Anthoula Malkopoulou is Docent and Lecturer at the Department of Government, Uppsala University. She has been a Marie Curie Fellow at the same department and a visiting fellow at the Faculty of Arts Program ‘Engaging Vulnerability’. She has also held research positions at Princeton University, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study and the University of Jyväskylä. Malkopoulou is the author of The History of Compulsory Voting in Europe (Routledge, 2015) and co-editor of Equality and Representation (Routledge: 2018). Alexander Kirshner is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Duke University. He was Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, 2015–16. His is the author of A Theory of Militant Democracy (Yale University Press 2014) and co-editor of Political Representation (Cambridge University Press 2010).

• Introduction: Militant democracy and its critics, Anthoula Malkopoulou; 1. Individual militant democracy, Jan Werner Müller; 2. Democratic equality and militant democracy, Peter Stone; 3. Militant democracy defended, Alexander Kirshner; 4. Militant democracy versus populism, Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser; 5. Three models of democratic self-defence, Anthoula Malkopoulou and Ludvig Norman; 6. Resolving the paradox of tolerance, Stefan Rummens; 7. Militant democracy and the study of political tolerance, Giovanni Capoccia; 8. The EU defending liberal democracy in a liberal democratic way, Tore Vincents Olsen; 9. Militant democracy and the detection problem, Bastiaan Rijpkema; 10. Militant constitutionalism, András Sajó; 11. Militant democracy as an inherent quality of a democratic state, Svetlana Tyulkina; References.

This is a timely book, as fascist and anti-democratic parties are on the rise in many democratic countries. The authors of the essays in this excellent collection devise some powerful arguments that shake our beliefs and challenge our convictions regarding the potential for a constructive politics springing from participation.