Wing Populism Research Articles

Der ungebetene Gast

The upsurge of right wing populists and new authoritarian forces fueled the debate on the future of the subject. Following Hegel and Lacan this article analyzes how the renaissance of reactionary ways of subjectification goes hand in hand with a destructive circle of suppression and recurrence. The modern crisis of identity is strongly connected to the figure of the other; at the same time the projections of this other reveal the ambiguity of a subject unable to confine its inner realms. Is it possible that the continuous crisis of the modern subject is based on religious and cultural-historical imaginations of identity? Do we have to get rid of this concept of identity to quit the destructive circle?

ДИАСПОРЫ В АРХИТЕКТОНИКЕ МЕНЯЮЩЕГОСЯ МИРА

More than a half century ago, an outstanding English historian and political thinker Arnold Joseph Toynbee visualizing the future wrote that the previous world of separate and territorially limited civilizations would be gradually transformed into the world of plural, huge and universal diasporas of different ethnic, religious, cultural backgrounds. The growth and expansion of present-day migrations is one of decisive features of the Global World structure and dynamics. As an outcome of wars, hungers, ecological catastrophes, ethnical and religious conflicts, predominance of local dictatorships, etc., millions and millions of human beings willy-nilly have to forsake their native birthplaces in search of favorable existence conditions. These massive processes drastically modify the whole picture of universal social, political and cultural history. The former world of relatively isolated civilizations seems to be almost finished; old European notions of tolerance and civil society need some kind of reconsideration; Oriental or Semi-Oriental clan structures are intensively “exported” to the countries of the West as well as to the Slavic area. This complex of circumstances provokes new challenges of xenophobia and mass right wing populism. All old notions of homogenous nation-state as well as those of “multiculturalism” seem to be obsolete. Thus, one of important imperatives of the present-day diasporized world seems to be connected with the search for new forms of cultural and political thinking based on renovated philosophical and political outlook.&nbsp

“Human Rights for the Righteous Humans”: The influence of Brazilian Conservatism on the national perception of human rights

In the past years Brazil has been through innumerous corruption scandals and increasing political polarization, which has led to the impeachment of a president and a serious economic crisis. However, these are not the only consequences generated by the clash between the left and the right wing in the country. In right wing populist discourse, human rights have been systematically identified with the political left – as this is captured in the popular conservative saying “Direitos Humanos para Humanos Direitos” (Human Rights for the Righteous Humans), meaning that the fundamental purpose of human rights is the protection of outlaws and the perpetuation of the weakness of that state that has to treat all individuals equally. For the Brazilian far right, human rights are a synonym of exaggerated and harmful “political correctness.” The aim of this paper is to understand how and why the term has become pejorative for a whole political segment, and what its effects are on Brazilian national and foreign policy regarding the human rights agenda.

Thracology and Nationalism in Bulgaria. Deconstructing Contemporaneous Historical and Archaeological Representations

It is now widely acknowledged that Bulgarian academic discourses of the country’s so-called communist era (1945-1989) were heavily politicized with the aim of nationalizing and ethnicizing the history of the Bulgarian people. This communist era phenomenon subscribes to a chronologically vaster process of nationalist continuum recognized to have spanned from the middle-end of the nineteenth century to at least the early 1990s. Despite this trend, Bulgarian academics, especially in the field of archaeology, have more recently presented their post-communist, transition period disciplines as ideology-free, objective, scientific research.
 In this paper, we provide examples of recent theoretical developments and interpretations in the sub-field of thracology – studies of ancient Thracian culture – that indicate that this claim to objectivity is unfounded. Based on the examples provided we argue that not only have Bulgarian academic discourses in the fields in question not severed with the ethnicizing practices of the so-called nationalist continuum of the pre-communist and communist eras, but they are now flourishing on the nationalist foundation of the preceding century and a half. As such discourses are reproduced unquestioningly in specialized publications, their influence on right wing populism is incontestable as they provide the latter, wittingly or not, with the scientific authority it needs to justify its ethnicizing of “historical” tenets of racial and social discrimination.

