Afleveringen
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Constitutional Conventions: Theories, Practices and Dynamics (Routledge, 2025) is an excellent edited volume exploring the various ways in which governments and constitutional structures operate in the spaces that are not necessarily articulated in law, edict, or formal documents. This is not a text about the folks who gathered together in 1787 in Philadelphia, or even those who wrote new constitutional structures after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Conventions means the rules that govern the interactions between political actors and the governments they inhabit. In many ways, this refers to the kinds of norms that have grown up around different parts of the systems of government. The strength and endurance of those rules or norms can change over time and in response to crises or dynamic changes. Constitutional Conventions: Theories, Practices, and Dynamics explores these thick and thin dimensions of the governing structures from a comparative perspective, taking up Anglo and American systems in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The book also examines the cases of Hungary and Czechia (the Czech Republic), two post-Cold War systems; and finally, also, China.
In considering these constitutional conventions, we can think of them as structures or engagement that is not enforced by the courts, since these are not, per se, written constitutional laws. In long standing liberal democracies, there is an inclination towards adhering to conventions. But when these conventions are under strain, how they work, or maintain “regular order” becomes a critical test within the established governmental systems. Constitutional Conventions provides another dimension of significant interest in the discussion of how China works within these kinds of conventions within the process in which political individuals come up through the governmental and party systems and move into leadership roles. The comparative case study of Hungary and Czechia indicates that even in somewhat similar structures, the conventions and norms are not always the same.
Constitutional Conventions: Theories, Practices, and Dynamics is an important analysis of the ways in which governmental structures work beyond what is written or built as the official system. The discussions cover theoretical, practical, and comparative dimensions of our understandings of the processes and functions of governments.
Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at [email protected] or send her missives at Bluesky @gorenlj.
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What does liberty entail? How have concepts of liberty changed over time? And what are the global consequences?
Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal (Cambridge UP, 2025) surveys the history of rival views of liberty from antiquity to modern times. Quentin Skinner traces the understanding of liberty as independence from the classical ideal to early modern Britain, culminating in the claims of the Whig oligarchy to have transformed this idea into reality. Yet, with the Whig vision of a free state and civil society undermined by the American Revolution of 1776, Skinner explores how claims that liberty was fulfilled by an absence of physical or coercive restraint came to prominence. Liberty as Independence examines new dimensions of these rival views, considering the connections between debates on liberty and debates on slavery, and demonstrating how these ideas were harnessed in feminist discussions surrounding limitations on the liberty of women. The concept of liberty is inherently global, and Skinner argues strongly for the reinstatement of the understanding of liberty as independence.
Illustrates the connections between philosophical debates surrounding liberty and the sociopolitical contexts in which they took place
Provides a comprehensive analysis and bibliography of rival ways of thinking about liberty
Explores the contribution of the American Revolution to discussions on the idea of liberty
Quentin Skinner is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University of London. He was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton between 1974 and 1979, and was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge between 1996 and 2008. He is the author and editor of numerous books on Renaissance and Modern Intellectual History, and the recipient of many awards including the Wolfson Prize for History and a Balzan Prize. Previous publications include the two-volume study, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1978), Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998) and, most recently, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge, 2018).
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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What has gone wrong with the left—and what leftists must do if they want to change politics, ethics, and minds. Leftists have long taught that people in the West must take responsibility for centuries of classism, racism, colonialism, patriarchy, and other gross injustices. Of course, right-wingers constantly ridicule this claim for its “wokeness.”
In Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left ( MIT Press, 2025), Eric Heinze rejects the idea that we should be less woke. In fact, we need more wokeness, but of a new kind. Yes, we must teach about these bleak pasts, but we must also educate the public about the left’s own support for regimes that damaged and destroyed millions of lives for over a century—Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, or the Kim dynasty in North Korea. Criticisms of Western wrongdoing are certainly important, yet Heinze explains that leftists have rarely engaged in the kinds of open and public self-scrutiny that they demand from others. Citing examples as different as the Ukraine war, LGBTQ+ people in Cuba, the concept of “hatred,” and the problem of leftwing antisemitism, Heinze explains why and how the left must change its memory politics if it is to claim any ethical high ground.
