populism Archives

Poetics and Politics of Islamic Imaginaries

Poetics and Politics of Islamic Imaginaries shows how narratives of culture, masculinist restoration and revolutionary spirit drive, connect and reinvent different forms of politics in Muslim majority countries. The book moves beyond Eurocentric and positivist approaches to political formations. Instead, it sees these formations as evolving in specific temporalities and contexts.

Gathering scholars in sociology, political science, anthropology, cultural studies, and social and legal history, the volume takes a decolonial approach to stimulate debate on the parallels and differences between various Islamic movements and their claims on the past, present and future. Through a comparative approach that spans scholarship from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, India and China, readers gain a clearer understanding of the ways that contemporary Muslim societies understand, renegotiate and reconfigure the presumed tension between imagination and reality.

With a rise in new forms of identity politics, right and left populisms, and a myriad of global crises, this volume is a timely exploration of how contemporary Islamic politics are bound to other socio-political imaginaries: nationalism, masculinity and revolution.

Heritage and Nationalism

How was the Roman Empire invoked in Brexit Britain and in Donald Trump’s United States of America, and to what purpose? And why is it critical to answer these kinds of questions? Heritage and Nationalism explores how people’s perceptions and experiences of the ancient past shape political identities in the digital age. It particularly examines the multiple ways in which politicians, parties and private citizens mobilise aspects of the Iron Age, Roman and Medieval past of Britain and Europe to include or exclude ‘others’ based on culture, religion, class, race, ethnicity, etc.

Chiara Bonacchi draws on the results of an extensive programme of research involving both data-intensive and qualitative methods to investigate how pre-modern periods are leveraged to support or oppose populist nationalist arguments as part of social media discussions concerning Brexit, the Italian Election of 2018 and the US-Mexican border debate in the US. Analysing millions of tweets and Facebook posts, comments and replies, this book is the first to use big data to answer questions about public engagement with the past and identity politics. The findings and conclusions revise and reframe the meaning of populist nationalism today and help to build a shared basis for the democratic engagement of citizens in public life in the future. The book offers a fascinating and unmissable read for anyone interested in how the past and its contemporary legacy, or ‘heritage’, influence our ‘political’ thinking and feeling in a time of hyper-interconnectivity.

The Faces of Authoritarianism and Strategies of Dissent in Contemporary Brazil

Rather than looking back into Brazil’s authoritarian past, the Bolsonaro administration (2019–2022) provides an innovative case study through which to explore Brazil’s manifold and recurring expressions of authoritarianism. This book investigates the ways that authoritarianism most recently emerged and how it was confronted, and, in doing so, the varied ways (and spaces) in which struggles over the meaning and practice of democracy that took place during the period.

The Faces of Authoritarianism and Strategies of Dissent in Contemporary Brazil examines repression and dissent: efforts to dismantle democratic foundations alongside forms of contestation and resistance to authoritarianism. The chapters offer valuable theoretical and ethnographic insights, from interdisciplinary perspectives, into the complex realities that Brazilians experienced in the four years of Bolsonaro’s presidency. The book is organised around four sections, each addressing a core area where democracy, as meaning and practice, was contested, attacked and defended. This is shown not only between Bolsonaro’s government and those who resisted it from within and outside the state, but also between state and non-state actors and between public and private sectors, allowing for a broad view of the country’s polarised political landscape and the impact such struggles have had on civil society.

Ruptures

Ruptures brings together leading and emerging international anthropologists to explore the concept of ‘rupture’. Understood as radical and often forceful forms of discontinuity, rupture is the active ingredient of the current sense of a world in turmoil, lying at the heart in some of the most defining experiences of our time: the rise of populist politics, the corollary impulse towards protest and even revolutionary change, as well as moves towards violence and terror, and the responses these moves elicit.

Rupture is addressed in selected ethnographic and historical contexts: images of the guillotine in the French revolution; reactions to Trump’s election in the USA; the motivations of young Danes who join ISIS in Syria; ‘butterfly effect’ activism among environmental anarchists in northern Europe; the experiences of political trauma and its ‘repair’ through privately sponsored museums of Mao’s revolution in China; people’s experience of the devastating 2001 earthquake in Gujurat; the ‘inner’ rupture of Protestant faith among Danish nationalist theologians; and the attempt ex nihilo to invent an alphabet for use in Christian prophetic movements in Congo and Angola.

Ruptures takes in new directions broader intellectual debates about continuity and change. In particular, by thematising rupture as a radical, sometimes violent, and even brutal form of discontinuity, it adds a sharper critical edge to contemporary discourses, both in social theory and public debate and policy.