Radicalising citizenship education

Democracy faces two key threats today. The first is evident in the growth of authoritarian, right-wing, populism which is evident in a number of European countries and beyond. The second has been the un- dermining of democratic life by neoliberalism. Liberal democracy has aided the latter by the separation of economics from politics and the focus on the individual at the expense of the public sector and the common good. At the same time, some of the virtues of liberal democracy – the separation of powers, for example – are threatened by authoritarianism. We argue the importance of a critical engagement with current versions of democracy by drawing on a more participatory and active democratic tradition. This has significant implications for how we view citizenship and citizenship education. The dominant ver- sion of citizenship education in Scotland and the UK (possibly in Europe too) embodies a ‘minimalist’ model of citizenship through a curriculum for taking personal responsibility. This is inadequate for the challenge democracy faces. We argue the need to ground citizenship education in more radical soil, to nurture a critically engaged and active citizenry capable of challenging the democratic threats of right- wing populism and neoliberal subjectivity.

REVIEW: Noted: Right-wing rhetoric makes the unpalatable normal

The Politics of Fear. What right wing populist discourses mean, by Ruth Wodak. London: Sage, 2015. 256 pages. ISBN 978-1- 4462-470-0-6AS WE observe political events unfolding in the United States, the Brexit vote in the UK, the discourse around Korea, the French elections and the rhetoric of European nations, Wodak’s book provides a timely insight into the discourse of right wing populism and why it is successful. In each of the eight chapters, Wodak provides campaign materials, images, online data, television interviews and news stories.

Right Wing Populism in the West: Social Media Discourse and Echo Chambers

Right Wing Populism in the West: Social Media Discourse and Echo Chambers

Why the British Conception of Sovereignty Was the Main Reason for Brexit And Why the British 'Leave-Vote' May End up Saving Rather Than Undermining the EU

Doomsdays preachers suggested that Brexit and Trump would mean the end of the liberal world order as we know it and thus the end of the EU. The research presented here suggests the opposite. Not only have Europeans turned their back to populism by voting yes to reforms and pro-EU-parties and governments in different member states over the past months, but Brexit and Trump also seems to have given a complete new momentum to the European project. This article demonstrates why Brexit cannot be generalized to the rest of the continent but is the result of a complicated and special British conception of what it means to be a sovereign state in the 21st century. Moreover and paradoxically, surveys show that the greatest fear among Europeans today is not more European integration but right wing populism and European Disunion.

Backlash Against “Others”

Right wing populist movements are challenging established political parties and institutions, including higher education. The discourse and platforms of these movements are a nationalistic backlash against elites and “others” that are antithetical to all that universities at their best stand for. But universities would do well to refocus on class-based inequities that also underlie this shift, in ways that rebalance the global and local.

Backlash Against “Others”

Right wing populist movements are challenging established political parties and institutions, including higher education. The discourse and platforms of these movements are a nationalistic backlash against elites and “others” that are antithetical to all that universities at their best stand for. But universities would do well to refocus on class-based inequities that also underlie this shift, in ways that rebalance the global and local.

‘All mouth and no trousers?’ How many Conservative Party members voted for UKIP in 2015 – and why did they do so?

A survey of ordinary members of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party carried out in 2013 revealed that nearly 30% of them would seriously consider voting for the country’s radical right wing populist party (United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP)). However, we show that at the general election in 2015, only a very small proportion of them – around 5% of Tory grassroots members – actually did so, driven it seems mainly by alienation from the leadership and David Cameron in particular, as well as, perhaps, by concerns about the Conservative-led government’s austerity policies. However, those party members who did eventually vote for UKIP were still much more likely to have expressed a propensity to vote for it in 2013 than those who did not. Since the Conservative Party has not experienced the same increase in membership as some of its competitors, and since members are an important part of parties’ electoral campaigning, they should avoid alienating those members they do have – something of which Theresa May appears to be aware.

“The More We Can Try to Open Them Up, the Better It Will Be for Their Integration”: Integration and the Coercive Assimilation of Muslim Youth

ABSTRACTCapitalizing on national anxieties, right wing populist leaders promise to enforce national borders with new constellations of policies that regulate and exclude Muslim bodies. Using the theoretical tool of “technologies of concern” (Jaffe-Walter, 2016), this essay critiques how state security discourses operate through public schools. Drawing on ethnographic research with Muslim youth in a Danish public school and an analysis of European integration policies, the author analyzes how policies and practices that ostensibly support young people’s integration enact everyday violence and coercive assimilation. Highlighting the perspectives of the young people she worked with, the author argues that state efforts to transform Muslim students into acceptable subjects of the nation-state encouraged their alienation and marginalization.