Eric Heinze is Professor of Law and Humanities at Queen Mary University of London.
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Donald Trump is putting liberal democracy through its greatest test in 80 years.
None of it is original. His style of rule is straight from the democratic backsliders' playbook. To secure long-term power rather than short-term office, rulers must take over the institutions that check and balance majority rule and bend them to their will. Trump has tamed Congress and inserted his people into the Supreme Court, law enforcement, intelligence, and competition regulation but - to his great frustration - the Federal Reserve is holding out.
It was the same story in Hungary after Viktor Orbán returned to the premiership in 2010. Bound by EU law and the mandates of the governor and his deputies, Orbán had to wait three years to break the national bank. One of those deputy governors, Júlia Király, experienced state capture from the inside and resigned with a public protest at the loss of institutional independence.
Now an associate professor of finance and monetary economics at the International Business School in Budapest, she began her career under socialism at the statistics and planning offices. As deputy governor, she was part of the team that managed the Hungarian economy through the post-2007 financial crisis – an experience she chronicles in Hungary and Other Emerging EU Countries in the Financial Storm: From Minor Turbulences to a Global Hurricane (Springer, 2020).
Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts at www.242.news on Substack.
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Britain's Conservative Party is one of the oldest and most successful political parties in history. Local elections in the UK have signalled that they are facing the prospect of being wiped out, imperilled by the rise of the right-wing Reform Party, headed by one of the most pervasive and divisive figures in British politics: Nigel Farage. Reform’s success is also coming at the expense of Labour, whose voters are underwhelmed and unconvinced by the performance so far of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government.
Hosts Nina Dos Santos and Owen Bennett Jones explore what makes Reform such a potent political threat that they could upend 100 years of Labour and Conservative rule, charting the party's rise from UKIP to Brexit to now.
They speak to Gawain Towler, former Reform spokesperson and close political confidant of Nigel Farage, and Ben Habib, formerly deputy leader of Reform two men who understand the soul of the movement and the man who leads and embodies the party: Nigel Farage.
Producer, Pearse Lynch
Executive Producer, Lucinda Knight
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What is the growing appeal of fascist idealism for young people? Why is radical nationalism on the rise in Europe and throughout the world? In Living Right: Far Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe (Princeton UP, 2024), Dr. Agnieszka Pasieka provides an in-depth account of the ideas and practices that are driving the varied forms of far-right activism by young people from all walks of life, revealing how these social movements offer the promise of comradery, purpose, and a moral calling to self-sacrifice, and demonstrating how far-right ideas are understood and lived in ways that speak to a variety of experiences. Dr. Agnieszka Pasieka draws on her own sometimes harrowing fieldwork among Italian, Polish, and Hungarian militant youths, painting unforgettable portraits of students, laborers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and activists from well-off middle class backgrounds who have all found a nurturing home in the far right. With a focus on far-right morality that challenges commonly held ideas about the right, Dr. Pasieka describes how far-right movements afford opportunities to the young to be active members of tightly bonded comradeships while sharing in a broader project with global ramifications.
In this episode we consider: the power of listening, locating and unpacking complexities, navigating field work, and handling difficult situations.
Our guest is: Dr. Agnieszka Pasieka, who is a sociocultural anthropologist. Before joining the University of Montreal, she was a senior research fellow at the University of Vienna and held guest lecturer and guest professor positions at various universities: Central European University, University of Bayreuth, Dartmouth College, and Yale University. She is the author of Living right: far-right youth activists in contemporary Europe, published by Princeton University Press in 2024.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a developmental editor for scholars, and is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.
