This chapter examines the mounting unease regarding the project of public education. By the mid-1960s, technocratic, Afrocentric, and Marxist critiques articulated a growing sense of worldwide educational crisis. These critiques presented differently in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, but in both countries popular frustrations were palpable. In response, both states attempted to reform public schooling: by introducing manual training in Ghanaian middle schools and television sets in Ivorian primary schools. Both reforms failed spectacularly, ultimately confirming the state’s abdication of its promise that education would lead to a better future for all. Public education systems crumbled along with public faith in the state, creating space for the privatization of education. The erosion of the anticolonial development ideology helped pave the way for neoliberalism to take root.

The Introduction defines the paradigm of anticolonial development, acquaints the reader with the scope of the book, and situates its main contributions in the literatures on education, decolonization, race, and development in Africa. It argues that a Black Atlantic perspective changes how we see decolonization and development in West Africa, by revealing schooling’s essential role in aspirations of African emancipation. The second part of the Introduction details the book’s unique methodological approach of comparison in global perspective. Such comparison allows for dialogue across two different colonial and postcolonial histories (Ghana/British empire and Côte d’Ivoire/French empire), in the process offering a regional history of the global spread of public schooling during the twentieth century.

The political failure of community is the background against which a range of post-Marxist European philosophers have sought to rethink what community could be. This chapter focuses in particular on Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, and Giorgio Agamben, who have made substantial contributions to what we might call a new philosophy of community. Nancy, Esposito, and Agamben ask how community, not least because of its promise of solidarity, can continue to serve a political purpose, despite the violence of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, which appears to be the logical endpoint of any conception of community. But Nancy, Esposito, and Agamben also respond to the failure of community’s presumed revolutionary potential to become a site of resistance against both capitalism and the modern state. Should community be conceived in the plural (Nancy), as a gift economy (Esposito), or as a coming community of stateless refugees (Agamben)? Such attempts to save community come at a considerable cost, both philosophically and politically, since they make community irrelevant for a normative theory of democracy.

Appeals to “community” and to “the common” have become increasingly frequent in political thought. In this chapter, I focus on some of the reasons for the appearance of such appeals in the landscape of contemporary political thought. This chapter also highlights some of the uncanny intellectual links across the entire political spectrum, from European post-Marxist and American communitarian philosophers to the public intellectuals of the neofascist “New Right.” These links emerge and play out in a broader intellectual field that is shaped both by the political economy of Western Europe and North America after 1945 and by the failure to address the obvious shortcomings and negative effects of this political economy. Against this broader background, current appeals to community in political thought can be seen as a response to the lived experience of neoliberal capitalism, which has led to a legitimation crisis of liberal constitutional democracy. But I am also going to suggest that appeals to community invariably tend to drift into an antidemocratic direction.

A renewed focus on “the common” in contemporary political theory, as it gained momentum in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, is a direct response to the failure of community in political theory. I argue that Hardt and Negri develop what we can understand as an “insurgent democracy of the common.” On the one hand, such an insurgent democracy of the common seeks to preserve the revolutionary potential of democracy. On the other hand, this democracy of the common also tends toward political romanticism: the legitimacy of “the common” depends on a political subjectivity tied to a paradoxical nostalgia for failed revolutions. As such, the democracy of the common entails an escape from the realities of the political world that undercuts its emancipatory potential. This becomes particularly obvious in the hope that Hardt and Negri place in social movements of resistance, but also in their critique of neoliberal capitalism.

The Epilogue traces the legacy of urban collectivization in the rest of the Mao era and its reinterpretation after 1978.

Chapter 8 tests the cross-regional validity of the refined theory by tracing processes in Ecuador and Peru and comparing them with patterns in Slovakia and Poland. After a brief discussion of antecedent conditions and crises before critical periods of major market reform, I assess neoliberal junctures in Ecuador and Peru with special attention to the hypothetically crucial variations in terms of political agency. The next two sections analyze divergent path dependencies that stemmed from nuanced juncture contingencies, ultimately showing that illiberal tendencies in the Andes were shaped in ways consistent with theoretical expectations. Finally, I compare the South American and Eastern European cases by focusing on the mechanisms of production and reproduction linking neoliberal junctures and subsequent illiberal tendencies. Contrary to prior research, I conclude that Andean illiberalism’s capacities to be politically dominant and to be contestatory vis-à-vis liberal democracy are, as in Eastern Europe, best understood as distinct adaptations to societal reactions resulting from prior historical contingencies. By offering a theoretically grounded comparative account, this chapter invites new ways of thinking about developments after neoliberal reforms in Latin America.

