Programme

In this paper I explore the connection between populism and nativism, which has implications for understanding the role of xenophobia and racism within populist movements. First, I define populism by combining the strengths of ideational and stylistic approaches, presenting it as both an ideological framework accusing elites of institutional exploitation and mismanagement, and a set of political strategies leveraging this anti-elite sentiment. Then, I critique the conflation of populism and nativism, highlighting cases of right-wing populist movements that do not employ nativist ideology and left-wing populists movements that do. Instead, I argue that nativism is a separate political ideology rooted in concerns about risks related to cultural heterogeneity, that advocate for protectionist measures and immigration limits to restore and enforce homogeneity. While nativism often scapegoats vulnerable groups and serves as a Trojan horse for racism and xenophobia, this paper argues that nativism is a spectrum and that any society requires a minimal level of cultural homogeneity. Using these two concepts, I then address the convergence of populism and nativism through two propositions. First, the cumulative negative effects of neoliberal globalization generate a populist sentiment demanding alternatives to the status quo. Second, institutional and economic constraints favor cultural over economic alternatives, positioning nativism as a key alternative to the neoliberal status quo. These dynamics drive political actors to prioritize immigration as a polarizing issue, exploiting economic anxieties and cultural fears. Drawing on empirical data from Europe and North America, I illustrate how globalization, economic instability, and cultural insecurities fuel nativist populism. By disentangling analysis of populism and nativism, we can better situate hostility to immigration within broader structural and institutional frameworks. The rise of nativist populism, I conclude, reflects discontent with neoliberal globalization and the failure of political actors and institutions to address fundamental economic and representative issues.

Populist politicians are known for prioritising negative and more emotional communication, positioning themselves against political adversaries (e.g. Nai, 2021; Salgado et al., 2022), a practice that distinguishes them from mainstream moderate actors. Particularly, they employ a comprehensive array of tools to delegitimize their opponents and often quite vigorous anti-immigration rhetoric. However, the binary nature of some electoral contests, mainly in two-round elections, can potentially challenge this pervasive expectation. These elections, extremely polarised inevitably (Gidron et al., 2023), compel both candidates to present as the preferable choice, thereby reducing the electoral run-off to a battle against a worse opponent. For our analysis of the nature of negative campaigning against immigration and its potential appeal to populist candidates, we examine the campaigns preceding two recent presidential elections in Central European countries: Czechia and Slovakia. These cases illustrate the confrontation between populism and stylized anti-populism (Havlík & Kluknavská, 2022) in the region where populism is increasingly relevant (Kukovič & Just, 2022). We focus on the rhetoric of presidential candidates towards Ukraine and most importantly towards Ukrainian refugees (both countries accepted a large number of Ukrainian refugees since the start of the full scale war). We use text analysis techniques to analyse Facebook posts of presidential candidates and to determine whether the populist candidate was more negative towards Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees. We then juxtapose our empirical findings with prevailing theories to offer new insights into populist communication during periods of heightened polarisation.

This paper examines the impact of Italy's right-wing populist government's securitization policies on the social integration of Muslim migrants. The Italian right-wing populist discourse defines Muslim migrants as a "potential threat" by using racial and religious nationalism in identity construction, creating significant barriers that hinder migrants' social integration. The study highlights that while right-wing populist policies do not directly hinder Muslim migrants' daily lives, structural barriers such as language proficiency, bureaucratic obstacles, racial discrimination, and the lack of citizenship complicate their integration. Moreover, the strategies employed by Muslim migrants to establish independent lives within the social structure form a type of resistance to the hardening created by these policies. However, this resistance does not lead to the transformation of Muslim migrants into active individuals reshaping social structures and norms. This paper evaluates Italian right-wing populist migration policies, challenging the consensus in the literature on how these policies impede integration, and explores the meaning and limits of these policies in daily life through the experiences of Muslim migrants.

Tokenism involves organizations making a superficial, but usually widely publicized, effort to include members of social minorities in order to appear inclusive and egalitarian. Far-right parties often use tokenism to challenge charges of racism raised against them and present their discriminatory views and policies as allegedly based on facts and not prejudice. In this paper, we focus on tokenism within a transnational Polish-British far-right milieu. We consider both the supply side, namely far-right parties’ recruiting Polish migrants as tokens and the demand side, i.e., Polish migrants joining the parties and thus contributing to symbolic destigmatization and legitimization of far-right anti-immigrant politics. We examine political communication of Britain First, UKIP and Reform UK to map typical mechanisms and discursive tools used by far-right parties to tokenize minority groups. We also analyze extensive ethnographic material, which includes interviews with British leaders trying to recruit Polish migrants and activists who have been tokenized in this way. We also focus on intersectional cases, such as a trans far-right Polish activist in Britain and, to maintain a transnational perspective and allow for comparisons between different political contexts, the case of Bawer Anondo-Akaa, a black activist with disabilities operating in far-right circles in Poland. We reflect on the degree of PR success of tokenizing strategies by far-right parties’ and discuss economic and symbolic benefits of tokenism for minority members as interpreted by themselves. We also explore the limits of tokenism, especially mechanisms through which minority members become disillusioned with what they begin to interpret as hypocrisy and instrumentalization of their involvement.