Playlist for listeners:
Dear Miss Perkins
Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism
Secret Harvests
Teaching About Race and Racism in the College Classroom
Immigration Realities
The Ungrateful Refugee
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can help support the show by downloading, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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On this edition of Ctrl Alt Deceit: Democracy in Danger, we are live at the Royal United Services Institute.
Nina Dos Santos and Owen Bennett Jones are joined by a world-class panel to discuss the dangers posed by the waves of dark money threatening to overwhelm our democratic institutions.Panelists:--Tom Keatinge, Director, Centre for Finance and Security, RUSI--Darren Hughes, Chief Executive, Electoral Reform Society--Gina Neff, Executive Director, Minderoo Centre for Technology & Democracy at the University of Cambridge, and Professor of Responsible AI, Queen Mary University London
Producer: Pearse Lynch
Executive Producer: Lucinda Knight
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In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey speaks with Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein, co-authors of The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future (Polity Press, 2024). In this conversation, they discuss how today’s right-wing movements, from the United States to Hungary, are waging a new form of politics that undermines the very foundations of the modern, rules-based state. Drawing on Max Weber’s concept of “patrimonialism,” Hanson and Kopstein explore how these leaders erode public trust, demolish impersonal bureaucracies, and replace rational governance with personal loyalty and whim. Along the way, they examine the role of conspiracy theories, the rise of “deep state” narratives, and the uneasy alliances connecting libertarians, Christian nationalists, and advocates of an all-powerful executive.
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Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Eleanor Paynter responds to the crisis framings that dominate migration debates in the global north. This capacious, interdisciplinary open-access study reformulates Europe's so-called "migrant crisis" from a sudden disaster to a site of contested witnessing, where competing narratives threaten, uphold, or reimagine migrant rights.
Focusing on Italy, a crucial port of arrival, Dr. Paynter draws together testimonials from ethnographic research—alongside literature, film, and visual art—to interrogate the colonial, racial logics that inform emergency responses to migration. She also examines the media, discourses, policies, and practices that shape lived experiences of migration well beyond international borders. Centering the witnessing of Black Africans in Italy, Emergency in Transit reveals how this emergency apparatus operates and posits a vision of mobility that refutes the notions of crisis so often imposed on those who cross the Mediterranean Sea.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Liberalism is in trouble. As a set of ideas, it has lost much of its historical authority in guiding public policy and personal behaviour. In this post-liberal climate, Russell Blackford asks whether liberalism is truly over.
How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration (Bloomsbury, 2023) examines how Western liberal democracies became nations where traditional liberal principles of toleration (religious and otherwise), individual liberty and freedom of speech are frequently dismissed as outdated or twisted to support conservative policies. Blackford traces the lineage of liberalism from problems of toleration that emerged when Christianity triumphed in the late centuries of classical antiquity, with comparison to non-Western civilizations. The political and philosophical story culminates in the recent development – over the past 30 to 50 years – of post-liberal ideologies in the West. At each stage, Blackford discusses arguments for and against liberal principles, identifying why no argument to date has been totally successful in convincing opponents, while maintaining that liberalism's ideas and language are still worth saving.
From campus wars over academic freedom to the Charlie Hebdo attack and the murder of Samuel Paty, this is an indispensable guide for anyone wanting to understand the why, what and how of the post-liberal world.
Russell Blackford is a philosopher, legal scholar, literary critic based at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of Freedom of Religion and the Secular State (2012), Humanity Enhanced (2014), The Mystery of Moral Authority (2016), and Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination (2017). In 2014, he was inducted as a Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.
Let's face it, most of the popular podcasts out there are dumb. NBN features scholars (like you!), providing an enriching alternative to students. We partner with presses like Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge to make academic research accessible to all. Please consider sharing the New Books Network with your students. Download this poster here to spread the word.
Please share this interview on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Bluesky. Don't forget to subscribe to our Substack here to receive our weekly newsletter.
