Asma Mhalla

Asma Mhalla is a political theorist and essayist. She works on power in the twenty-first century—on the political form it produces, and on what that form demands of democracies.

With BigState, she writes a history of power at the height of its century. She developed much of this work in New York, drawing on the two traditions she claims as equally her own: the continental and the American. Reading from Hobbes, Arendt and Aron, she names the end of the modern state—and the form that takes its place.

Her essays have made her one of the sharpest European voices on power, sovereignty and the fate of democratic form. She writes and speaks for readers and audiences who want the present described precisely—not reassured.