Global Political Sociology

This edited volume breaks new ground and opens up new perspectives by capturing the role played by claims to authenticity in populist discourses in Brazil, India and Ukraine. By conceiving of both triumphant populism and increasing demands for authenticity as expressions of crisis, the volume seeks to satisfy the need to take a closer look at yearnings for orientation in a globalised world that is often associated with rapid social change and the disappearance of old certainties. Starting from the assumption that media play a crucial role for populist discourses of authenticity, the volume moves beyond conventional and social media by expanding its focus to media in formal education, notably school textbooks and curricula. These two particular media formats lastingly shape younger generations and thus the future. The proposed volume adopts global perspectives from three postcolonial countries that are often beyond the scope of studies dealing with populist discourses and media entanglements – insights that contribute new aspects to international scholarly debates.

Once considered a question of an international order based on consolidated

statehood and homogeneous social communities within national borders, global

order has become a question of alternative political articulations, resistance

movements, and cultural diversity, among others. This book first critically

analyzes the conditions for the struggles of theorizing global normative order in

political and IR theory. Second, to make sense of the presence of difference and

possibility for global normative order in view of the simultaneous absence of first

foundations, the study draws on post-foundational thinking based on the seminal

work of German philosopher Martin Heidegger and Argentine political theorist

Ernesto Laclau. Finally, the author develops a theoretical framework for a

hauntological approach to global normative order that provides an alternative

and theoretically coherent explanation for the emergence of global order. This is

of interest to scholars as well as practitioners (including activists) concerned with

global social relations, global political discourse, and the construction of global

identity and normative order(s).

This book analyzes key popular culture artifacts linked with United States’ far-right extremism to illustrate how extremists use various narrative strategies to legitimate their interests and goals and to justify violent actions. Recognizing these narrative strategies and how they are used partly explains the back and forth moves between mainstream politics and the far-right of ideas and issues that used to remain within far-right circles. The main objective of this book is to utilize theoretical approaches that centralize processes of racialization to analyze and explain how far-right extremists utilize recognizable narratives to mainstream and communicate their ideas. The book will illustrate processes by which racialized subjects are produced and violence justified. In order to do so, the book concentrates on popular culture as sources of how the far-right constitutes their identities and goals. It first develops a methodological plan to study popular culture artifacts that is drawn from scholarship on race and discourse analysis in International Relations (IR). It then analyzes far-right use of key popular culture artifacts, such as magazines, memes, and manifestos, to note how extremist identities and interests are produced, publicly communicated, and mainstreamed. This will contribute to Security Studies and IR’s understanding of far-right extremism, especially how they utilize similar narrative strategies as used in mainstream contexts to justify their calls for violence.

The book develops a novel framework for the analysis of global crises. It differentiates crises on three dimensions: permanent, recurring and ephemeral crises. This conceptualization allows us to analyze global crises not only in their immediate environment, but makes it possible to understand them in the broader context of social instability. The approach revolves around the terminology of discursive dislocation which provides fundamental insights into diverse forms of social instability. A multidimensional conceptualization of dislocation is advanced which informs the differentiation of global crises. Furthermore, a methodological toolkit is developed and tailored to the theoretical framework, which makes it possible to utilize the book both theoretically and methodologically for the analysis of manifold forms of global crises. The book also provides a comprehensive analysis of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States under Donald Trump. Making use of the aforementioned methodology, it presents a hands-on illustration of how the multidimensional framework can be utilized for practical analyses. The analysis reveals how the construction of the Covid-19 pandemic is embedded in the historically ingrained self-portrayal of the United States, and how crisis responses are invoked to serve particular socio-political purposes in retaining an established vision of the United States.

