Populism and Autocratization in the Age of Neoliberal Crises: Global and Comparative Perspectives
While the end of the Cold War witnessed the triumph of the neoliberal model and the deepening of globalization, recent developments increasingly suggests that populism, polarization and autocratization of the political landscape is on the rise. For example in the Global North, including Europe, North America and Japan the challenges of irregular migration has not only deepened internal ideological divisions; but exacerbated the rise of populist actors as well as extremist groups that insist on the ‘purification’ of the nation-state and a majoritarian/nativist hegemony. Democratic states in Europe such as Great Britain, France and Germany have all confronted the dilemmas of immigration from Eastern Europe, the Middle East or Africa. Populist leaders such as Viktor Orban of Hungary have used immigration as a strategy for entrenching autocracy; while in the United States, Donald Trump exploits the ‘fear of immigrants’ to consolidate power. In the Global South, India’s Nerandra Modi deploys Hindu nationalist populism to assert autocratic power and exclude minority groups, including Muslims. Similarly, in Sub-Saharan Africa military regimes in Niger and Mali as well as autocrats such as Yoweri Musevini in Uganda continue to appropriate populism as a strategy for excluding the opposition from the democratic process. In Brazil former president Jair Bolsenaro concentrated power at the federal level and tried to disrupt peaceful transfer of power. Populism, indeed, provides autocrats with the ideological frame to expand their reach into civil society and consolidate power by undermining the legitimacy of democratic institutions. The aim of this panel is to unpack the nexus between populism and autocratization from global and comparative perspectives. Drawing empirical data from countries across the globe, we argue that issues of immigration, identity politics, civil liberties, democratic inclusion and expansion of the political space are, more often than not, appropriated by populist elites to entrench authoritarianism, thereby undermining liberal democracy and its core values. The papers in this panel contend that the neoliberal state model, which emerged in the post-Cold War epoch of globalization, is increasingly confronted by numerous existential social, economic and political crises that require urgent reconstitution of the ‘social contract.’