Abstract

What makes people lose faith in democratic statecraft? The question seems an urgent one. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, citizens across the world have grown increasingly disillusioned with what was once a cherished ideal. Setting out an original theoretical model that explores the relations between democracy, subjectivity and sociality, and exploring its relevance to countries ranging from Kenya to Peru, The State We’re In is a must-read for all political theorists, scholars of democracy, and readers concerned for the future of the democratic ideal.

Joanna Cook is a Lecturer in Medical Anthropology at University College London. She is the author of Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and Change in Thai Monastic Life (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and co-editor of Detachment: Essays on the Limits of Relational Thinking (Manchester University Press, 2015).

Henrietta L. Moore is the Director of the Institute for Global Prosperity at UCL, where she also holds the Chair in Culture, Philosophy and Design. Her most recent monograph is Still Life: Hopes, Desires and Satisfactions (Polity Press, 2011).

Nicholas J. Long is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of Being Malay in Indonesia: Histories Hopes and Citizenship in the Riau Archipelago (NUS, NIAS, and University of Hawai’i Press, 2013) and co-editor with Henrietta L. Moore of Sociality: New Directions (Berghahn, 2012) and The Social Life of Achievement (Berghahn, 2013).

“[This volume] successfully demonstrates that, globally, democracy has “systematically maintained inequality”, and that attention must be served to the current inadequacies in the execution of this theoretical concept. This book is appropriate for students and academics in the fields of political science, anthropology, and sociology.” · International Social Science Review

“This book is a strong contribution targeted at a much needed re-consideration of democracy as a concept and a practice in a world of porous boundaries, which exposes people in societies to the often hegemonic imposition of extra-territorial actors.” · Harald Wydra, Cambridge University