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The starting point of this book is the 'civil war' of ideas that broke out during the early 2010s about the purpose and even the desirability of the European Union as a polity, with a number of right-wing populist formations openly advocating for exiting the Union. The sovereign debt crisis triggered a spiral of ideological decommunalization: national leaders seemed to have lost that sense of 'togetherness' and mutual bonds that had been laboriously developed over decades of integration.
Politics and Social Visions: Ideology, Conflict, and Solidarity in the EU (Oxford UP, 2024) explores this politically disruptive process from an ideational perspective, on the assumption that symbols and visions play a crucial role. In processes of polity formation, ideologies offer competing partisan views, but tend to converge along the 'communal' dimension, which defines the nature and boundaries of the emerging polity. This convergence has been a challenge for the EU since its origins, as it has required the construction of a coherent and acceptable image of Europe as a compound polity of nation-states with a divisive past. Maurizio Ferrera offers a reconstruction of how the main ideological currents have struggled - and often failed - to reconfigure their horizontal profiles (i.e. their images of the national within Europe) into a new vertical profile (i.e. an image of the European within the national). The challenge has been especially demanding for European left-wing parties, which have been largely unable to forge a shared and recognizable 'social vision' of the European Union. Only during the COVID pandemic have the seeds of a novel communal consensus emerged that might prove capable of defeating the anti-communal views of Eurosceptic ideologies and free market technocrats.
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Radical nationalism is on the rise in Europe and throughout the world. Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe (Princeton University Press, 2024) provides an in-depth account of the ideas and practices that are driving the varied forms of far-right activism by young people from all walks of life, revealing how these social movements offer the promise of comradery, purpose, and a moral calling to self-sacrifice, and demonstrating how far-right ideas are understood and lived in ways that speak to a variety of experiences.
In this eye-opening book, Agnieszka Pasieka draws on her own sometimes harrowing fieldwork among Italian, Polish, and Hungarian militant youths, painting unforgettable portraits of students, laborers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and activists from well-off middle class backgrounds who have all found a nurturing home in the far right. Providing an in-depth account of radical nationalist communities and networks that are taking root across Europe, she shows how the simultaneous orientation of these groups toward the local and the transnational is a key to their success. With a focus on far-right morality that challenges commonly held ideas about the right, Pasieka describes how far-right movements afford opportunities to the young to be active members of tightly bonded comradeships while sharing in a broader project with global ramifications.
Required reading for anthropologists and anyone concerned about the resurgence of far-right militancy today, Living Right sheds necessary light on the forces that have made the growing appeal of fascist idealism for young people one of the most alarming trends of our time.
Agnieszka Pasieka is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Montreal.
* This episode is part of a special collaboration between the New Books Network and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, a section of the American Anthropological Association. Together, we’re highlighting exciting new work in Europeanist anthropology—featuring authors from across the field, including winners of the William A. Douglass Book Prize and contributors to the European Anthropology in Translation series published by Berghahn Books.
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How do separatist conflicts arise and spread? When does separatism become a cover for a foreign aggression? How do local communities respond when state institutions collapse, and militants take over? The armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine, which started eight years before Russia's full-scale invasion, contains unique evidence to address each of these questions.
In Seize the City, Undo the State: The Inception of Russia's War on Ukraine (Oxford UP, 2015), Serhiy Kudelia offers an authoritative study of the conflict at its initial stage--2013-14--based on a meticulous comparison of mobilization dynamics in over dozen towns of Donbas as well as in two major cities outside of it: Kharkiv and Odesa. Through his extensive travels and numerous interviews with conflict witnesses and participants, Kudelia explains how a small group of Russian agents and local militants succeeded in eliminating state control over the largest and most densely urbanized region of Ukraine but failed to do it elsewhere. Kudelia challenges the conventional accounts of the armed conflict in Donbas, which portray it either as an interstate conflict entirely manufactured by Moscow or as a civil war that broke out without any external influence. Instead, he argues that local actors prepared ideological and organizational basis for the uprising, but the successful spread of separatist control resulted from the covert intervention of Russian agents and widespread collaboration with them of town administrators and community activists. His findings also show that when enough members of local communities organized to resist militant takeovers, the separatist challenges there quickly dissipated.
