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Beginning with two vivid examples that illustrate the Handbook’s core arguments—that politics is performative, performance is political, and that both of these matter to understanding our worlds—the introduction provides a current, contextual account of the shared syntax of politics and performance. It defines key terms, such as politics, performance, theatricality, and performativity, that inform the Handbook contributions. Through accessible and provocative engagements with new ways of thinking about politics and performance in both disciplinary and interdisciplinary modes, the introduction shows that these categories are interwoven and entangled in complex and consequential ways. It outlines the states of the art in theater and performance studies and politics, respectively, capturing key points of interconnection between these discourses in order to build on, extend, and reshape interdisciplinary conversations. Finally, it reflects on key challenges and opportunities that attend bringing the two broad fields together for mutual enrichment and building a new, hybrid field of study. Underlining the co-constitutive nature of performance and politics, the introduction suggests that such a framework is critical to promoting an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the complex political world of the twenty-first century.

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In his lecture titled 'The University without Condition' (2002), Jacques Derrida puts forward the claim that the public university, and within it, the Humanities, must remain unconditional in their autonomy, free of any national, ideological or economic affiliations, able to profess, set free any thought. Rather than being understood as safeguarding a privilege or entitlement, this unconditionality is formulated as a pledge of responsibility, a status that is affirmed and maintained by a profession of faith. Derrida evokes in this essay three notions that are of central importance to the proposed book: the critical role of the Humanities in the organization of what he terms mondialisation or worldwide-ization; the performative, embodied nature of knowledge production, and the order of the 'as if', the training of the imagination to not only make sense of the present, but also to generate the ferment, from which knowledge that does not yet exist may emerge. This marks a characteristically theatrical perspective in as far as the objects of performance studies are critically tied to the lens through which these objects are constituted as performance. The mode of 'as if' shapes the inquiry in two directions: into new ways of thinking and knowing, and new things to think and know about. In the spirit of Derrida's plea of putting to work the unconditional sovereignty of the Humanities, the proposed volume focuses on the specific contribution of International Performance Research to knowledge production in the field. Concretely, this is addressed through essays reflecting on the experiences of a seven-year long collaborative pedagogical effort in the form of a joint international inter-university collaboration funded by the European Commission, namely, the Erasmus Mundus postgraduate programme in