Rethinking Muslim migration: frameworks, flux and fragmentation

ABSTRACTIn the wake of the San Bernardino and Orlando shootings, as well as the Paris and Brussels attacks, and in the midst of the right wing populism of US. presidential campaigns and UK referendum debates, the political rhetoric around Muslim migration has sunk to an all-time low. The Bengal Diaspora provides a much needed antidote. By studying Muslim migration across continents the book provides insights into a global climate of Islamophobia, and it challenges us to think critically about migration theory’s universalizing logic. In this review essay, we will focus on the three areas of study in which the book makes the most striking intervention, as well as three questions left unanswered or posed for future work.

Feminist Currents: Decolonial Responses to the Neoliberalization of the University

Feminist CurrentsDecolonial Responses to the Neoliberalization of the University Eileen Boris and Elizabeth Currans For this installment of “Feminist Currents,” we took our questions to the annual meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) in Montreal, November 10–13, 2016. We earlier had asked readers of this journal to discuss the effects of today’s neoliberal political economy on programs and departments in Women’s, Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and what strategies they have witnessed or envisioned to cope, confront, and survive. In keeping with NWSA’s theme for 2016, we asked roundtable participants to bring a decolonial lens to this question by exploring how decolonial imaginaries and strategies can inform responses to shrinking budgets, requests to quantify feminist pedagogical interventions, and institutional concerns with student credit hour productions. We were interested in how our departments and classrooms can address student and faculty experiences of colonial and neoliberal trauma while responding to forces that question the legitimacy of our work and operate within a market-driven, heteropatriarchal understanding of education. Days before we recorded this conversation, the 2016 US presidential election shook the world. Our conversation occurred in the shadow of the victory of Donald Trump, an individual considered to be a misogynist, nativist, Muslim-bashing, anti-union, and racist right wing populist, who won the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote decisively to Hillary Clinton, the first woman to gain nomination for the presidency from a major political party. His particular threat to our work haunted the roundtable. What follows is the edited account of presentations and audience comments based on transcripts by McKenzie Campbell, MA student at Eastern Michigan University. eileen boris, Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara: What will be the fate of the neoliberal university after Trump? When facts and knowledge have little salience? Will minoritized bodies, genderqueer, trans [End Page 210] bodies, and even cisgendered women be valued for the value added they give to an institution in the kind of individualized manner that commodifies difference, as Amber Jamila Musser so elegantly expresses in “Specimen Days: Diversity, Labor, and the University,” published in Winter 2015 Feminist Formations? She argues that minoritized people are valuable because of their very difference; our presence allows the university to show off its diversity work. As Roderick Ferguson writes in The Reorder of Things: “This new interdisciplinary biopower placed social differences in the realm of calculation and recalibrated power/knowledge as an agent of social life.” This insight repeats anew the point of Ann duCille’s “Occult of True Black Womanhood,” the valuing of minoritized people as holders of magic or “specimens,” as Musser puts it. We need to ask: what will happen to multiculturalism and the representation of difference in the face of white heteropatriarchy and a white supremacy fearful of its decline, projecting its fears onto the others, a white supremacy that disdains policy, knowledge, empiricism for truths of their flesh spinning out of control from opiates and other hurts in the deindustrialized areas of our country? We saw this in my university, this charge of “feminism is cancer,” this denial of rape culture, this celebration of conquest and genocide in the name of white men; we saw chalking incidents denying the prevalence of sexual assault and we heard about white supremacy rallies. There was a white student Facebook group with a demand for a Hernan Cortez room in our Hispanic-serving institution. Of course, this comment is not to let white women off the hook, especially given their role in giving the election to Trump. These assaults will require more labor, more unpaid labor for creating spaces of dialogue and empathy to listen to our students and help them gain tools, not just for survival, but to come together across differences to fight for social justice—and value knowledge production that takes account of all our fleshes to produce theory that will make a difference. beth currans, Women’s and Gender Studies, Eastern Michigan University: I teach at a regional comprehensive university that attracts a lot of first generation college students, many of whom work thirty plus hours per week and commute to campus. We also graduate the highest percentage of...

