Echoes of the ancient Greek terms demos and kratos have been resounding among democratic theorists in recent years . The return to these ancient words connotes both a growing dissatisfaction with our democratic present and an unflagging hope that democracy and democratic theory still have much to offer. In search of notions that stretch beyond modern European and American (in the broadest sense) experiments with liberal democracy and even post-Cold War democratization, employment of these expressions has shed new light on and profoundly reframed pressing political questions. These include the nature of popular participation, scales of citizenship and political belonging, as well as the place of the European and Atlantic experience in our democratic future. While historians of ancient Greece have convincingly argued that a better understanding of both demos and kratos may illuminate democracy in the past and present , contemporary interest in demos, demoi, and kratos have implicitly pushed democratic theorizing to investigate novel forms of popular rule. By explicitly placing these terms at the center of its investigation, this special issue seeks to offer an early perspective on some principal directions of democratic theory beyond the post-Cold War imaginary.