ISRF Newsletter – April 2026
Spring is here, along with this month's ISRF newsletter! Featured is a Director's Note on reimagining climate finance. Also in this newsletter: upcoming ISRF book launches and news from our Fellows.
Contents
Director’s Note
You Can Get There From Here
Christopher Newfield
Discussions of radical change to our economic system eventually confront the use of force. No one in our March workshop, Redesigning Finance for Climate Justice (REDFIC), wanted our running theme of “Coercing Climate Finance” to lead to civil war. And yet at some point in any debate about, for example, how to transform credit policy to speed up decarbonisation, which would include a central bank making loans on petroleum investments unaffordable, someone would say, “This kind of thing always involves shooting people. They don’t give up their assets otherwise.”
Such comments produced some leery chuckling in the workshop. But no one let anticipations of crushing backlash from the financial sector steer the discussion. To project onto everyone, we generally wanted radical changes in today’s global financial system and also wanted them to come through democratic deliberation. The power of finance and the weakness of democracy make it hard to imagine this combination—the democratic redesign of finance. But that is the task.
Book Launch: States of Transition: From Governing the Environment to Transforming Society
10th April 2026, 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm (BST). In person & online.
Barnard’s Inn Hall, London
In States of Transition (CUP 2025), Peter Newell discusses the limits of today’s policies in ways that reveal their potential for much more powerful effects. While existing efforts at regulation are essential, they also support the same industries they seek to curtail, leaving needed transitions incomplete. He describes states as dynamic sites of continuous improvisation and struggle, with their prospects far more open and hopeful than we often assume.
Book Launch: The Matter of Architecture: Geology, Buildings and Us
3rd June 2026, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm (BST). In person & online.
Architectural Association Bookshop, London
In his important new book, The Matter of Architecture (Reaktion, 2026), Paul Dobraszczyk approaches geology as the architecture of our planet, arguing that what we build has always been dependent on what Earth has already made. Yet, what we produce now will also become the geology of the future: billions of tonnes of concrete, plastic, brick, metals and other fabricated materials that are quickly piling up to eventually become new geological strata.
Book Prize Shortlist: ‘Spying on Muslims in Colonial Mozambique, 1964-74.’ by Sandra Araújo
The Polly Corrigan Book Prize recognises scholarship within the realm of intelligence and security, written by women scholars and/or about women. Among this year’s shortlisted books is ISRF First Book Fellow Sandra Araújo’s book Spying on Muslims in Colonial Mozambique, 1964-74. Araújo’s book focuses on Muslim communities and their response to counterinsurgency and armed nationalism during the colonial war. Congratulations Sandra!
New publication: ‘Neighbourhoods and the far right: What is to be done?’ by Ana Santamarina and Anthony Ince
This article builds upon an ongoing scholarly discussion on the far right, from everyday institutions that constrain or enable them to digital spaces. The authors argue that responding to the far right is not simply a question of subculture politics or particular moments of confrontation. Rather, an antifascist response should be practiced as a transversal political culture embedded in struggles over housing, belonging, care and everyday coexistence.
New publication: ‘Confronting the dilemmas of humanitarian borderwork: NGO engagements with Australian offshore detention’ by Eleanor Davey
Examining Australian offshore detention in the Pacific, this paper explores the ethical and strategic challenges that humanitarian organisations face when navigating policies designed to deter unauthorised migration. Such policies foster dynamics that make sustained humanitarian support untenable and raise questions about the implications for organisations wishing to reduce the harms caused by deterrence measures.
New publication: ‘More-than-human loss: Exploring the intersections of Indigeneity, conflict transitions and memory in Cambodia’ by Peter Manning and Duong Keo
There are many assumptions about Indigenous communities, memory and temporality that this article aims to complicate. Drawing on interview data from two Indigenous communities in Cambodia, the authors argue that memory is a central site for articulating Indigeneity through forms and claims of absence that specifically emerge from the remaking of the material and epistemic scaffolds of Indigenous life.
Upcoming event: ‘Read the Ting: Sonic-visual literary clash’ hosted by UCL Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment
Join Academic Advisory Board member, Joy White, with Elijah and Janine Francois for an exchange of theory and practice centred on Black music culture, world building and spatial imaginaries. Framed through sonic, social and spatial ecologies, this event explores how sound shapes community, memory and collective futures in East London.