Introduction. Liberalism, Anti-Liberalism and Beyond

One of the most important lessons from experience we learned in the past decades is the acceleration of changes in international politics, internal regimes as well as in academic research. Climate changes, Covid pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine have completely overturned previous narratives of globalization and the world (dis)order. In the second half of 20th century, studies on the processes of democratization mainly focused on the transition from autocratic to democratic regimes, but contemporary research on democratization has dramatically changed in the past two decades. This book offers a contribution to critically rethink not only the illiberal wind blowing on contenporary democracies, but also the illiberal and undemocratic side of those liberal theories which, equating democratic procedure with market economy, prefer to defend inequality at the expenses of rights. Complexity is what we can learn from experience, an experience that, as we have seen in empirical research, risks too often to be flattened on the horizon of the present time, and at the same time cannot be captured by normative theories which are often blind to the facts.