This book analyses the historical sociology of state formation in the Horn of Africa. It examines the genesis, trajectories, processes, routes and consequences of the evolution of state formation. Three analytical and explanatory models explain the process of state formation in the HOA: proto-state, colonial and national liberation. The models, heuristically and innovatively, provide understanding, interpretation and analysis of state formation. While the proto-state model explicates an indigenous historical process of state formation, the colonial model refers to an externally designed and imposed process of state formation. The national liberation model concern state formation conducted under liberation movement and ideology. The distinct significance of these models is that collectively they generate sufficient analysis of state formation. They are also unique in that they have never been employed as aggregate analytical and explicative instruments to address the predicament of state formation in the Horn of Africa.

This book engages the concept of necropolitics to present a vision of how to understand the physical body as a space of power and resistance to social order, in the context of the Kashmir resistance. The author sheds new light on the relations between India and Pakistan, with a focus on tensions over the Kashmir region, in order to better understand the emergence and stabilization of the narrative that criminalizes and thus justifies the population that rebels against state actions in the region. The research draws from archival and interview research and presents the reader with new insight into both conceptual and material dimensions of necropolitics. 

This book explores how the United Nations (UN) attempts to stabilise and justify an ambivalent meaning of protection and its socio-political roles in the Protection of Civilians agenda. Negotiating between different notions of translation, the research takes the Community Liaison Assistants (CLAs) as an analytical prism to complexify the efforts to construct representations of protection. Created alongside the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO), the CLAs are local staff tasked with improving the mission's engagement with the local population, given their supposed linguistic-cultural skills. The CLAs are also part of the stabilisation turn in UN doctrine, adhering to counterinsurgency tactics and instrumentalising language and culture to obtain intelligence and support of the local population. Following a poststructuralist and postcolonial approach inspired mainly by the works of Jacques Derrida and Homi Bhabha, this book proposes deconstructing the representations applied to the CLAs by analysing the discourses presented in the UN reports and doctrinal documents.

This book explores the news media’s coverage of Indigenous-settler reconciliation following the conclusion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). Using a comparative case study research design, the book examines news coverage of three significant Indigenous rights issues and events during the post-TRC era. The findings presented demonstrate that in the post-TRC era, the Canadian news media continue to produce systemic patterns in coverage which reject, marginalize and erase the territorial rights and claims of Indigenous Peoples. The author concludes that rather than helping to move the relationship between Indigenous Peoples and settlers forward along a path of reconciliation, power-sharing, and the resurgence of land-based self-determination, the news media are continuing to construct discourses and representations that work against the political objectives of Indigenous Peoples and reinforce settler colonial power relationships in Canada.

This book analyses the entanglement between Washington and Hollywood to shed light on the violence inherent in the image as a semiotic-material agent in contemporary warfare. In the 21st century, the weaponized military drone, an image-centered machine, has spearheaded the geopolitical curatorship of the USA in the context of the war on terror. Drone violence shares the same characteristics as cinema: image and movement. However, a drone's image is not purely a reflection of the nature of war; it is more than representational, it is performative. Building upon the concept of annihilation-image, this book argues that the image wields a destructive agency as it transitions from reflection to diffraction. Rather than mirroring reality, the annihilation-image creates a brutal pattern of difference in the world. It is a destructive ontology in which seeing and annihilating are in a state of superposition. Therefore, everything that is framed is potentially dead. That is to say, by framing bodies and objects in the terrain, a state of superpositional violence is created in which one is alive, but virtually dead.

The Palgrave Handbook on Right-Wing Populism and Otherness in Global Perspective argues that a key characteristic of the recent rise in right-wing populist politicians worldwide is the pervasive dynamic of exclusionary conflicts and moral divisions, designated as meta-othering. This is achieved through the use of two distinct forms of otherization: 'upward' othering, which targets the establishment elites and their associates, and 'downward' othering, which involves demeaning and scapegoating certain out-groups or external outsiders. The Handbook takes a multidisciplinary approach and focuses on recent real-world expressions of right-wing populist tactics to justify, strengthen, or instrumentalize alterity narratives and claims. It provides a comprehensive analysis of manifestations of right-wing populism othering from diverse cases and variations around the world with a particular emphasis on including examples from the Global South.