Deese & Holm Co-Edit New Book on Future of Transnational Democracy

Sam Deese and Michael Holm, Senior Lecturers in the College of General Studies and former Faculty Research Fellows at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, are the co-editors of a new book exploring how liberal democracy can better adapt to the challenges of our time by evolving beyond the paradigm of the nation-state.

The book, published by Routledge, is titled How Democracy Survives: Global Challenges in the Anthropocene, and is available through online open access. The interdisciplinary group of authors argue that global institutions must become more resilient and transparent in order to tackle emerging crises like climate change, mass migration, and resurgent authoritarianism.

A Q&A with the the editors was recently published in BU Today.

The book, which is dedicated to the late Prof. Anthony Janetos, Director of the Pardee Center until his death in 2019, builds on a three-day international conference convened by Deese and Holm, and hosted by the Pardee Center, in October 2020. The conference featured leading scholars and activists from around the world exploring how democratic values and institutions can evolve and adapt to the growing challenges that are now destabilizing democratic nation-states, such as climate change, resurgent nationalism, ethnic and religious conflict, human rights abuses, and deepening levels of economic inequality. Video recordings of every session of the conference are available here.