Foreword

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a utopia is not a dystopia, but that the pursuit of the first can lead to the realisation of the other. While a utopia is little more than an everywhere-but-nowhere dream, dystopias have been all too manifest in our history on this planet. As one old year elides into a new, the skies over 2024 risk growing even darker than during those recent months when geopolitics witnessed the growing triangulation of three global crises—Ukraine, Israel–Gaza, and Taiwan—exploited as proxies and direct theatres of engagement between competing ideologies. Increasingly, democrats claim their democracies to be under attack from a concerted authoritarianism pursued from both inside and outside their countries. Yet their pleas for support, argued in the language of an existential struggle, have frequently fallen on deaf ears.