Shirin M. Rai is Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, UK.

Janelle Reinelt is Professor in the Department of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick, UK.

This volume brings together important work at the interstection of politics and performance studies. While the languages of theatre and performance have long been deployed by other disciplines such as psychology (Freud's primal 'scene'), sociology (Goffman's 'backstage'), and politics (politicians 'play' to the public, stage debates), this metaphorical attribution has seldom been taken seriously and pursued systematically to discover the actual nature of the relationship between performance as a set of behavioural practices and the forms and the transactions of these other realms.

1. Introduction 2. Performing Democracy: Roles, Stages, Scripts 3. Performance at the Crossroads of Citizenship 4. 'I am an American': Protesting Advertised 'Americanness' 5. Characterisation and Systemic Gender Violence: the Example of Laundry and the Figure of the Mother in Irish Culture 6. Theatricality vs. Bare Life: Performance as a Vernacular of Resistance 7. Becoming a Democratic Audience 8. Street Arts, Radical Democratic Citizenship, and a Grammar of Storytelling 9. Tahir Square, EC4M: the Occupy Movement and the Dramaturgy of Public Order 10. Temporality, Politics and Performance: Missing, Displaced, Disappeared 11. Performance and Politics: Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament 12. Bringing the Audience Back In: Kenya's Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission and the Efficacy of Public Hearings 13. Betrayal and What Follows: Rituals of Repentance, Healing and Anger in Response to the Church Sexual Abuse Scandal in Ireland 14. Closet Grammars of Intentional Deception: The Logic of Lies, State Security, and Homosexual Panic in Cold War Politics 15. Afterword