In After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order, award-winning writer Rana Dasgupta turns his gaze to a world in political free fall. The system of nation-states that has governed human life for centuries, he argues, is no longer merely strained—it is breaking apart.

As American power recedes, Western societies grow anxious and inward-looking, beset by debt, inequality, and resurgent xenophobia. Liberal democracy, once the lodestar of global politics, finds its moral authority eroding. In its place rise assertive autocracies—from China and Russia to the Gulf states—offering stability without freedom. For those whom nation-states have failed altogether, the future lies only in perilous migration, across borders that promise safety yet deliver hostility.

Dasgupta situates this moment within a vast historical sweep. He traces the origins of the nation-state through the collapse of ancient empires, the global spread of European money, law, and capitalism, and the violent rearrangements of colonial modernity. He then brings the story into the present, where multinational tech corporations rival states in power, sovereignty fractures, and China’s restored civilizational confidence reshapes the balance of the world.

What emerges is not only a diagnosis of political collapse, but a challenge. If the nation-state no longer protects human dignity, what might replace it? Dasgupta calls for radically new ideas of citizenship, law, and economic life—ideas capable of responding to a deeply interconnected, ecologically fragile planet.

Urgent, elegant, and unsettling, After Nations asks why we are losing our grip on the political world—and whether we can still imagine a way to remake it.

Published by Allen Lane (Penguin India) in January 2026, After Nations spans 496 pages.

Rana Dasgupta is the author of two novels and a landmark non-fiction portrait of twenty-first-century Delhi. A former visiting fellow at Princeton University and visiting lecturer at Brown University, he has written for The Guardian, New Statesman, and BBC.com. His work has been recognized with the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Windham Campbell Prize, and the *Ryszard Kapuściński Award. He lives in Delhi.