The concluding chapter summarizes the book’s arguments and findings and discusses their implications. Whether we seek to understand the electoral viability of illiberal forces or their behavior in power, the legacies of critical junctures of market reform remain pivotal. Crucially, as institutional developments entail the interplay between historical legacy and human agency, illiberal outcomes unfold in the probabilistic shadow of prior neoliberal deepening. The chapter closes with a discussion of (1) the study’s contributions to research in the tradition of Karl Polanyi; (2) the social bases and neoliberal adaptations of illiberal incumbents; (3) the legacies of Eastern Europe’s transition to democracy and the market; and (4) the crisis of liberalism and the Left. Although intense market reforms have failed to produce democratic stability and illiberals have kept finding ways to opportunistically exploit neoliberalism to their own advantage, the book ends on an optimistic note. Far from inevitable, the illiberal challenge can be countered – and democracies strengthened – if forward-thinking political agents learn from past experiences and progressive examples, build parties around new ethical principles, and focus on delivering economic well-being to broad social coalitions.

Chapter 7 further develops the study’s critical juncture framework and justifies its extension to cases in South America. Drawing lessons from Eastern Europe, I begin by distinguishing between varying illiberal tendencies in Slovakia and Poland, based on which I offer new theoretical insights. As I elaborate sequences linking (1) illiberals’ divergent ability to be politically dominant back to whether neoliberal reform agents were social democrats or polarizing populists, and (2) contestatory versus moderate tendencies back to whether or not anti-neoliberal protest was institutionalized during critical periods of early market reform, I elaborate the argument about the durable effects of contingency associated with postcommunist junctures. I then make the case for applying the refined framework to South American cases. Here, I note some blind spots in scholarship on Latin American populism and highlight important commonalities between dynamics in Eastern Europe and the Andes. Next, I review the advantages of analyzing developments in Ecuador and Peru from a comparative perspective that is sensitive to both cross- regional and intra-regional patterns of similarity and difference. Ending with a discussion of the insufficiency of standard explanations of illiberal trends, the chapter sets the stage for the paired comparison that follows.

Chapter 1 introduces the study’s core puzzle and overall logic of inquiry. It discusses main themes, locates arguments relative to relevant scholarship, and establishes the analytical framework. Early in the chapter, the puzzle of varying illiberal electoral outcomes is presented and contextualized. Captured by two distinct yet related indicators – illiberal voting and post-neoliberal populist magnitude – illiberal electoral outcomes not only varied persistently across countries but also signaled the high salience of economic issues in postcommunist Europe. The next section establishes the rationale for explaining outcomes by drawing insights from Latin America – another semi-peripheral space that experienced consequential neoliberal junctures. Having argued, based on key economic and political parallels between the two regions, that a critical juncture approach is appropriate also for making sense of developments in Eastern Europe, I spell out the work’s central propositions and highlight theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions. The final sections discuss matters of research design and evidence – namely, the mixed method approach, case studies, and quantitative and qualitative data, including 100 interviews – as well as the book’s organization.

Chapter 6 explores developments in Czechia and Romania and once again assesses the validity of the book’s central argument – now by using a more qualitative approach to comparison. I begin by tracing processes in these two countries, where, following aligning junctures, mainstream leftist parties critiqued and moderated neoliberalism, thus remaining electorally strong and effectively constraining the electoral prospects of illiberals during most of the 2000–20 period. I then engage in comparisons with Slovakia and Poland to reassess the study’s core proposition vis-à-vis rival explanations of voting for illiberal parties. As the evidence supports the postcommunist juncture theory, I emphasize, on the one hand, the linkages between critical periods of early market reform and parties’ subsequent programmatic positions and, on the other hand, the relevance specifically of economic statism in terms of illiberalism’s chances of electoral success. Moving beyond the four cases, the final section offers a panoramic view of developments in Eastern Europe, which affirms the theorized linkages between postcommunist junctures, the evolution of the Left, and illiberalism’s electoral viability. With its focus on divergent legacies and comparative analysis, the chapter offers much evidence in support of the book’s main argument.

