society politically and environmentally”. 

This commitment to research exploring the currents and connections underpinning the most pressing social issues is reflected in the upcoming ISRF Conference on Migration and Democracy in a Time of Climate Crisis.

The conference, taking place in Warsaw in October, will sit alongside the ISRF’s Season V of book launches which is expected to begin in the autumn, setting the tone for ISRF’s work into 2025 and beyond.