Suchergebnisse

Drawing inspiration from Lewis Mumford's classic analysis of the "technics" of political organization, this article explores ways in which anti-government militias and like-minded groups frame the civic role of dissent in technological terms. For militia activists, guns are tangible artifacts that uniquely align existing social practices with an important historical tradition, enhance agency, and provide interpretive finality, while militias serve to help embed that protection and defense with participation in an organic, empowering community. To members, these participatory technics provide a seemingly democratic counter to the authoritarian logic of the federal government.

Sovereignism is at the crux of the current wave of radical right-wing populism. Populist parties advocate 'taking back control' and generally do so in the name of the 'people', pledging to restore economic well-being. This article argues that populism and sovereignism are inherently connected in radical right-wing populism politics through a set of values that emphasize popular and national sovereignty. To test the empirical validity of our proposition, we focus on two established European radical right-wing populist parties, namely the Rassemblement National in France and the Swiss People's Party and use data from an original survey. We find that while Rassemblement National and Swiss People's Party voters diverge in general economic orientations, they share similar economic populist sovereignist values that significantly shape electoral support for those parties. These findings suggest that economic populist sovereignism may represent an important driver of support for the radical right-wing populism, alongside other correlates of radical right-wing populism voting, such as perceived immigration threat.

The article aims at identifying the characteristics shared by the right-wing populist civil movements of Western Europe and the USA and evaluating the possibility to use them for researching right-wing nationalist organizations in Russia. The movements selected for the comparison range from party-like electoral actors to unorganized protesters. They include as follows: The Five-star Movement (Italy), PEGIDA and the like (Germany), the English Defence League (the UK), the Tea Party Movement (the US). The authors identified several interrelated characteristics shared by these movements: (1) dealing with local, usually social, issues, (2) network-like structure of autonomous local groups building the agenda from below, (3) ideological ambivalence leading to replacing ideology with subculture, (4) digitalization of activism. Although in Russia there are no civic movements structurally or functionally identical to Western right-wing populists, the authors demonstrate that local social issues and civic responsibility have become important topics for some Russian nationalists (right-wing radicals) since the mid 2000s. The trends of deideologization and dealing with non-political local issues are researched mainly on the example of the "Frontier of the North" (Komi Republic). The authors conclude that some of the radical Russian nationalists are gradually declining their own independent agenda, following local protests instead. This opens up the possibility for right-wing organizations to become local civil society institutions and to participate successfully in local elections, similar to the "electoral break-through" of right-wing populists in the West. Although it is too early to speak about the deideologization of Russian nationalism, the article suggests that some nationalists are ready to mitigate ideological tensions to secure expanded social support. At the moment, nationalist organizations in Russia remain frozen between right-wing radicalism and emulating Western right-wing populism.

Right-wing populism is on the rise all over the world and has led to profound effects and changes in the international system. The European continent, which is identified with democracy and human rights, also sees its share of this trend. Today, right-wing populist parties and actors are gaining strength in many EU countries and come to the fore as a serious political focus. The European Parliament (EP), as an example of direct democracy, has become one of the most visible institutions facing this shift. In this article, the discourses of right-wing populist parliamentarians in the EP toward Türkiye are focused on through a social constructivist perspective. The 2009-2014 and 2014-2019 parliamentary periods are analyzed comparatively to present which discursive strategies MEPs used in their statements about Türkiye and what kind of Türkiye representation they constructed in the EP. The article benefits from critical discourse analysis studies and aims to contribute to the literature on the attitudes of right-wing populist groups on Türkiye.