 The end of Cold War ideological divisions led some to have great expectations in the 1990s of enhanced global cooperation to rid humanity of the threat of global nuclear annihilation and to increase global commerce and spread prosperity, the material bases for building a truly global moral and political community of humankind. The end of the twentieth century was marked by an unbridled faith and optimism in the inexorable twin triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy as the end of history (Fukuyama 1992). With the collapse of Soviet-style state socialism, the world witnessed neoliberal transformations on a global scale, driven by the “ideology of free markets, trade liberalization, deregulation, and the small state” (Lüthi 2020: 596). Quinn Slobodian has described the paradoxical ascendancy of “globalist” neoliberalism, entailing the development of a world state and regulatory laws that privileged the “encasement” of markets from domestic democratic regulation and accountability, leading to an institutional project to redesign “states, laws, and other institutions to protect the market” (2018: 4 and 6). As neoliberalism spread on a global scale, so did the deterioration of conditions for robust democratic politics, precipitating serious backsliding of democratization.