How to Lose a Country
How to Lose a Country is a warning to the world that populism and nationalism don't march fully-formed into government; they creep.
Award-winning author and journalist Ece Temelkuran identifies the early warning signs of this phenomenon, sprouting up across the world from Eastern Europe to South America, in order to arm the reader with the tools to recognise it and take action.
Weaving memoir, history and clear-sighted argument, Temelkuran proposes alternative answers to the pressing - and too often paralysing - political questions of our time. How to Lose a Country is an exploration of the insidious ideas at the core of these movements and an urgent, eloquent defence of democracy.
This 2024 edition includes a new foreword by the author.
Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish writer, political thinker and public speaker whose work has been published worldwide. Her novels, Women Who Blow on Knots and The Time of Mute Swans, have been published in several languages and adapted to the stage. Temelkuran's two political essays, Deep Mountain: Across the Armenian-Turkish Divide and Turkey: The Insane and Melancholy, explore the connection between the personal and political. After she left her country in 2016, Temelkuran began writing in English. Her first book in this language, How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Fascism, received international praise. Her second, Together: A Manifesto Against the Heartless World offers 'a way out from the political and moral insanity' that is ushered by the global rise of fascism. Ece Temelkuran has lived in Beirut, Tunis, Oxford, Paris and Zagreb. She is currently based in Berlin and is on the advisory board of Progressive International and DemocracyNext.
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