Adventures in Open Democracy

Dramatic, frank and full of insights: a memoir that shows us how we can, and must, re-think the world, from the initiator of the pioneering global website openDemocracy.

From Anthony Barnett, the creator and former editor-in-chief of openDemocracy, comes this startling political memoir about the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

Beginning with 9/11 and running up to the COVID-19 pandemic, Adventures in Open Democracy witnesses the major political events of this period, from globalisation and the war on terror to the implosion of the British state and Trump. 

Like a detective story of a search for who throttled democracy, as well as the usual villains it recounts how opponents of the way the world is being screwed fail time and again to get their act together, offering new and effective ways to envision and enact a better society by allying science, human rights and democratic participation. 

Part memoir, part political theory, and part history of the twenty-first century, Adventures in Open Democracy shows us how we can, and must, rethink the world.

Anthony Barnett is a veteran thinker and activist. He’s combined three careers: as a journalist and editor, culminating in co-founding openDemocracy in 2001; as an organiser for rights, liberty and democracy across Britain, as the first coordinator of Charter 88 in 1988 and Co-Director of the 2009 Convention on Modern Liberty; and as an author, writing books since the 1980s on Cambodia, the Falklands war, Russia under Gorbachev, the UK and, most recently, The Lure of Greatness.

Mary Fitzgerald is the editor-in-chief of openDemocracy.