Journal of Illiberalism Studies |
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The latest issue of the Journal of Illiberalism Studies is out now! This special issue focuses on Latin America.
We start with a piece from Julio F. Carrión on the relationship between populism and democracy and how erosion of checks and balances comes in tangent with the erosion of popular sovereignty.
Then a piece from Emilio Peluso Neder Meyer on the juridical discourse that acted as a basis for the historical development of Brazilian illiberalism and its chances for enduring.
Followed by a piece from Benjamin Garcia Holgado on the populist radicalization of the courts in Argentina from 2007-2015.
Francisco Alfaro Pareja writes on the illiberal experience in Venezuela between 1999 and 2007 as an example of the continual dismantling of the rule of law.
Followed by Diego C. Soliz T. on the illiberal counter-hegemonic dialogue between the various components of the Latin-American left and Russia and its ideological inheritance from the Soviet past.
Last, but certainly not least, Armando Chaguaceda, Johanna Cilano Pelaez, Maria Isabel Puerta on the illiberal influence of Russian media in Latin America.
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Zuzana Maďarová on the connection between anti-gender movements and illiberal politics using the case study of Slovakia's abortion debate.
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Katrin Kremmler on the uses of national culture and heritage for new Hungarian project of civilizationist illiberal nation-branding.
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Anna Réz on the unity between established conservative and progressive political parties in Hungary on Covid-19 and how concerns about Covid measures could have been expressed differently. |
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Thomas Land on the socio-economic conditions that made identity politics not only possible but likely.
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Tove Soiland on the disputes on the political left over Covid-19 policies and the new class-based coalition between capital and the state.
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Joshua Vandiver on varieties of masculinism, how masculinism influences fascism and the far right, and the role of religion and geopolitics in far-right ideology and discourse. |
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Julian G. Waller draws a distinction between illiberalism and authoritarianism, presenting “best-use” conceptualizations of both. To push back against the “conceptual stretching and terminological confusion” that occurs when the two terms are conflated, Waller presents illiberalism as a positive and ideational reaction against hegemonic liberalism. In contrast, authoritarianism is best conceptualized as a category of political regime.
Stefan Borg surveys the postliberal landscape by reconstructing its emergence and development. After charting postliberalism's key claims and critiques, Borg posits that a central challenge for postliberalism lies in “moving from a critique of liberalism to proposed remedies for its perceived deficiencies, without slipping into a political project with clear illiberal rather than merely non-liberal implications.”
Pairing Jacques Rancière’s theory of depoliticization with poststructuralist discourse analysis, Anni Roth Hjermann contends that discursive depoliticization contributes to authoritarian consolidation. Looking to Russia, the article explains how entrenched depoliticizing discourses were produced and reinforced in a “co-constitutive internal/external sphere,” making possible the authoritarian consolidation that has occurred in Russia as it’s waged its war on Ukraine.
Claudio Balderacchi takes a novel look at populist outcomes, assessing them not by their effect on liberal priorities, but on their own terms, i.e., by their effect on democracy, be it liberal or not. Balderacchi finds that “the quality of populism-induced inclusion is inherently incompatible with populism's ultimate goal of realizing popular will” and that populism may, paradoxically, suffer from the same limitations as the liberal institutions that it rejects. This article contributes to a critical reassessment of dominant understandings of the relationship between populism and democracy.
Helena Segarra revisits the Hungarian government’s successful attempt to securitize migration in 2015. Using qualitative research and expert interviews, Segarra demonstrates how reception infrastructure was extra-territorialized and standards were dissolved, while civil society and asylum seeker support groups were criminalized. She concludes that this act contravened EU citizens’ freedoms and is indicative of the weaknesses of common European reception standards.
Agnieszka Bień-Kacała and Tímea Drinóczi hone in on abortion law in Hungary and Poland. In both cases, captured constitutional courts helped build and maintain the illiberal system. However, in Poland the captured court “serve[s] one master (the Polish illiberal autocratic leader),” whereas the Hungarian court serves two: the illiberal autocratic leader and some “remnants of substantive constitutional democracy.” This partially explains why the Polish court has restricted abortion while its Hungarian counterpart has yet to intervene, though that could change. The authors conclude that the constitutionalization of abortion has led to the expansion of rights in many cases, but that it leaves rights vulnerable to erosion or elimination: “Illiberal constitutionalism…reminds us that a turn to the constitution can undermine sexual and reproductive rights as much as it can expand them.”
