How to Lose a Country

“Essential.” —Margaret Atwood

An urgent call to action and a field guide to spotting the insidious patterns and mechanisms of the populist wave sweeping the globe from an award-winning journalist and acclaimed political thinker.

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.