After Nations explores 'a generalised state of crisis' that afflicts the nation-state worldwide. In an effort to understand this crisis, Rana Dasgupta charts the development of the global nation state project from the Enlightenment to the present, its ongoing value unquestioned—to our detriment.

In its modern, fully-fledged form, the nation-state system is a very recent innovation, and one that departs from the normal history of the world—which is a story of empires. What we are seeing is the rapid disintegration of a system on which we had come to depend too completely.

After Nations offers a startling account of this exhilarating and terrible system. Its thesis will be disturbing to many, but we must quickly come to terms with it if we are to address the very grave challenges that now face us as a species: at their core, the political, economic, military and even environmental problems we face today are not the fault of inadequate policies or poor leadership. They are the consequence, rather, of our outdated political infrastructure—the nation-state system—which is not capable, even in theory, of protecting populations from twenty-first-century conditions. Five crises (“God”, “Money”, “Law”, “War” and “Nature”) will combine inexorably to diminish the ability of this system to deliver minimally acceptable outcomes.

The author's aim, through a portrait of this time of crisis, is radically to re-imagine what the nation-state system can and should provide. His interrogation of what we might now ask of our neighbourhoods and cities, will here be writ large: After Nations asks what we want for our global future.