Chapter 5 examines path dependencies in Slovakia and Poland, where postcommunist junctures produced powerful illiberal reactions in the 2000–20 period. It does so by unpacking political and societal dynamics and emphasizing how illiberal forces reaped considerable electoral benefits. In both countries, mainstream leftist parties embraced the neoliberal agenda and (eventually) failed, with many of their former supporters becoming available for subsequent populist mobilization. As the Left’s failures occurred amid the rising salience of economic concerns, adaptive illiberals gained at the ballot box. While it stresses key similarities in terms of the core mechanism linking postcommunist junctures and illiberal electoral outcomes, the chapter also identifies important distinctions between reactive sequences in Slovakia and Poland. Indeed, bait-and-switch tactics may have defined junctures in both cases, but political configurations featured more nuanced distinctions specifically in terms of agency, which, in turn, conditioned important differences between illiberals in the two countries. Overall, whereas the patterns of similarity substantiate the book’s core theory linking early market reform legacies and illiberal electoral outcomes, the differences suggest that the critical juncture framework can be further refined – to which I return in the book's final part.

Chapter 2 develops the book’s core theoretical framework. After discussing some relevant literature that focuses on the significance of historical legacy and political agency in Eastern Europe, I turn to political economy, sociological, and anthropological perspectives influenced by the work of Karl Polanyi and then elaborate on the Latin American parallel. Next, I define postcommunist junctures and locate fifteen Eastern European countries in three categories, depending on who led the charge for and against market reforms during relevant periods. The chapter then develops the book’s central argument, according to which distinct political configurations during junctures led to persistently varying odds of illiberal electoral viability via a two-step process. Concretely, postcommunist junctures shaped divergent path dependencies on the Left, which, in turn, conditioned subsequent antiestablishment parties’ programmatic choices and probabilities of electoral success. As in Latin America, illiberal outcomes in Eastern Europe were products of contingencies during neoliberal junctures. Unlike Latin America's key market reform periods, postcommunist junctures triggered a more specific mechanism, in which the status of the Left is a crucial intervening variable.

Chapter 4 examines the changes from 1992 to 2009, a period that was characterised by the end of the Cold War. The focus is on examining how the EU became a politicised actor with increasing public visibility. The study analyses the most important developments of this period chronologically, including the introduction of the euro, the Schengen Agreement, several rounds of enlargement, and the Common Foreign and Security Policy. Both the institutional reforms and their social and political effects are considered. While considerable successes were achieved in economic integration and geographical enlargement, fundamental problems remained unresolved: incomplete institutional structures (especially in monetary and political union), growing social inequalities due to the neoliberal agenda, and a growing democratic deficit. These developments laid the foundations for the crises that were to shake the EU in the following decades. The period exemplifies the tensions between economic integration and political legitimacy, between enlargement and deepening, and between national sovereignty and supranational governance that still characterise European integration today.

This chapter explores the constructed nature of environmental understanding through colonial, neocolonial, postcolonial and ecofeminist lenses. It begins by dissecting the binary opposition of nature versus civilisation as shaped by colonial narratives, revealing how this dichotomy justified the exploitation of Indigenous populations, women and natural resources. The analysis extends to neocolonial practices – such as land-grabbing and neoliberal economic expansion – and their environmental repercussions. Through literary and filmic examples like Robinson Crusoe and Cast Away, the chapter highlights how survival narratives reinforce human supremacy and commodify nature. It then critically examines the idealisation of Indigenous peoples as ‘noble savages’ and the romanticised notion of nature as a Garden of Eden. Moving towards constructive alternatives, it foregrounds postcolonial and ecofeminist approaches that challenge anthropocentrism, promote interconnectedness and embrace Indigenous cosmologies centred around earth goddesses like Pachamama and Papatūānuku. The chapter concludes with a case study on Brendon Grimshaw’s ecological restoration of Moyenne Island, advocating for grassroots conservation and ethical environmental care. Ultimately, the chapter urges readers to reassess dominant narratives and join collective efforts to protect and regenerate nature.