Peoplehood and Nation-Building: Between Collective Emancipation and Authoritarian Closure

It is a commonplace that the notion of “the people” has been taken up by strongman leaders with autocratic tendencies – from the US and Brazil to Hungary and Turkey to India and the Philippines – often to evoke a reified image of an essentialized subject as the exclusive domain of a single party or leader. At the same time, democratizing movements around the world – from Chile to South Africa to Kurdistan – have sought to reclaim the name of the “people” in their struggles against authoritarian regimes and currents. This panel sets out to explore the conflictual interplay between attempts at emancipatory activation and authoritarian closure of popular identities, especially in contexts of intense conflict between competing projects of nation-building. How is “the people” imagined and articulated, for instance, by movements seeking autonomy or independence from an existing state, emancipatory projects seeking to redefine established understandings of nationhood, and nationalist strongman leaders aiming for an authoritarian transformation of the state? Does thinking together peoplehood and nationhood rob both of emancipatory potential or, on the contrary, open new pathways for plurinational popular identities? Of particular interest here are theoretical and empirical approaches alike that grapple with competing notions of peoplehood as a variously monistic and reductionist category or a pluralistic and irreducibly heterogeneous one – both on a conceptual level as well as in the political practices of organized movements and parties on the one hand and civic culture and attitudes on the other. In this panel, we bring together a wide range of approaches and perspectives, from republican and radical democratic theory to ethnographic studies of collective identities to actor-centered analyses situated within the broad field of democracy and autocracy research, with regional foci ranging from Latin America to Western and Eastern Europe.