State of Nature

State of Nature is a blog dedicated to interviews with leading thinkers in social and political theory. Through these interviews, it challenges dominant ideas that propagate economic inequality, social injustice and environmental decline. It also explores the potentials of alternative political formations and movements.

The site is run by Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes, the former editors of State of Nature journal, who have been conducting and publishing interviews since 2005. They are the authors of Weapon of the Strong: Conversations on US State Terrorism (Pluto, 2013), which includes interviews with Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, Richard A. Falk, Judith Butler, Ted Honderich, to name a few.

Cihan Aksan

I became a refugee at the age of five when I left Turkey with my family following the coup d’état in 1980. Since then, I have lived in France, England and Cyprus, but still feel stateless at heart.

I have an MA in Continental Philosophy from the University of Warwick. Through my postgraduate work, I developed an interest in archival research and oral history. In recent years I have travelled widely, collecting documents and conducting interviews on state crime, terrorism and political violence.

I am currently working on a book on revolutionary violence in Turkey in the 1970s.

Jon Bailes

I was born and grew up in England, but have since left and come back at various points.

In 2017 I completed a PhD in European Studies at University College London. I am now a freelance writer and researcher. My areas of specialisation are social theory and cultural criticism, with a healthy dose of Marxism and psychoanalysis. I am especially interested in theories of ideology and neoliberalism, as well as the politics of resistance in modern consumer societies.

I’m the author of Consciousness and the Neoliberal Subject: A Theory of Ideology via Marcuse, Jameson and Zizek (Routledge, 2020), and Ideology and the Virtual City: Videogames, Power Fantasies and Neoliberalism (Zero, 2019).