Revisiting State Personhood and World Politics: Identity, Personality and the IR Subject. By Bianca Naude. New York: Routledge, 2022. 200p. $128.00 cloth.

just the beginning of a research agenda that attempts to understand the strategies of populists in power (pp. 281– 84): Beyond case studies, there is a need for comparative approaches that transfer the individual cases into general explanations. Also, the paradoxes of populist government with a view to its understanding of bureaucracy—such as mixed forms of populism and technocracy—are yet to be explained. Among others, these aspects define possible avenues that should motivate many empirical works to come on the relationship between populism, democratic backsliding, and bureaucracy.