Journal of Political Power

The Materialities of Populism(s)

Concept Note: 

This special issue will interrogate the material dimensions of populist politics. The dominant tradition of theorizing populism, post-Marxist discourse theory, associated most prominently with the work of Ernesto Laclau, sought to think ‘populism’ as the ‘royal road to “the political”’ (2005). Such a ‘discursive’ approach to theorizing and studying empirically populist formations, was part of a broader effort in post-foundational European thought to rethink the category of ‘discourse’ in a way that encompassed both the ideational and material dimensions of social and political relations (Laclau and Mouffe 1987). Despite this ‘onto-political’ (Connolly 1995) theorizing by post-Marxist theorists of populism, this material dimension has been systematically under-examined within the field, and the associated ‘Essex School’ of discourse theory (Devenney 2020). Furthermore, the understanding of the ‘material’ within this discourse-centred paradigm, has remained subsumed within a metaphysical horizon marked by anthropocentrism, and modelled around a dualistic opposition between the subject as the source of meaning/knowledge and the objects it observes, dominates and instrumentalizes (Horkheimer 2004; Plumwood 1993). It is a mode of theorizing ‘the political’ that gives methodological and normative primacy to the philosophical (as opposed to the historical, sociological, geographical) and in turn relies of a very restrictive understanding of power relations (Banerjee 2020).

In recent years we have witnessed a resurgence of populist mobilizations across the globe that range from the progressive and socialist to more reactionary and proto-fascist formations. These political projects each in turn have sought to defend or instantiate new political and material realities, new orders of propriety (as norm and property-relations) and political possibility, as well as competing political identities and constituencies of ‘the people’ and their Other. Understanding ‘materiality’ in the broadest possible sense here, to include issues of political economy, propertization, ecology, racialization and the effects of coloniality as complex layers of culture, nature, science and politics – something that new-materialist (Connolly 2013, 2017; Bennett 2009; Colebrook 2014) and posthuman (Braidotti 2013) theorizing have brought to our attention more clearly – we invite papers that grapple in some sense with the materialities of populist politics.

At stake, we propose, in failing to account for the materiality of populist politics, is the risk of disavowing the materialities through which the ‘people’ and their ecologies (social and environmental) are (re)bounded in and through forms of ‘cosmopolitics’ (Stengers 2005), and how sovereign and colonial violence is variously expressed on the gendered and racialized body – by the police, through the upholding of borders, though indifference.

What’s more, it is only by attending to the materiality of populist politics, that any effort to decolonize populist theorizing and praxis are thinkable: to focus on the material, brings into the relief the mode of de/colonial struggle implicated or refused in contemporary populist politics (Tuck and Yang 2012; Liboiron 2021; Nixon 2011). To neglect the material further in thinking the politics of ‘peopling’ risks eliding the forms of becoming that are actualized or denied in such hegemonic contests over truth, power and ways of being (Maldonado-Torres 2007; Wynter 2003).

Whilst populist politics entail the articulation of distinct visions of the people or (political) collectivity as such, we are particularly interested to explore collaboratively how such articulations carry within them ecological commitments or refusals (Charbonnier 2021; Ferdinand 2019). Thinking this problem on a 'planetary' scale (Spivak 2014), the popular subjectivity that is enthroned through such hegemonic battles, may be a more relational being, one that takes account of our embeddedness in the precarious ecological entanglements that constitute our world. Or conversely, as seen most blatantly in the contemporary neo-fascist and authoritarian (on the left and right) backlashes against all progressive environmental successes, the populist collective subject has often been rooted in a radical refusal such entanglement. Instead, ‘Man’ is once again the centre of all things (Wynter 2003), and a relationship of dominion is (re)grounded through the articulation of an exclusionary understanding of the people – often at the expense of indigenous, racialized and non-human constituencies (Brum 2021; Devenney 2020; Haraway 2016). At stake, as we have seen, is the intensification of exploitation and economies of extraction – of the animal/human, of the earth, and invariably the defence of the insatiable and destructive dance of ‘fossil capital’ (Malm 2016) and the ongoing planetary threat of coloniality (Mbembe 2024).

Inspired by new materialist (Bennet 2009, Connolly 2017), posthuman (Barad 2003, Braidotti 2013), critical theoretical (von Redecker 2020, Malm 2018, Horkheimer 2004), post/de-colonial (Banerjee 2020, Bhandar 2018, Bhambra 2021, Wynter 1994, 2003) and eco-feminist (Dordoy and Mellor 2000, Plumwood 1993) approaches to thinking the material dimensions of politics, this special issue will:

1. revisit, and subject to critical scrutiny the post-Marxist account of materialism;
2. theorize the materialities through which populism is produced, mediated, and contested across diverse socio-political contexts;
3. trace the ways in which contemporary populism(s) and their theorization are entangled within the material and epistemological legacies of colonialism and its afterlives;
4. deepen our understand of the ways in which populism, as a politics of ‘peopling’, is enveloped within much more complex and networked relations of power than the typical post-Hobbesian political ontology of a ‘sovereign people’ can theorize.

In foregrounding questions of materiality, our aim is to displace the dominant post-Marxist account of populism in productive and dialogic ways. By polemically placing discourse theory into juxtaposition with ground-breaking research arising from new materialist, post-human, critical theoretical, decolonial and eco-feminist paradigms we can develop new vocabularies, concepts, and ‘interpretive-analytics’ (Rabinow and Dreyfus 1982) for the study of populism and the forms of social and political power relations it is enveloped within, dependent upon, productive of, and unable to see.

This special issue invites scholars from sociology, political science, environmental studies, geography, cultural studies, anthropology, philosophy, development studies, and beyond to interrogate the underexplored materialities and power-relations underpinning national, transnational, and planetary populisms both in the past and present.

Suggested (but not limited to) Themes:

• Material Agency in Populist Mobilizations
• Colonial Property Regimes and Populism
• Nonhuman Actors Shaping Populist Politics
• Extraction, Land, and Populist Claims
• Affective Materialities of Mass Populism
• (Post)Colonial Epistemologies of ‘the People’
• Infrastructures of Popular Belonging and Exclusion
• Eco-Feminist Critiques of Populist Formations
• Anthropocene Materialities of Populist Power
• Networked Power Beyond Sovereign Ontology

We seek critical and creative engagements that do not merely accept populist politics as a given but interrogate its ideological apparatus and material foundations and consequences.