Athough the populist radical right (PRR) has become a global phenomenon, research about it focuses much more on Europe than on other regions. To counter this imbalance, this talk, based on a recent special issue in the journal Language and Politics, provides comparative evidence on the discourse elaborated by the PRR in six non-European countries: Australia, Brazil, Chile, India, Turkey, and the United States. As we show, non-European PRR forces articulate authoritarian, nativist, and populist ideas in different ways than their European brethren and they employ specific ideological elements (e.g., neoliberalism and religion) to advance discourses that resonate with the social grievances that are preponderant in the context wherein they operate. This reveals that part of the success of the PRR is related to its discursive flexibility and capacity to adapt itself with the aim of constructing frames that connect with the anxieties experimented by segments of the voting public across different national and regional settings.
Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser is professor at the Institute of Political Science at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, an associate researcher at the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES), and Director of the Laboratory for the Study of the Far Right (ultra-lab). His main area of research is comparative politics, and he has a special interest in the ambivalent relationship between populism and democracy. Before his current position, he worked as a research fellow at the University of Sussex, the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB), and the Human Development group of the Chilean Bureau of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Together with Cas Mudde (University of Georgia), he has authored the book Populism. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017), which has been translated into more than fifteen languages.
Lisa Zanotti is a postdoctoral research fellow at Diego Portales University in Santiago de Chile, an Adjunct Researcher at the Center for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES), and a researcher at the Laboratory for the Study of the Far Right (ultra-lab). She is also the leading researcher of the postdoctoral project "Make it about representation: the missing link between populism and crisis" (FONDECYT 3210352). Her main area of research is comparative politics with a focus on populism, radicalization processes, and democracy.
This webinar will be moderated by Eviane Leidig.
The Global Perspectives on the Far Right webinar series
The webinar series Global Perspectives on the Far Right is hosted by C-REX and takes place every quarter in 2023. The webinars last for one hour from 15:00-16:00 CET, unless indicated otherwise due to the speakers’ time zone differences. This webinar series is a continuation from February 2021.
The regions covered are largely inspired by the new Manchester University Press book series, ‘Global Studies of the Far Right’, by founding co-editor and C-REX affiliate Eviane Leidig.
The webinar will have one short presentation followed by a Q&A session, moderated by Cas Mudde or Eviane Leidig.
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