(2013) and a full-scale history of democracy, The Life and Death of Democracy (2009). Forthcoming in Arabic, it has been published in Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese (European and Brazilian) and Korean; it was short-listed for the Prime Minister's Literary Award (2012) while the Japanese translation (2014) was ranked in the top three non-fiction books of that year published in Japan. His most recent books are When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter (2017); Power and Humility: the Future of Monitory Democracy (2018); The New Despotism (2020) and The Shortest History of Democracy (2022). He was recently nominated for the 2021 Balzan Prize and the Holberg Prize for outstanding global contributions to the human sciences. In 2021 Keane published the book To Kill a Democracy: India's Passage to Despotism co-authored by Debasish Roy Chowdhury. Monitory democracy In The Life and Death of Democracy, John Keane coined the term monitory democracy for a phase of democracy characterised by instruments of public monitoring and scrutinising of government power. It began following the events of the Second World War. Monitory institutions refer to 'watch-dog' and 'guide-dog' bodies which subject governments to a public mechanism of checks and balances. Under the theory of monitory democracy these institutions extend the notions of representative democracy to "enfranchise many more citizens voices" in the political process. The ability to publicly monitor government power enabled through these institutions has the effect of changing the political and geographic dynamics of existing representative democracies. According to Keane, monitory democracy adds to the democratic nature of political representation as it changes the notion from "'one person, one vote, one representative'" and instead embodies the principles of "one person, many interests, many voices, multiple votes, multiple representatives". Criticism Keane's theory of monitory democracy outlined in 'The Life and Death of Democracy' (2009) has been critiqued by Christopher Hobson in a review of the book. Hobson states that it is unclear "whether all the changes Keane identifies collectively constitute something coherent enough to be considered a new kind of democracy". However, he states that monitory democracy provides a "valuable opening to begin discussing these issues, as part of considering the current shape and likely future of democracy". In another review of 'The Life and Death of Democracy' (2009), the Guardian referred to monitory democracy as an "ugly phrase". They critique the theory as being "at best a partial description of what democracy is and what it needs