1 Afterword: They say the Centre cannot hold: Austerity, crisis, and the rise of anti-politics Ana Drago 1 Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra/CES-Lisboa, Portugal Abstract This afterword engages in a dialogue with the theoretical prospects opened by this Special Issue. First, it discusses how these articles show that conceptualizations such as anti-politics that aimed to organize a reading on the growing mistrust and disenchantment towards the institutional apparatus of contemporary democracies must not be equated to political voidance – I argue that these articles rather point to a profound legitimization crisis of the political-spatial consensus of neoliberal governance that, as this SI sustains, must be analyzed through the social and geographical configurations of the austerity cycle of the last decade and the situated conflict confronting it. In that sense, anti-politics redefines traditional conflict in liberal democracies, although through contradictory forms: commoning; radical protest; or ethno-nationalist extremism. And secondly, I discuss a most relevant argument that runs through the SI: analysis of anti-politics must engage with everyday spatial practices and geographical imaginaries that point where conflict arises, but also how it is being recrafted. I discuss this proposal of a spatial turn on anti-politics by interpreting it as emerging from the collapse of the aspirational narrative of neoliberalism– its promise of a global post-class conflict order succumbed as post-2008 austerity punitively targeted specific geographies, spaces and social classes, leading to a cycle of politicization organized through spatial or geographical dichotomies: North/South Europe; urban versus periurban/rural; streets versus institutions. After decades of neoliberal depoliticization of class conflict, attempts to relaunch anti-systemic political conflict seem to rely (again) on everyday spatial practices and geographical categories. Keywords Antipolitics, austerity, politicization, crisis Heavy concepts are too lightly thrown Concepts such as anti-politics, post-democracy and post-political have become central in critical theory during the last decade drawing our attention to a dual process. First, a widely perceived disenchantment and increased mistrust of large popular segments with the political and institutional form of contemporary liberal democracies (Fawcett et al., 2017; Hay, 2007; Mair, 2013); and, secondly, a dismissal of transformative alternatives from the realm of political possibilities that seems to result from a persistent entanglement of democratic regimes with a neoliberal agenda (Crouch, 2004; Swyngedouw, 2011). Although relying in different dimensions, these processes tended to be discussed through the lenses of concepts such as anti- politics or post-democracy as a broad process of depoliticization within contemporary democracies – on the 1 Corresponding Author: Ana Drago, Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra/CES-Lisboa, Picoas Plaza – Rua Viriato, 13 Lj 117/118, 1050-227 Lisboa, Portugal. Email: drago.ana@gmail.com How to cite this article: Drago, A. (2020). Afterword: They say the Centre cannot hold: Austerity, crisis, and the rise of anti-politics. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654420981388