Book Review

Europe’s forgotten frontiers are where the next crisis is already beginning. Hannah Lucinda Smith’s Hinterlands (Profile Books, 2026, 288 pages) begins from a proposition that western European governments have spent decades trying to avoid: Europe’s periphery is central to Europe’s security. The continent’s most dangerous political spaces frequently lie beyond the metropolitan centres where European

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die shows how democracies are dismantled legally, incrementally, and often with public approval, by leaders who come to power through elections and then hollow the system out from within. The authors’ central argument is that since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have not been