In the age of coalescing crises of democratic fragility, antagonistic polarisation and the rise of the social disimagination state, the role of critical policy studies is ever more important. Drawing on new authoritarianism (Brown; Giroux; Hall), and variously labelled ‘authoritarian populism’, ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’, and ‘illiberalism’, the keynote lecture will map out the profound and radical shifts in meaning, value and authority of policy apparatuses in Hungary, Europe and beyond. Utilising Muirhead and Rosenblum notion of ‘ungoverning’, and Taggart’s concept of ‘unpolitics’, the lecture will invite scholars to consider the possibilities of an ‘un’-turn in policy studies. Building on and extending the ideational-, interpretivist-, discursive-, and emotional- turns in policy studies, this approach traces the practices of radical dismantling of the administrative state, the deconstruction of the welfare state and subversive institutionalism. This ‘un’-turn has a disassembling impact on knowledge production, expertise, power and policy-making, not least through devaluing the civil service and rendering advocacy, activism and participatory policy spaces invisible. In response, there is an urgent need to develop a new conceptual vocabulary to capture these undoings, to trace their global reach and transnational co-production, and to map out their long-term impact on public policies.