A fine-grained and highly original on-the-ground analysis of the origins of the wider Russian-Ukrainian war that broke out in 2022, this book offers broader insights into the conditions under which external intervention may trigger the rise of an armed insurgency in a society torn apart by political and ideological disagreements.
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Live from the Frontline Club in London, Ctrl Alt Deceit is back for its second season.
Hosts Nina dos Santos and Owen Bennett-Jones host a fascinating discussion on the myriad threats to democracy, particularly in light of Trump's re-election.
Joined by Gabriel Gatehouse is an award-winning BBC journalist and broadcaster, formerly International Editor of Newsnight and host of the award winning podcast The Coming Storm.
And
Connor Tomlinson is a commentator and writer, contributing to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Courage Media and presenting the Deprogrammed podcast at the New Culture Forum. He previously hosted Tomlinson Talks on LotusEaters.com
In this provocative and timely discussion, big ideas collide as our panel tackles the fault lines shaking the foundations of the democratic world.
As power shifts, authoritarianism rises, and ideological battles intensify, is liberal democracy collapsing under its own contradictions—or is it still the best system we’ve got?
From Silicon Valley’s techno-libertarian ambitions to the push for a return to a more rigidly defined Western identity, our panel will explore the competing visions for the future. Has democracy been hijacked by global institutions that sideline voters? Was the dream of a liberal world order always doomed to fail? And if democracy is in decline—what comes next?
Producer: Pearse Lynch
Exec Producer: Lucinda Knight
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Liberal democracies don’t age gracefully. Established systems of governance like those of the UK and the US which once served as blueprints are today experiencing a profound crisis of legitimacy. In Britain, a landslide general election result was quickly followed by a catastrophic tumble in approval ratings. In the US presidential campaign, meanwhile, voters were told that democracy itself was on the ballot, with both candidates suggesting the election might well be the last one ever.
The consensus underpinning the world’s most powerful democracies is, indeed, waning. The populaces have developed a deep dissatisfaction with their governments’ political procedures, yet no credible alternatives have emerged. In his latest book Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies (Edinburgh UP, 2024), Benjamin Studebaker argues that the kinds of disagreements which historically led to political violence today instead just linger throughout the state and society. Without alternatives, liberal democracy’s legitimation crisis leads to neither reform nor revolution.
Studebaker depicts a legitimacy crisis rife with state capacity problems, in which citizens tell each other many conflicting legitimation stories as they search for ways to live with a dissatisfying political system they cannot replace. As different factions try to ‘save’ democracy in their own ways, they appear authoritarian to one another. Efforts to build legitimacy thus only spark greater inequality, pluralism, and ever-tighter gridlock.
Benjamin Studebaker is a political theorist. He holds a PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge. He has written for Aeon, Sublation, Compact, Current Affairs, The Bellows, and Huffington Post, among others. He hosts Political Theory 101 and co-hosts the film podcast The Lack.
Benjamin is also the author of The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy which we spoke about in 2023.
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Though European administrative laws have gained global significance in the last few decades, research which provides both theoretical analysis and original empirical research has been scarce. The Common Core of European Administrative Laws Retrospective and Prospective (Brill/NIjhoff, 2023) an important account of the evolution of judicial review and administrative procedure legislation, using a factual analysis to shed light on how the different legal systems react to similar problems. Discussing the concept of a ‘common core’, Giacinto della Cananea reveals the commonalities in, and differences between, the foundational assumptions of European administrative adjudication and rule-making.
This is the fourth book in the series, Comparative Law in Global Perspective published by Brill Niehoff, and it is available open access here.
