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.

Populism has lately experienced a meteoric rise to become one of the most widely used terms in academic and wider public discourses and a supposedly defining feature of both domestic and world politics. Situated at the intersection of International Relations (IR), Political Theory and Comparative Politics, this book makes a critical intervention into the burgeoning IR scholarship on populism and problematizes the often hyperbolic and sweeping usage of the term as a general descriptor for non-centrist politics of different persuasions. The book seeks to move into a different theoretical direction and broaden the empirical focus of existing IR research. Theoretically, it bridges the gap between theories of populism and IR by bringing the Laclauian, discursive approach and IR poststructuralism together in a theoretical framework. The proposed framework moves away from the search for the policy preferences and impact of populism, and instead conceptualizes foreign policy and world politics as potential sites for practicing populism, ranging from the articulation of societal grievances to the construction of populist identities such as ‘the people’. Empirically, the book takes IR scholarship beyond the predominant focus on the populist radical right and single-country and -region studies. Building on the discourse analysis of an original data set, it offers a comparative analysis of right-wing and left-wing populist discourses in different world regions as well as populist cross-border collaboration and identity construction.

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.