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The present moment is marked by one central political idea: the nation-state. It installs itself through a system of nation-states and a corresponding global framework that originated from a new world order after the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Since then, it has become so deeply embedded in our thinking that alternative forms of political organization have become practically unimaginable—even though serious alternatives, such as transnational anti-colonial movements and communist internationalism, existed at the time. By laying bare the framing conditions of the nation-state, their exclusionary mechanisms and the structural violence anchored within them, Now is the Time of Monsters picks up a phrase by Antonio Gramsci to open up a space for the decisive question: How can one think beyond the limits of the nation-state system? Today, neo-nationalist threats and the failures of a nation-state system facing global migration make it clear that we need to reclaim such a zone of political transformation and radical imagination. Curated by Rana Dasgupta, Nanna Heidenreich and Katrin Klingan, this three-day discussion will draw on international voices from art, literature, theory, and science. How did the nation-state system replace all other ideas of political organization, and what was lost in this process? How do inequality and global power asymmetries get transferred into international systems of state and law? How can migration allow for a radical reconsideration of existing structures? How should one understand the role of the state in the relational network of globalization and financial capitalism, and how does this influence our idea of the actual character of the state?