Michael Butter traces the impact that Donald Trump had, and continues to have, on the forms and functions of conspiracy theory in American political culture. He charts a shift “in the status of conspiracist knowledge within the Republican Party and parts of its electorate,” but does not hold Trump solely responsible for this phenomenon. Instead, he historicizes Trump’s conspiracism by looking at the role of conspiracy theory throughout American history, including its role in the foundation of the Republican Party in 1854. By embracing the longue durée, Butter suggests that a return to conspiracy theories as “orthodox knowledge” may characterize America’s future, and thus present an acute challenge to liberal democracy.
Maria S. Tysiachniouk et al. use qualitative fieldwork and an analysis of state documents and data to demonstrate how Russian environmental activists contest the government’s environmental policies. The authors show that, by deploying transnational discourses, resources, and collaborations, these activists have effectively struggled with the Russian state over sovereignty. However, Tysiachniouk et al. also illustrate the ways in which this struggle has changed as the Russian political context has grown increasingly illiberal and exclusionary.
While debates over populism typically center the negative effects it can have on liberal democracy, Josh Pacewicz flips the question and asks whether and how populist rhetoric supports liberal democracy. Pacewicz synthesizes a cognitive theory of populist resonance with interviews from the American Rust Belt during the Obama elections. He finds that voters use populist rhetoric to simplify political decisions when cross-pressured and that “traditional partisans…routinely made populist claims to sideline anti-pluralist appeals, whereas those alienated from politics were given to illiberalism.” In doing so, Pacewicz fortifies the intuition that populism is democratically functional in a stable party system but also demonstrates that illiberal populism is a symptom of enfeebled political parties.
Christian Joppke combines political, economic, and cultural factors in his assessment of right-wing populist politics in the West. Joppke claims that the populist right addresses a political condition – neoliberalism’s endemic democracy deficit – while suggesting that the illiberal democracy that populists advocate is not a cure for it. He also elaborates on a populist paradox: middle-class decline under a neoliberal order is a root cause of populism but populism’s agenda is culture-focused, “amounting to a nationalist opposition to immigration and cosmopolitanism.” Joppke calls this a “cultural deflection” and concludes that one-sided accounts of populism in exclusively economic or cultural terms are unconvincing.
Binio S. Binev compares trends in Latin America and Eastern Europe, presenting a novel conceptualization of post-neoliberal populism, and arguing for a family resemblance categorization that rejects minimal definitions of populism and disaggregates populism’s key dimensions of anti-establishment discourse, illiberal ideology, and strategic organization. Using a dataset of 198 national-level elections in 33 Latin American and Eastern European democracies, Binev demonstrates the validity of his family resemblance approach, as conceptual unity and cross-regional parallels were shown.
The Rise of the Radical Right in the Global South is the first academic study to offer a comprehensive framework for understanding the emergence and consolidation of different radical-right movements in the Global South today. By focusing on a myriad of movements in Brazil, India, the Philippines, South Africa, and elsewhere, the authors show that the radical right should be analyzed “through specific lenses, considering national historical patterns of political and economic development and instability.” They insist that this does not mean abandoning a transnational understanding of the radical right. Rather, they examine how the radical right is invented, adapted, modified, and resisted in specific regions of the globe.
Using China's contemporary gender politics as a case study, Yunyun Zhou develops a more nuanced understanding of illiberal state feminism theory. Zhou finds that deep-rooted institutional dilemmas lie at the heart of illiberal state feminism. These manifest in four contradictions: interest consolidation vs misrepresentation; coalition-building vs repression; institutionalization vs bureaucratization; and political integration vs parallelism. These internal contradictions lead to segregation and marginalization of illiberal state feminism, itself indicative of the institutional obstacles faced when a single women’s policy agency is sponsored by an illiberal state.
Sigal Ben-Rafael Galanti and Michal Hisherik analyze the relationship between the politics of debasement and the national populism of Israel’s right-wing and religious parties. They find that when the National Camp was in parliamentary opposition from 2021-2022, debasement became the main characteristic of the bloc’s rhetoric and was used to “sharpen points, delegitimize rivals and democratic institutions, and even for the purpose of their dehumanization and symbolic extinction.” The authors find that debasement is fundamentally a way of signaling that the National Camp is the exclusive voice of the ‘deprived righteous majority,’ is the representative of ‘true’ Jewish identity, and is a critic of the democratic foundations of Israel.
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For resources on illiberal, populist, and authoritarian trends across the globe, consult our growing Resource Hub aggregating hundreds of published academic articles on illiberalism and other topics relating to illiberal movements. From security and international affairs, to democratic backsliding and public policy, this center of longstanding and recently-published literature continues to document ongoing global trends of growing illiberal movements around the world.
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Illiberalism Studies Program
Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES)
Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University
1957 E Street, NW | Suite 412 | Washington, DC | 20052
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