In this conversation with Ferenc Laczó and Vera Scepanovic, Quinn Slobodian – author of the new book Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy – discusses the unusual legal spaces and peculiar jurisdictions that have multiplied in recent decades and the libertarian ideas that propelled their rise; dissects the relationship of such zones to existing states and their sovereignty; shows how legal unevenness of contemporary globalization relates to earlier forms of imperial and colonial rule; and reflects on the more normative elements of his critique and on the future of the zones in an age of ‘de-globalization.’

Quinn Slobodian is a history professor at Wellesley College.

Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy has been published by Penguin.

In collaboration with Lucie Hunter