Despite expressing prejudice towards numerous racial and ethnic groups in the US, Trump steadily gained support among their ranks, with lowest scores in 2016, increased support in 2020 and highest (and some argue decisive for the election) outcomes in 2024. A variety of groups: African Americans, Latinos, Arab Americans and Native Americans, came out in increasingly greater numbers to support him, even as his anti-minority rhetoric never subsided on the national scene. My study looks at how the Trump campaign transformed the wide appeal of othering it used to typically secure the vote of whites, into tailored "us versus them" and scapegoating discourses that won him (for many quite surprising levels of) support from minority groups. This analysis will account for the recipe for Trump's success, seeking to discern how campaign messaging was tailored to mobilize diverse voters and the extent to which other variables (economic and social realities, racial prejudice, etc.) factored into this outcome. I will rely on the the Cooperative Election Study (CES) for my data analysis.

Scholarship on populism has often overlooked the role of women's mobilization within far-right forces, particularly in Latin America. While populism typically constructs a binary division between “ordinary people” and perceived threats posed by minority groups, it also creates opportunities for certain actors—such as elite women—to shape and disseminate its narratives. This paper examines how far-right populist forces in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile strategically engage elite women to establish connections with female voters, using shared identities and populist rhetoric to strengthen their appeal. Through a comparative analysis of these three cases, this study explores the discursive and organizational strategies employed by female political elites within far-right forces. It assesses how these women navigate gendered expectations, leverage conservative values, and employ moral and affective appeals to foster support among women voters. In doing so, the paper sheds light on the mechanisms by which right-wing populist actors incorporate certain groups while scapegoating others, offering insights into the gendered dimensions of political mobilization in contemporary Latin American populism. This analysis raises key questions about the conditions under which women gain prominence within populist discourse: What tactics enable them to transition from being politically marginalized to becoming active agents in shaping ultraright ideologies? Additionally, it examines the broader political implications of these strategies, assessing whether they reinforce or challenge traditional gender roles. By situating women’s experiences within these movements, this study advances the debate on the intersection of gender, populism, and minority dynamics, demonstrating the complex ways in which female agency operates within the populist framework in Latin America.

The paper explores diaspora nationalism in the context of the expanding populist authoritarian politics and the national attachment discourses of migrants in Europe. It seeks to enter into conversation with the literature on (1) long-distance and diasporic nationalism (Anderson 1993, Dieckhoff 2017); (2) transnational expansion of populist nationalism deploying diaspora organizations (Arkilic 2020, 2021); (3) the support of populist far-right among immigrant voters (Jakobson et al 2024) and (4) transnational nationalism (Kastoryano 2006, Nowicka 2000) asking how national attachment and identity are embedded and altered in in expending illiberalism and migrants' stories. The empirical case examines the Hungarian diaspora and homeland attachments among Hungarians living in Germany by investigating (1) how diaspora politics has been made part of populist governance in Hungary, (2) how diaspora engagement policy affected Hungarian diaspora organizations in Germany producing various forms and reasons for co-optation and resistance; (3) how Hungarian migrants living in Germany react to the changing diaspora politics depending on their relation to the host society, to other migrant groups, and their changing social and political attachment to their home country. The paper applies a qualitative methodology examining documents of the Hungarian state’s diaspora policy, activities of 13 diaspora organizations using interviews, ethnographic methods, and online resources; 50 narrative and semi-structured interviews with first-generation immigrants recruited through posts advertising our research on social media supplemented by recruitment through personal contacts in Berlin, Stuttgart, Göttingen, München and Halle. The paper claims that the ethnonationalist discourse of the populist government of Hungary empowers diaspora originations with material and symbolic resources. At the same time, a transnational political public of populist authoritarianism is created, successfully capturing diaspora institutions. Nevertheless, the interviews revealed much more room for maneuvering at the individual level: non-participation ranges from opposition to indifference. Moreover, smaller diaspora organizations and communities are also involved in international resistance to autocracy.

In ethnically heterogeneous polities, populist parties face the challenge of developing a message that makes them at least tolerable or even favorable among ethnic minority voters if these parties want to expand their base beyond a majority-driven agenda. Specifically, this task involves eschewing the tendency among populists toward xenophobia and attempting to develop at least an approach to dealing with ethnic voters. This paper will profile two such approaches based on examples from populist parties in Latvia. Conceptually, we put forth two forms of minority-attuned populism – anational and binational populism – depending on the degree of ethnic accommodation in the rhetoric of the populist party. We will examine how a right-wing populist newcomer in Latvia (‘Who Owns the State?’ (KPV)) exemplified a kind of anational populist message, when it burst on to the political scene in 2018 with 14% of the vote. Thereafter, we will scrutinize an example of even more astute minority-conscious behavior among the Latvia First party (Latvija Pirmajā Vietā) that entered the political scene in 2021-2022. Both parties have generally been classified as populist (see, for example, the PopuList database). However, their approaches to navigating Latvia’s sizeable Russian-speaking electorate have been different. Our findings suggest that when competing with the hard-line nativism of other established right-wing parties, anational populist rhetoric generally failed to capture the appeal of minority voters, whereas some degree of binational populism has proven stronger. This is evidenced by the differing electoral success of KPV and LPV in regional terms. In terms of methods, the paper will combine the analysis of campaign rhetoric, party-political actions and elite interviews.

