In his powerful poem titled ‘Shema’, Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, urges the world to pay attention to the victims of the Holocaust and to never lose sight of the human monstrosity that unfolded under fascism. Despite Levi's warning, there is a global resurgence of fascism (Mason 2021; Patnaik 2024; Stanley 2020). India seems to be in a similar situation with its embrace of fascism in the form of Hindutva. Fascism is a state of capitalism that arises because of a crisis or its possibility in which the traditional elite cannot dominate the political sphere and serve the interests of large corporations through liberal institutions (Poulantzas 2018). It is an authoritarian reaction (Desai 2016; Patnaik 2024) and a capitalist counter-revolution wearing a popular mask (Parenti 1997; Rosenberg 2016).

The ascent of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power in 2014 marked a significant transformation in India's sociopolitical landscape. The BJP, as the political wing of the Sangh Parivar, a network of Hindu supremacist organizations, strategically utilized the full spectrum of politico-legal systems and socio-economic institutions in its attempt to shape India into a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation). This effort has gained remarkable momentum, particularly following the BJP and its alliances’ successive electoral victories and firm control over the Indian parliament. For building Hindutva (Hindu nationhood) politics, the BJP adopts a primordial perspective, defining a nation through socio-biological links or socially constructed cultural connectivity, such as language, religion, territory, and kinship (de Souza 2022; Kumbamu 2020; Shani 2021). Deeply immersed in such primordialism, the Sangh Parivar defines the nation based on the idea of oneness (one law, one culture, one religion, and one language), which aims to promote Hindu supremacy, stigmatizing and labelling those who diverge from its definition as ‘enemies’ or ‘anti-nationals’ (Banaji 2018; Chacko 2023; Frykenberg 2008; Siddiqui 2017). As a result, there is an increasing criminalization of various forms of political dissent. This includes actions ranging from targeted ‘legal’ assaults on opposition political parties and ideologies to overt threats and ‘conspiracy’ cases against activists, academics, journalists, writers, and artists.

In this political context, deep-seated concerns have emerged regarding the state of democracy, civil liberties, and the functioning of constitutional institutions.

When its armies were finally defeated in May 1945, the vaunted Third Reich lay in waste and smoldering ruin. The air was foul, the cities ablaze, the countryside blighted; forests, fields, and rivers were blasted and defiled. Adolf Hitler, the messianic Führer or leader of the nation, had promised his people a thousand years of prosperity and peace. Instead his 12-year reign left nothing but desolation. Across Europe, the trail of German forces stank with the wreckage of shattered communities, ravaged landscapes, and exterminated lives. The destruction that Nazi Germany inflicted on the continent was unparalleled in human as well as environmental terms.

The introduction begins with the book’s central argument: Egyptian cultural and media institutions have constructed a coherent state project after the 1952 revolution through a praxis of ‘achievement’ (ingāz, pl. ingazāt). Inspired by the anthropology of bureaucracy and the state, the book intervenes in the longstanding historiography on the Nasser era to show how low- and mid-ranking bureaucrats affiliated to the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance have worked to create a unified state-idea after 1952, while constituting a bureaucratic corps on a similar ideological basis. Such bureaucrats, as well as higher-ranking officials and ministers, are central actors in the book’s narrative. The introduction also reviews the book’s main sources and methods, including ethnographic fieldwork, archival visits in institutional repositories and personal libraries, as well as regular dives into the second-hand book market in Cairo.

This chapter introduces the supposed problem of ethnicity: that it undermines national cohesion, or is a colonial hangover with no appropriate place in political life. In contrast, I argue that ethnicity is neither inherently desirable nor undesirable; its political effects depend on how it is known and used, and our understanding of how it is known remains underdeveloped. I establish that there is no definitive list of Kenya’s ethnic groups, and we must stop taking for granted what we think we know about ethnicity. I offer the concept of cultivated vagueness – a widespread aversion to resolving the ambiguity of lists of Kenya’s ethnic groups – to understand how ethnic knowledge works and to contrast it with legibility and governmentality. Cultivated vagueness is the response from bureaucrats, civil society, citizens and the state to the conundrum that ethnic knowledge is both common sense and impossible to settle. It also explains how ethnic classifications serve both projects of division and of pluralism. I suggest that attention to the benefits of cultivated vagueness may facilitate the advancement of the latter over the former. The chapter outlines the book’s methodology and chapters.