The diffusive model for <i>Aedes aegypti</i> mosquito on a periodically evolving domain

This paper deals with a reaction-diffusion model on a periodically and isotropically evolving domain in order to explore the diffusive dynamics of Aedes aegypti mosquito, where we divide it into two sub-populations: the winged population and an aquatic form. The spatial-temporal risk index $ R_0(\rho) $ depending on the domain evolution rate $ \rho(t) $ as well as its analytical properties is investigated. The long-time behaviors of the periodic solutions under the condition $ R_0(\rho)>1 $ and $ R_0(\rho)\leq1 $ are explored, respectively. Moreover, we consider the specific case where $ \rho(t)\equiv1 $ to better understand the impact of the periodic evolution rate on the persistence and extinction of Aedes aegypti mosquito. Numerical simulations further verify our analytical results that the periodic domain evolution has a significant impact on the dispersal of Aedes aegypti mosquito.

The Economic History of Trumpism

Why did America embrace right wing populism in the 2016 election? A look back at past moments of economic transformation suggests that government policy of producerism mitigated the pain and fear among those losing jobs and opportunity in a changing economy. The abandonment of this policy after 1980 explains the resentment of the white working class toward established elites of both political parties and set the stage for the rise of a political outsider like Trump.

The Rise of Right Wing Populism and Its Effect on HRM

This paper provides an overview of the human resource management implications associated with the rise of right-wing populism. Our perspective is based on a review of the managerial, policy, and academic literature. We highlight some of the potentially negative human resource management consequences for markets in the U.K., U.S., and around the world that result from declines in social protection, a rise in racism, a decline in diversity or acceptance of diversity, as well as barriers to the mobility of labour, immigration, and trade, among other problems.

Europa und Frankreich im Ausnahmezustand.

In France, the state of emergency (declared in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of November 2015) has been used against the Nuit-Debout- and the strike movement: fundamental rights were set aside in order to push through the deregulation of the labour market. An approach informed by hegemony theory can demonstrate that these developments and their point in time are articulated with the political and economic position of France within the European ensemble of state apparatuses. Because of its Eurocentric and liberal set-up, mainstream state theory tends to identify authoritarianism only in the periphery or as a threat connected with right wing populism. But an authoritarian turn is already happening within Western liberal institutions. The crisis has pushed the neoliberal mode of integration into a crisis of hegemony. The status quo can no longer be maintained through consensus and is instead upheld through coercion and racism.

Right Wing Populism and Hip Hop Music in Norway

The relationship between the Norwegian cultural field at large and the Norwegian right wing populist Progress Party has been, and still is, characterized by enduring antagonism. Norwegian hip hop music is arguably the form of artistic expression through which antipathy towards the Progress Party (the FRP) is most explicitly articulated. This article situates this antagonism in the wider political and sociocultural context of Norway. It further outlines how the practices and aesthetics typical of the Norwegian hip hop scene facilitate antagonism against the FRP, and how this antagonism plays out in the public sphere. In conclusion this study discusses these public intersections in light of the FRP’s populist claim to be victimized by the mainstream media and cultural sector.

Populism in Lithuania: Defining the Research Tradition

AbstractThe research on populism and populist political communication in Lithuania is rather limited, regardless of the fact that populist movements and politicians are influential on national and local political levels; they also receive sufficient support from a significant share of the population. Because the Western European research tradition is concentrated on the challenges of right-wing populism, Lithuanian political scientists distinguish right-wing populism as more significant in comparison to left-wing populism. Although Lithuanian researchers note, that in the balance of the left-right wing populists, Lithuania stands out with the majority of left-wing populists, in comparison to the popularity and number of right-wing populists in neighbouring countries.Despite the interest of scholars in various fields of policy research in Lithuania, there is still a lack of research on populist political communication, and what interest does exist is mostly concentrated on analysis of practical issues within the political arena, e.g. the study of the processes of political elections.The analysis of populist political communication in Lithuania revealed that populism is a relatively oft-mentioned topic in Lithuanian scientific discourse, but in most cases remains on the margins of other research. The theoretical work presents the assumptions based on the analysis of the political situation in Lithuania and examples from other countries. The empirical research of populism is scarce, and in most cases based on content analysis of political documents and media reports.