In the essay that launches this Substack, Andries du Toit and Jelena Vidojević take their cue from Partha Chatterjee’s The Politics of the Governed. They argue that today’s debate on democracy and the crisis of institutions is too centred on the North Atlantic, and that post-colonial and post-socialist societies, the ‘New South’, hold some of the most instructive experiences of what can go wrong and what must be built. They see populist, technocratic and ‘decolonial’ critiques of the state as utopian escapes from the work of government, and set out the themes the publication will follow.

Read the full essay on Substack