The proposed paper will focus on the Estonian populist radical right party EKRE and explore its discursive strategies to mobilize female voters by constructing the „conservative women“ identity. EKRE has made persistent attempts to achieve a more substantial electoral appeal among female voters since being founded in 2012. It strives to show itself as a conservative but female-friendly party: it has founded its own women’s organization (which is very active and visible within the party) and is using extensively the party’s webzine The New News (Uued Uudised) and other media channels (sometimes even the mainstream media) to reach out to female voters. The current paper will primarily analyze the party’s communication towards female voters on the partisan New News platform while focusing on three major research questions: (1) How is EKRE constructing the „conservative women“ identity via creating inner-outer group dichotomy and hierarchies between the „good conservative“ women and the „bad left-liberal women.“? (2) How does the party, more precisely, politicize and de-politicize some specific issues and identity elements for the inner group to construct that identity and establish inner-outer group boundary? (3) How does the party solve the obvious identity tensions for the members of the inner group that might emerge (e.g., dedicated housewives who are active in politics or even female entrepreneurs simultaneously)? The paper will also briefly touch upon how the new „conservative women“ identity gets forged via different collective actions (meetings, seminars, campaign activities, etc.) quite extensively covered by the New News. The empirical base for the analysis will comprise the relevant media texts of the New News from 2015 – 2025. Critical discourse analysis and qualitative content analysis will be combined to analyze the relevant discursive identity construction elements in those texts.

Populism Studies have largely overlooked the workings of populism in the Muslim world, and Islamists’ exclusionary and anti-plural politics are reduced to the issues of Islam and political Islam. Additionally, there has been scarce anthropologies of populism to investigate how vox populai in Muslim communities emerge in response to populist thoughts and consolidate Islamist populism. In Iran, Pakistan, and Mauritania, the three constitutionally declared Islamic Republics in the world, the Islamist politicians repeat the exact patterns of populist rhetorics like those of the Global North and non-Muslims. The transnational patterns of ethnonationalism, the thin fable of imaginary Other taking ride on the thickness of nationalism, corrupt elites versus people, and even appearing sartorially unique. However, the Islamist populists have an additional rhetoric in their arsenal, and they differ from others by taking the cloak of decolonial heroes and the men in the arena who stand against the West. In other words, the animosity against the “West” and its allies are parts and parcel of the arsenal of Islamist populism, which uses collective memory, histories of colonialism, and military invasions to mobilize the people and discredit their political opponents as agents of colonial masters or Racial capitalism. By way of political anthropology and ethnography of Muslim electorates supporting populist parties, I illustrate how vox populai in Islamic Republics emerges in response to Islamist populism and Muslim electorates support them by projecting heroism and masculinity and locating their individuality into the mobilised collective memories and grievances that less to do with (political)Islam but more to do with how they imagine nation and nationalism.

This presentation seeks to apply the concept of populism to narratives produced by or for Estonian Russophiles after the full-scale Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the limelight of analysis are public speakers associated with the ‘Koos / Vmeste’ party, along with some pro-Russian video bloggers who regularly promote Kremlin’s messages addressed to the Baltics. The phenomenon of populism in this regard will be approached through the academic lens of desecuritization which implies the refusal to project on Estonia the insecurities produced by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, and the rejection of the firm pro-Ukrainian stand of the Estonian government as belligerent. The desecuritized nature of this discourse is also manifested in the engagement with ideas of “peace” without specifications or qualifications, and the return to “business-as-usual” relations with Moscow, including the lifting of the current sanctions and resumption of trans-border contacts and interactions. Of particular interest in this respect is an eventual impact of the beginning of the Trump second presidency on the Russophone discourses in Estonia.

This paradox is further complicated by two interrelated observations. First, the politically salient gender/sexuality issues have shifted from gender equality and gay rights in previous decades to other issues like trans rights and non-binarity since the late 2010s, and ‘anti-woke’ rhetoric is usually aimed against the latter but not (often) the former. Second, what is seen as progressive discourse has changed accordingly, and thus contemporary standards for what is considered a progressive outlook on gender/sexuality are more stringent than a decade ago. In this paper, I explore the logic found in ‘anti-woke’ discourses within the PRR in the Dutch context to provide a more nuanced and detailed interpretation of this recent more conservative discourse. My aim is to analyze shifting conceptions of the volonté generale in PRR discourse, and the resulting shift in the categorization of gender identity and sexuality in political in- and outgroups. Looking at the Dutch case, I find that gender and sexuality have become increasingly dislodged from nativist logic, undermining the continued centrality of homo-nationalism in the contemporary (Dutch) PRR, and paving the way for more conservative discourses. I discuss what this may entail for the future of the so-called ‘gender-modern’ current in the PRR.