Chapter 3 turns to one of the best known but most controversial instances of ecological practice under Nazi auspices. It centers on the coterie of “advocates for the landscape” responsible for environmental planning on a series of major Nazi public works projects, most famously the building of the Autobahn system. The group was led by Alwin Seifert, whose title was Reich Advocate for the Landscape. Seifert was a pivotal figure in the development of the post-war environmental movement in Germany, and the work of his landscape advocates on the Autobahn has been the subject of several important previous studies. The focus of the chapter extends far beyond the Autobahn project to include many other fields in which the landscape advocates took an active part, styling themselves “the conscience of the German countryside.” The chapter shows that Seifert and the landscape advocates consistently applied ecological techniques even in the face of concerted resistance from other branches of the Nazi bureaucracy, with the support of a surprising range of high-level party and state functionaries. Though their achievements were limited in significant ways, through a modernized version of blood and soil ideology they conjoined Nazi ideals with environmentally sustainable policies.

The relevance of ecological ideals in lands occupied by Nazi forces would seem to be completely overshadowed by the ruinous impact of war. The book’s final chapter challenges this view through a thoroughly documented alternative analysis. Hitler’s vision of creating “a garden of Eden in the east” imbued longstanding racial myths with an ecological dimension, a call to restore harmony to the natural world, which in turn provided a crucial opening for environmentalists. The landscape advocates worked closely with German military authorities throughout occupied Europe on “green” programs that combined martial and environmental values. After the 1941 dissolution of the Reich League for Biodynamic Agriculture, leading biodynamic figures found a new institutional home in Himmler’s SS, working on settlement activities in the East and designing idealized rural communities founded on blood and soil precepts. The large biodynamic plantation at the Dachau concentration camp, growing organic products for the SS, served as a training center for environmental renewal as an integral part of occupation policy. Far from being consigned to insignificance, the full panoply of ecological aspirations came into their own in the midst of war. Their realization was prevented not by internal obstruction but by Germany’s defeat.

Chapter 1 examines three distinct organic farming movements that arose in Germany in the 1920s as pioneering examples of environmental ideals in practice. Though disparate in their origins and political commitments, all three organic tendencies found considerable common ground with Nazism, in some cases well before the Nazis came to power. Tracing their divergent fates under Hitler’s regime after 1933, the chapter offers a dense historical reconstruction of early environmental ambitions that were sometimes thwarted and sometimes fulfilled through active cooperation with Nazi agencies. A core aspect of the analysis centers on the implicit and explicit influence of racial ideologies within the emerging organic milieu and the opportunities and challenges this opened up under the conditions of Nazi rule. The chapter is built around a comprehensive range of archival sources, many of which have never been examined before, and provides the fullest portrait yet in German or English of the inception of organic farming currents in the context of proto-environmental politics.

This chapter theorises ethnicity as a mode of thought and identification around which ways of being, acting and relating are organised. It is one among many possible anchors for identification, solidarity and difference, though it is the most prominent in Kenya. I discuss how this became so, describing identity and community before colonialism, and offering a history of how ethnicity organised social life under and after colonial rule, especially around elections. I provide a sketch of varied ethnic identifications in Kenya, demonstrating immense variety, not all of which obviously fit an ethnic framework, and many of which entail politics quite different from the ‘big 5’ which dominate studies of elections. Finally, I situate the case of Kenya in a comparative context, highlighting key features of how ethnic classification has operated in Kenya, including reification, colonial penetration, nationhood, demography, and differences between direct and diffuse effects of identification. This section shows that both ethnicity and its classification can be conducive to pluralism and solidarity in Kenya, but perhaps not in other contexts.