Giacinto della Cananea is a full professor in the department of law at the University of Bocconi. He holds a PhD in European law from the European University Institute (1994) and a law degree from the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ (1989). He is a public lawyer, with research interests in administrative law, European Union law and global administrative law, with specific focus on three areas: the comparative law of administrative procedures, the general principles of law, and budgetary issues. He and Mauro Bussani are co-editors of the series Comparative Law in Global Perspective, published by Brill Niehoff
Jessie Cohen holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. She is an editor at the New Books Network
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Even before its rebirth as a nation in the 1990s, Serbia had acquired a reputation abroad as Russia’s stalwart Slavic ally in the Western Balkans.
Yet, as Vuk Vuksanović argues in Serbia’s Balancing Act: Between Russia and the West (Bloomsbury, 2025), two centuries of history and the 25 years since the fall of Slobodan Milošević tell a more nuanced story.
"When it comes to Russia's interests,” he writes, “there are no sacred cows in Serbia-Russia relations". Governments in Belgrade will be courted and then discarded depending on Moscow’s needs, and they know it. For their part, the Serbs depend on Russian political support in their campaign for a face-saving settlement of the long-running Kosovo dispute but know their economic success hinges on their ties to the EU and the US. Belgrade must "manipulate the superpower rivalry to secure economic resources from both superpowers and its political strategic autonomy".
Vuk Vuksanović is a foreign policy expert at the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy, an associate of the Central and South-East Europe Programme at LSE IDEAS, and a prominent media commentator on strategy in the Balkans.
*His book recommendations were Rival Power: Russia in Southeast Europe by Dimitar Bechev (Yale University Press, 2017) and Why War? by Christopher Coker (Hurst, 2021).
Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts on Substack at 242.news.
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In this episode, RBI director John Torpey speaks with Estonian parliamentarian and defense expert Kalev Stoicescu about the recent tensions between the United States and Ukraine following a contentious meeting between Presidents Trump and Zelensky. Stoicescu critiques Trump's transactional diplomacy, emphasizing the critical role of alliances such as NATO in maintaining international peace and stability. He stresses Europe's need to strengthen its defense capabilities independently, warning that Europe's security depends on sustained and unified support for Ukraine. Stoicescu proposes a structured peace agreement, underscoring the necessity of robust international guarantees for Ukraine’s security. The conversation further explores Europe's shifting perspectives on military engagement in response to ongoing Russian aggression.
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East Central Europe Since 1989 (Routledge, 2025) examines politics, economics, media, religious institutions, transitional justice, gender inequality, and literature, highlighting the overt functions, latent functions, and side effects associated with each sphere. Communism in East Central Europe had cracks from the beginning, as uprisings in East Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956 demonstrated. But with the establishment of the Independent Trade Union Solidarity in Poland in the Summer of 1980, communism went into steady decline and, between 1988 and 1991, crumbled. What followed has been an unsteady transition to various forms of often corrupt pluralism with democracy doing best in the Czech Republic (with the exception of the years 2017-2021) and Slovenia, and worst in Hungary, Albania, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. This volume will be of interest not only to specialists in East Central Europe but also to graduate and undergraduate students, members of the diplomatic corps, and general readers.
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Why has the United Kingdom, historically one of the strongest democracies in the world, become so unstable? What changed? Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail (Cambridge UP, 2023) demonstrates that a major part of the answer lies in the transformation of its state. It shows how Britain championed radical economic liberalisation only to weaken and ultimately break its own governing institutions. The crisis of democracy in rich countries has brought forward many urgent analyses of neoliberal capitalism. This book explores for the first time how the 'governing science' in Leninist and neoliberal revolutions fails for many of the same reasons. These systems may have been utterly opposed in their political values, but Abby Innes argues that when we grasp the kinship in their closed-system forms of economic reasoning and their strategies for government, we may better understand the causes of state failure in what remains an inescapably open-system reality.
Abby Innes is Associate Professor of Political Economy in the European Institute at the LSE.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.
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