Ladislav Zemánek traces the roots of liberal authoritarianism in the West and its effects on international relations. The turn towards liberal authoritarianism is conceptualized as a mechanism for protecting liberal democracy and its values. That same instinct is reflected in the international arena, wherein the West’s hegemony – practiced through the enforcement of the “rules-based order” – increasingly comes into conflict with the emancipatory aspirations of the global south, which seeks to “establish a polycentric model based on the centrality of the UN Charter and the principles of peaceful coexistence.”

Bernadett Lehoczki explores how populism interacts with international relations, using Venezuela and Hungary as case studies. She argues that the post-Western international order as a context, and a potential opportunity, strongly influences the foreign policy conduct of populist leaders “regardless of their ideological background or geographical situation.” Lehoczki finds throughlines in populist foreign policy in the form of conflicts with traditional (Western) powers¸ the search for new partnerships in the non-Western world, and the empowerment of regional institutions. The author concludes that, while populists may loudly promote their short-term successes, they are relatively silent when it comes to the long-term challenges of their approach. 

Michał Krzyżanowski et al. submit a call to action, arguing that an interdisciplinary agenda relating contemporary crises to the ongoing process of normalizing anti-and post-democratic action is needed. Gathering researchers of populism, extremism, discrimination, and other formats of anti- and post-democratic action, the authors propose investigating how, why, and under which conditions, discourses and practices underlying normalization processes re-emerge to challenge the liberal democratic order. The authors argue that only by exploring the multiple variants of ‘the new normal’ can the current path towards politics of exclusion, inequality, xenophobia, polarization, radicalization, and far-right politics be understood. 

Marton Gera analyzes how Viktor Orbán uses social categorization and populist rhetoric to pursue his government’s anti-LGBTQ agenda in Hungary. Gera examines 46 interviews, press statements, public speeches, and op-eds by Orban, concluding that Orbán frames LGBTQ+ communities as “an out-group that poses a threat to Hungarian values and way of living,” a similar frame to the one used by Orbán in past campaigns against immigrants and the West. Rather than treating each campaign as an isolated incident, Gera shows how Orbán connects LGBTQ+ communities to other out-groups that he has portrayed as a threat for many years.

Using the Conservative Political Action Coalition’s (CPAC) meetings in the United States and Hungary as a case study, Rebecca Sanders and Laura Dudley Jenkins examine the transnational connections of so-called patriarchal populists, i.e., those who espouse an ideology combining populism and anti-feminism. They show that, despite the geographic distance, participants in both events converged on common themes including “advocacy of transnational right-wing coalitions, fearmongering about threats to the West, calls to control education and knowledge production, and bellicose advocacy of illiberal strongman leadership.” Through these findings, the authors conclude that right-wing populism is a significant challenge to women’s and LGBTQ rights in the US and elsewhere.

Simon Dawes introduces a special issue of French Cultural Studies on so-called “Islamo-leftism,” i.e., the supposed alliance between Islamists and the far left. Dawes situates the discussion in the French government’s 2020 accusation that universities were being “overrun” by ‘Islamogauchistes.’ Dawes critiques the term on theoretical and functional grounds, showing how the term is, theoretically, little more than an “empty signifier” and demonstrating that its employment has the practical effect of scapegoating minorities, ‘othering’ left-wing opposition, normalizing the far right, and empowering the neoliberal center to become “increasingly illiberal and authoritarian.” Dawes concludes that the term represents “a particularly republican form of racism that supplements the [neo-illiberalization] of the state.” 

Jennifer V. Evans et al. survey transnational online hate networks in Germany and Canada to trace how false framings of the historical past – so-called “historical misinformation” – circulate across platforms, shaping the politics of the center alongside the fringes. They show how harmful speech and civilizational rhetoric are transferred from the far right to the mainstream, where they become part of legitimate discourse. The authors demonstrate how the distortion of the historical record is used to build alternative collective memories of the past, in order to undermine minority rights and cultures in the present.

Joanna Wawrzyniak and Veronika Pehe introduce Remembering the Neoliberal Turn: Economic Change and Collective Memory in Eastern Europe after 1989, setting out the conceptual framework of the volume, which traces how neoliberalism became the legitimizing myth of the postsocialist transitions in Eastern Europe, and the counter-memories it provoked. They argue that the neoliberal turn was one of the most profound changes of the late twentieth century and was not only hegemonic in the economic sphere, but also as a social and cultural practice. As such, investigating different levels of memory – from the national to the local to the cultural – is particularly explanatory given the contemporary populist and nationalist turn. 

Looking to Erdoğan in Turkey, Modi in India, and Duterte in the Philippines, Cihan Tuğal demonstrates how, when faced with a similar problem – neoliberalism’s disorganization of their societies – each strongman’s relative embrace (or lack thereof) of statism and civic militarism explains the character of their regime. Tuğal details how Erdoğan embraces statism and mass organization, and therefore his style emphasizes productivity and fertility, whereas Modi embraces the “civic paramilitary aspects of rule” but not statism, and therefore his style emphasizes the ethnic divide his party relies on, while Duterte on the other hand embraced neither, and so his style did little more than “sexualize violence.” Tuğal concludes that these features explain why one sees hegemonic autocracy in Turkey, ethnic autocracy in India, and oligarchic autocracy in the Philippines.

Asrinaldi and Mohammad Agus Yusoff locate the decline in Indonesian democracy in both President Jokowi’s personal ambitions and rule, as well as in the decades-long failure of democratic consolidation that enabled it. The authors point in particular to the lack of consolidation in independent civil and political society, which allows Jokowi to intimidate and arrest anyone that criticizes the government, and allows the Jokowi government to monopolize the civil society space, using social media and pro-government civil society figures to praise the successes and achievements of his government.

Using a postcolonial lens, Chenchen Zhang explores the use and abuse of anti-colonial discourse by reactionary and ultranationalist projects in the Global Easts and South. Zhang expounds on the multifaceted relationships between postcolonial identity and the global right, showing how postcolonial nationalism is: used to differentiate oneself from the US/Western-dominated world and thereby legitimate reactionary politics; purported to challenge the liberal international order, but in fact reproduces its essentializing, hierarchical, and racialized logics by reversing its value judgment; indicative of the digital far right and the transnationality of contemporary formulations of racism, anti-feminism, Islamophobia, and “culture war” discourses. Zhang concludes that these findings have wider implications for both postcolonial critique and the study of right-wing politics in general, including in the Western core.

By looking at the 2020 October Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, Ajar Chekirova takes advantage of an opportunity to look beyond classical cases of populist mobilization in Europe and the Americas and to “uncover key factors that cause existing populist attitudes to become activated and mobilized.” Chekirova challenges the traditional supply-side versus demand-side framework for understanding populism, noting that “these theories of populism may do well at explaining American or European varieties of populist mobilization, but they fail to capture Kyrgyzstan’s experience.” By using ideational theory and empirical data from the World Values Survey (WVS) in 2003, 2011, and 2020, Chekirova investigates not only changes in attitudes but also crucial contextual factors that determined the outcome of the October Revolution. The author concludes that “on the demand-side, populist ideas have always been widespread, but required specific material conditions, including explosive corruption scandals and the COVID-19 crisis, and populist cues from the supply-side to become activated.”