Bücher der Reihe Global Political Sociology

Populism has lately experienced a meteoric rise to become one of the most widely used terms in academic and wider public discourses and a supposedly defining feature of both domestic and world politics. Situated at the intersection of International Relations (IR), Political Theory and Comparative Politics, this book makes a critical intervention into the burgeoning IR scholarship on populism and problematizes the often hyperbolic and sweeping usage of the term as a general descriptor for non-centrist politics of different persuasions. The book seeks to move into a different theoretical direction and broaden the empirical focus of existing IR research. Theoretically, it bridges the gap between theories of populism and IR by bringing the Laclauian, discursive approach and IR poststructuralism together in a theoretical framework. The proposed framework moves away from the search for the policy preferences and impact of populism, and instead conceptualizes foreign policy and world politics as potential sites for practicing populism, ranging from the articulation of societal grievances to the construction of populist identities such as ¿the people¿. Empirically, the book takes IR scholarship beyond the predominant focus on the populist radical right and single-country and -region studies. Building on the discourse analysis of an original data set, it offers a comparative analysis of right-wing and left-wing populist discourses in different world regions as well as populist cross-border collaboration and identity construction.

This book analyzes key popular culture artifacts linked with United States' far-right extremism to illustrate how extremists use various narrative strategies to legitimate their interests and goals and to justify violent actions. Recognizing these narrative strategies and how they are used partly explains the back and forth moves between mainstream politics and the far-right of ideas and issues that used to remain within far-right circles. The main objective of this book is to utilize theoretical approaches that centralize processes of racialization to analyze and explain how far-right extremists utilize recognizable narratives to mainstream and communicate their ideas. The book will illustrate processes by which racialized subjects are produced and violence justified. In order to do so, the book concentrates on popular culture as sources of how the far-right constitutes their identities and goals. It first develops a methodological plan to study popular culture artifacts that is drawn from scholarship on race and discourse analysis in International Relations (IR). It then analyzes far-right use of key popular culture artifacts, such as magazines, memes, and manifestos, to note how extremist identities and interests are produced, publicly communicated, and mainstreamed. This will contribute to Security Studies and IR's understanding of far-right extremism, especially how they utilize similar narrative strategies as used in mainstream contexts to justify their calls for violence.

The book develops a novel framework for the analysis of global crises. It differentiates crises on three dimensions: permanent, recurring and ephemeral crises. This conceptualization allows us to analyze global crises not only in their immediate environment, but makes it possible to understand them in the broader context of social instability. The approach revolves around the terminology of discursive dislocation which provides fundamental insights into diverse forms of social instability. A multidimensional conceptualization of dislocation is advanced which informs the differentiation of global crises. Furthermore, a methodological toolkit is developed and tailored to the theoretical framework, which makes it possible to utilize the book both theoretically and methodologically for the analysis of manifold forms of global crises. The book also provides a comprehensive analysis of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States under Donald Trump. Making use of the aforementioned methodology, it presents a hands-on illustration of how the multidimensional framework can be utilized for practical analyses. The analysis reveals how the construction of the Covid-19 pandemic is embedded in the historically ingrained self-portrayal of the United States, and how crisis responses are invoked to serve particular socio-political purposes in retaining an established vision of the United States.

This edited volume breaks new ground and opens up new perspectives by capturing the role played by claims to authenticity in populist discourses in Brazil, India and Ukraine.

This book has four main objectives: to bring the thus far almost entirely neglected historical case of 'the rise of Japan' into the literature on power shifts in general and 'the rise of China' in particular;

This book explores narratives produced in the Maghreb in order to illustrate shortcomings of imagination in the discipline of international relations (IR).